Holding your breath and doing math - RPG or party game?

 As I mentioned in my last blog, I decided to read a couple micro RPGs. The first one, Holy Mountain, was just what I expected. Wreckdivers.. was not.

Wreckdivers, from what I can tell, was originally published in Table Top Magazine, as was Holy Mountain. I’ve never actually seen the magazine but I am now under the assumption that one-page games were a regular feature.

It’s a game of doing math with dice rolls while you hold your breath.

The theme is diving down to wrecked ships to salvage gold. The active player rolls two dice to see how long they need hold their breath. During that time, they roll two red dice and and two white dice. If the sum of the white dice is greater than the sum of red dice, you get the difference in gold. Keep on rolling and keep doing the math in your head while you hold your breath.

You can surface any time during your dive but if you breathe or run out of time, you lose any gold you got. Other players can talk during your turn and if they make you laugh, that counts as breathing.

Okay, I stand corrected. It’s a game of doing math while holding your breath while the jerks you hang out with try and make you laugh.

I have to admit, I think that Wreckdivers is kind of genius in its silly, slaphappy fun. Most micro RPGs invoke fear or anger or sadness. Because those are easy. (I once tried to get a manuscript of micro games published and I know I leaned heavily on those emotions. Because I knew I could get them to work) A game designed to make people laugh? That’s harder and I respect Wreckdivers for going for that.

It’s no Sea Dracula but that’s a high standard. Wreckdivers isn’t a game I’d play with folks who are looking for bleed in their RPGs but I would play it with the bastards who I’d have played with Diplomacy with.

There is one tweak I’d add to Wreckdivers. Have the non-active players take on the personas of folks sitting on the dock or in the boat. THEN it becomes an actual RPG.

A page of RPG bleed

I went through a period of reading a lot of micro RPGs. That’s kind of given way to reading and playing journaling RPGs but it’s still fun to do it every once in a while.

Holy Mountain, at least the one I stumbled across, was originally published im Table Top Magazine. In it, players are a group of pilgrims climbing a mountain, stopping at different shrines.

Micro RPGs, to steal an analogy from Isaac Asimov, are the blowgun of RPGs. They just have room to do one thing and only one chance to do it.

The key idea of Holy Mountain is that the pilgrims have vowed to not speak of the outside world, their ancestors, the trail ahead or expose their faces. And they must break each of these vows at the shrines.

One concept that comes up a lot when it comes to looking at indie RPGs is bleed, the idea of real emotions bleeding into the game. (Obviously, this exists in non-indie games as well) Creating bleed is pretty much the only point of Holy Mountain.

Which is beyond reasonable. That’s not a bad goal. I was in a short-lived group that focused on indie games, mostly because we wanted a break from D&D. And we would have enjoyed Holy Mountain.

With that said, Holy Mountain has two hurdles to overcome. One, a group has to be serious about playing it (which is an issue any game can have) Two, it doesn’t stand out in a world where there are a lot of little games about bleed.

Holy Mountain reminded me why I started hunting down journaling RPGs instead. At the same time, I like living in a world where people write games like it.

Solitaire RPG or writing exercise? Does it matter?

Dungeon Hero is a name that’s been used for a few different games. In this case, I’m talking about a solitaire RPG that comes in the form of a paper mod. The link to it is over here: https://lonespelunker.itch.io/dungeon-hero

My interest in pocket mods and solitaire RPGs helped me stumble across this game. Each adventure consists of a pocket mod. You just add dice, a pencil and _LOTS_ of imagination.

If you strip the game down to its mechanics, each adventure is nothing but a column of die rolls. Make it through the end of the column and you win. So many rules-lite RPGs live or die on the fluff and that’s definitely the case with Dungeon Hero.  The favor text is the meat of the game.

Your character consists of 30 resolution points (health points) and 15 stamina points (which are used to lay for rerolls) You then come up with eight traits and assign a die to each trait. You have a d12, 2d10, 2d8 and 3d6 to work with. And the traits can be anything. 

The adventures consist of a list of environmental elements, including monsters, that have dice assigned to each one. You roll a d6 to go down the column. Each encounter uses the die you land on and the die from the last one you were at. You have a roll off for each encounter using two of your traits.

You win if you make it to the end of the list still alive and you score points based on treasure. Which you earn by beating monsters. So it’s really how many monsters you beat.

You could play Dungeon Hero as a straight dice game and it would be incredibly boring. In fact, I would say that it only works as a story prompt. The best way I have found to play the game is as a journal game, writing one paragraph to describe each encounter and a second paragraph to describe the dice resolution. 

As a writing exercise, Dungeon Hero does work. I firmly think that Alone Among the Stars is a better solitaire story-telling game but I am glad to have Dungeon Hero to mix things up. 

Bleed in RPGs needs purpose

 Every once in a while, I go back to the Indie Megamix Mixtape. It’s a rather large collection of tiny indie RPGs inspired by songs and created to raise money for creators in need. I have intentionally treated every game as a single entity and taken my time to look at them. In fact, I think this is the first time I’ve looked at the collection this year.

The Sound of Silence is a game for two-players.

You define a relationship between the two characters and a fight. Then you privately decide how you feel about the fight. Then you sit back to back and try to resolve things.

There’s a fine line in a lot of indie games between RPG/Storytelling and therapy techniques, particularly in short forms like game poems. The Sound of Silence might actually completely cross that line. And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

A concept I have spent too much time thinking about is bleed. That’s when real feelings bleed over into game play.

When I first came across the idea (which was in a discussion about Wraith: the Oblivion, by the way), I didn’t like it. It struck me as both emotionally dangerous and getting in the way of the whole escapist point of RPGs.

Since then, I have quite changed my tune. Bleed can be not just powerful but useful. Games like Polaris and My Life With Master are two good examples of that. Although I say that with the caveat of Emily Care Boss’s guideline that everyone needs to be safe and protected.

But I can’t help but feel that The Sound of Silence is bleed for the sake of bleed and that just seems unnecessary.

Alone Among the Stars actually works

 I recently stumbled upon Alone Among the Stars and its myriad of hacks completely by accident. I’d been looking into more conventional solitaire card games. In fact, I’m still wading through all the variations and pondering the whole matter. You use a deck of cards and a die to come up with the inspiration to describe planets that you are exploring.

Alone Among the Stars is on the seriously soft end of the solitaire RPG spectrum. On the hard side, you have the tightl structure of game books that strictly restrict your choices. On the soft side, you have basically guidelines to write fiction or a meditation exercise. The solitaire version of De Profundis consists of keeping a diary of Lovecraftian horror that hopefully isn’t actually happening to you.

Alone Among the Stars Has you take the role of a solitaire explorer in outer space. For each planet you choose to explore, you role a die to see how many cards you lie down. You then use the dice and charts to give you some rough inspiration on what you find. And thus you create a journal of exploration.

Okay. The games consists of three tables that you use to create writing guidelines. That’s it. Which is probably why there have been so many hacks of it. That’s a really, really simple framework to work with.

But... Alone Among the Stars gives you just enough structure to work with that you really do have a framework to work with. And it is open enough that the replay value is just limited to your creativity and imagination. 

I honestly wasn’t sure how well it would work. Alone Among the Stars didn’t seem like much of a step beyond just telling you to go write a story, have fun. But when I actually tried it, I found it did give me enough guidance to work as a structured writing game.

I then recommended it to some friends... and they quickly began playing it as well.

I honestly think Alone Among the Stars gives enough guidance AND flexibility that it can work for a lot of people. You can spend pages on one card or just a couple sentences and both are perfectly valid. 

I didn’t think Alone Among the Stars would be good but it is.

Cozy Town, a game where nothing bad happens

After getting into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I went looking for an RPG that had a similar feel for community building. What I really wanted was something like The Quiet Year until someone told me that Cozy Town was verbatim what I was looking for.

So, I found it and checked it out.

In Cosy Town, you are creating a safe and cozy community together. The core concept is communally creating a map of the place. Along the way, you will develop the folks who live there, the resources the town has and the holidays they celebrate. While there will be individual characters, they don’t belong to anyone. Everything belongs to all the players.

The game plays out a year in the life of the community. You divide up a deck of cards by suit, with each one being a different seasons. Each turn, the active player draws a card and consults the guide. Each card describes an event that takes place and asks a question about how the resolution affects the town.

After that, the active player can choose one of the three actions: add a feature to the map, have a friend of the town visit or prepare for an event.

I have to say that, while it would be super easy to create an Animal Crossing-style town, a lot of the fluff options that are suggested are actually even more whimsical and saccharine than Animal Crossing, to the point that Animal Crossing would end up on the gritty, realistic side of Cozy Town. 

It’s beyond obvious that Cozy Town is heavily influenced by The Quiet Year to the point that it’s practically a reskin. Mechanically, they are border on being identical. And, yet, they are almost on the opposite ends of sensibility. The Quiet Year runs on scarcity and the innate conflict that comes out of scarcity while Cozy Town explicitly bans scarcity and conflict.

I am fascinated by The Quiet Year. It’s a very unique gaming experience. Cozy Town is also fascinating for me. It is what I was looking for in a game that emulates Animal Crossing. At the same time, I have a feeling if I played it more than once, particularly with the same group of people, we’d end up bending the rules on scarcity and conflict. I mean, you need some level of conflict to create drama.

No one told me Winnie the Pooh was an owlbear

I don’t know if there had to be a Winnie the Pooh RPG but, if there had to be one, Winnie-the-Owl-Pooh does the job remarkably well.

The game was created waaay back in 2006 as part of a design contest from Bully Pulpit about owlbears. Yup, this is about Winnie the Pooh as an owlbear. A two-foot tall, child friendly owlbear who lives in the d100 Acre Wood with other child friendly version first edition Dungeons and Dragons monsters.

Mechanically, it’s a very rules light, narrative game. Folks take turns playing the titular owlbear and come up with innocent fun that always ends in troubles. The only die rolls in the game (and they favor the player who is playing Winnie the Owl Pooh) are to determine who gets to narrate how each kerfuffle ends up going. 

But what really struck me about Winnie-the-Owl-Pooh was how charming it is. I was expecting a  brutal deconstruction of Winnie the Pooh. Instead, it captures the whimsy and gentle satire of original Milne stories. If anything, it’s a reconstruction of old D&D monsters. I wasn’t quite as charmed by the Batman expansion for the game but even that has a similar feel.

As with any game, particularly a rules light narrative RPG, Winnie-the-Owl-Pooh depends on the group. Everyone has to be on board to tell a charming little children’s story or it will all fall apart like wet cardboard. But if you do want to tell such a story, I think this is a good system to use.

http://gameworld.thesnakefarm.com/24hourrpg.php

A Game Poem that emphasizes the Poem

Reading The Tears Devour You from the Indie Mega Mixtape, I was reminded why I read the individual games in the collections so slowly, even though I could probably read all thirty-odd of them in one sitting. It’s not just because they’d all blur together but so many of them are these tiny little emotional bullets.

So many of these tiny, short form RPGs read like exercises in group therapy. I say that a lot but I have to because it’s true. (Not that I’m recommend that you use them as a substitute for therapy. In fact, I’m adamantly against that) And The Tears Devour You is a doozy of an example of that.

It’s a game for two players and all you need is each other, some pencils and index cards. Index cards are like the duct tape for tiny indie games. You can use them for so, so much.

In this case, you use one each to write down things like hopes and dreams and wishes. Then you swap cards. The card you get, that’s your character for the game. And the rules tell you to be faithful to those ideas and to not be a jerk.

You play out four scenes: standing on a mountain, bathing on the sea, lying together, and the sky is falling. You have a secret list of the feelings: madly, truly, deeply and doomed. Secretly choose one for the scene and no repeats.

And that’s it. Four scenes and no definitive ending but you are allowed to wonder what happens next. (Some games ban that)

If nothing else, The Tears Devour You is really poetic and really rings true to the songs that inspired it.

I’m kind of glad that I that I don’t gorge these tiny games because I’d totally fail to appreciate them. The Tears Devour You is a sweet little game poem but the way you create each other’s characters is what makes me think hmmmm, this could be good.

The Tears Devour You isn’t perfect or brilliant but it has enough potential to make me really consider it.

An RPG where poker isn’t just the mechanic but the whole thing

It’s been a while but I decided it was time to go back to the Indie Mega Mixtape to read some more wacky RPG goodness with I Bet My Life.

Here’s the one sentence summary: Play poker with your skills and dreams and memories as stakes.

Seriously. That’s really what the game is all about. You define three overwhelming problems, crushing issues that are destroying your lives. Then symbols that represent skills and memories and dreams. Then, deal the cards.

As is often the case with games this short, there are some ambiguities. It sounds like there should be a dummy hand for The Smiling Man but that isn’t actually mentioned.

It’s also doesn’t say if you are supposed to play as yourself. If you are, I Bet My Life has a ridiculous amount of bleed and borders on being an exercise in psychoanalysis, which is going too far for my tastes.

But if you don’t go with that, I Bet My Life actually crosses the line into being a RPG. The rules state you should describe how you should role play out bidding your dreams and memories. And the idea of basically stealing other people’s dreams and skills to solve your own messed life of just a fascinating story telling method.

When I first read I Bet My Life, I was underwhelmed. But the more I’ve thought about, the more I’ve found myself thinking it could really work as a story telling and roleplaying exercise. Poker is the gimmick but it’s one that can turn around and enhance the story telling.

Poking the Emperor - too complex for its own good

Over the last few years, I have read a lot of odd, sometimes free, RPGs. Poking the Emperor... well, it struck me as a brilliant idea thematically but kind of clunky mechanically.

Okay, here’s the idea. You know how Conan ends his career as the emperor of a vast and ancient empire, the crown on his troubled brow, etc? Well, the game takes place decades that happened. The unnamed but blatantly Conan emperor is now old, demented and dying. The players are his court, each one trying to take over when he’s dead but also trying to keep the empire from completely collapsing. Unless you side with the enemies of the empire, of course!

I’m not going to go through the rules. The game is free to download and pretty short to boot. The GM controls the emperor and tracks his humors to determine his moods and tastes. The players pick from a very prescribed list of actions to gain power and influence the emperor. And after everyone gets to do something, you find out what bad stuff happens to the empire. The game ends with either the emperor dying or the empire collapsing.

And here’s my issues with Poke The Emperor and why I’m pretty sure it’s languished in obscurity. There is too much focus on book keeping and specific discrete mechanical actions and not enough about creating scenes and actual role playing. I’ve played crunch heavy games and don’t mind lots of rules but the structure of Poking the Emperor might make it easier to not role play.

It’s pretty obvious that My Life With Master was a big influence on Poking the Emperor. However, I feel like it’s missing so much of what made My Life With Master special. My Life With Master is very character-driven, focused on the personal journey of a minion. Poke the Emperor is, well, a lot more general and big picture. Which really needs another kind of approach.

There are elements I like about the game. The overall theme and the way different threats progress. But I don’t see myself actually playing the game.

Embrace how you always cheated at Choose Your Own Adventure

A few years ago, I stumbled across the Parsely RPG, a system designed to emulate old school interactive fiction. It’s a fun game, part party game and part RPG and part street theater. The biggest downside to it is that you can only play each scenario once per group. 

Enter Cheat Your Own Adventure. It’s a free RPG whose existence I discovered through Play By Forum. Instead of being based on old computer games like Zork, it’s inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure game books, hence the name. But let’s be honest, it’s a pretty similar idea.

In Parsely, one player is the computer/game master. They have the map and the adventure and everyone else takes turns giving instructions. And frankly, a lot of the fun of the system is the GM imitating the artificial stupidity of those old games. And it is a lot of fun.

Cheat Your Own Adventure, on the other hand, has players turning playing the reader and everyone else gives choices. So, it’s kind of like you takes turns being the PC while everyone else is the GM.  

Mechanically, after the active player makes a decision, two dice are rolled, trying to beat or equal an increasingly high number that caps at twelve at the end of the game. 

Rolling under means game ending, over-the-top failure and death. But that doesn’t mean the end of the game. No, just like with a real Choose Your Adventure book, you can go back and make another choice, which will automatically work. (You did it too. Own up to it) Twelve rolls and you wrap things up. 

There’s actually a lot I like about this system. It has a lot of replay value and every player has a lot more agency in the story you end up telling. Every story-based game depends on the group but I think this would work with a lot of groups. It’s seriously on my list to try.

Cheat Your Own Adventure doesn’t fire Parsely for me. The GM is an artificially stupid computer is a really awesome mechanic when done well. However, I think it is a game that will be easier to play more often.

http://mcleanfamilyonline.co.uk/CYOA.pdf

Laika is a game designed to break your heart

I think that short form RPGs need of be about one idea. The shorter the form, the more focused and concentrated they need to be. If an RPG takes less than two hours, it has to be a punch in between the eyes.

Which is why it seems like so many of them seem to be so darn tragic. Let’s be honest, it’s easier to make folks cry than to make them laugh. Comedy is harder than tragedy.

Which brings me to Laika, an RPG about saying good bye to something forever and is designed for one player. 

When you deal with more indie, more experimental RPHs, they sometimes blur the line between an RPH and a board game or story telling or a drama exercise. In the case of Laika, it blurs the line with ritual. To be fair, it’s not the first time I’ve seen that happen. (Brave Sparrow comes to mind)

The game is just a few pages long and free to download so I won’t go  into detail about the game. In a sentence, you go through several steps to make something go away that you will never get back.

That can be a very powerful experience to put yourself through. Possibly unnecessarily traumatic but powerful. 

But what made Laika absolutely brutal for me was that invoked Laika, the first dog in space. Who the Russians sent up with no plan or intention of bringing back. By putting a face and a true story to the process, it really made it visceral.

Laika skates the line between RPG and something else. Its not something that I can see myself playing more than a couple times and not in a row. But I think it succeeds in its goal of creating a sense of loss.

Can one page capture all the Lasers and Feelings of Star Trek?

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at RPGs, let alone played one. However, I recently took a third and longer look at Lasers and Feelings, a one-page game named after a Double Clicks song (We’ve actually heard them in concert) and blatantly inspired by the original Star Trek. In fact, the mechanics are entirely based around choosing to either play a Spock or a Kirk.

Okay. Here’s the core mechanic. The thing fits on one page so you know only one mechanic can fit in. Other than some descriptors to justify situational bonuses, your character is defined by a number from two to five. There are two kinds of actions in the game. Laser actions, where are all logic and left brain and reason, where you want to roll under your number. Feelings actions, which are all squishy and passion, you want to roll over. So, pick a high number if you want to be Spock and a low number if you want to play Kirk.

The clever bit, because there always has to be a clever bit, is if you hit your number exactly, you get laser feelings and get to ask the GM a question. And you can then redo your action based on that new knowledge.

The first thing that went through my mind when I was reassessing Lasers and Feelings was ‘Did I just read a one-page Trollbabe back?’ The answer was clearly no, since Lasers and Feelings doesn’t break the narrative structure the way Trollbabe does. However, the one number stat and how it’s used definitely reminded me of Trollbabe.

Okay. I’m pretty sure that the mechanics would hold up under play. Lord knows, I’ve played with games with even less structure and focus. But that doesn’t answer the bigger question: would it be any fun?

One of the big questions I ask when I look at an RPG is what kind of stories is it going to let me tell? If all I get is some tables and a conflict resolution system, I’m not interested. 

Lasers and Feelings gives you a paragraph of background and some tables to pregenerate a sentence to describe an adventure for the GM. Which is still more than some systems I’ve seen and what do you expect from one page?

But here’s where I wonder. The game is pretty obviously inspired by Star Trek, the original series in particular. So you go in with a setting and a style of stories already in mind. Is that enough to invest you in the game and make the stories work?

I don’t know and I am pretty curious about that. Since Kirk and Spock never die (except in the movies), there lack of a death mechanic seems appropriate. But they do sometimes fail. Could the shift to more drama focus actually make this game really feel like Star Trek?

I also learned that Lasers and Feelings inspired what seems to be a hundred hacks, exploring different themes. I will definitely have to take a look at those.

http://onesevendesign.com/lasers_and_feelings_rpg.pdf

Found an RPG that was too much for me

Dyin’ Day is a short form RPG about a father taking his babe, no more than nine years old, up the mountain to kill them because a prophetic dream told them to. And, unlike Abraham and Isaac, the game definitely ends with the killing.

Okay. I hit a wall with this game. As a daddy, this game is one that I cannot handle, period. 

It’s a two-player game from the Indie Megamix Mixtape. It openly admits that Trollbabe was a major inspiration, which wasn’t remotely a surprise. The babe player is the GM and creates the trials and tribulations. The father player uses the mechanics from Trollbabe to resolve them. 

Dyin’ Day is an interesting game for me. It’s well grounded mechanically (no surprise given its pedigree) and does a good job evoking the setting of a folklore Appalachia in its two pages. But it hit me with a theme I flat out cannot handle.

My Mother’s Demons promises to bleed onto the table

There is a thin line between experimental group therapy and some indie RPGs. (Not that I’m in a position to talk. A lot of my unpublished RPG work can be described that way) My Mother’s Demons definitely dances on that line.

From the Indie Megamix Mixtape, My Mother’s Demons is a short form RPG about a daughter going to her sick or dying mother but she can only communicate with her mother’s demons.

It’s critical to understand that demons, in this case, doesn’t mean any kind of supernatural creature or even a negative part of the mother’s personality. They are the mother’s coping or protective mechanisms like shame or anger and they are fiercely invested in the mother’s well being.

The game is entirely narrative and has the daughter asking questions which lead to the demons framing scenes in order to provide answers. The daughter will not be in active player in the scenes but she can help guide the scene. In a way, the daughter is the game master. The game ends with the daughter having a conversation with each demon, putting them to rest so the mother can be well.

An important concept in many indie games is bleed, which is when emotions spill over from the game. My Mother’s Demons has a ridiculous potential for bleed. In fact, I’m sure that’s the point. A game of My Mother’s Demons without bleed would basically be a failure.

I respect the game for creating a structure for potentially very powerful experiences. However, I would be reluctant to play it myself and be very careful who I played it with. 

Even by short form, Indie RPG standards, My Mother’s Demons is a niche creation. Unlike many niche games, though, you might not know if you are in the niche.

Wield and ‘I need an Elric TV show!’

I just finished Wield, a game by John Wick, and I really don’t know what to think about it. 

In the game, you play an artifact of great power, an intelligent magical item that has its own will and goals. Stormbringer from the Elric books (and the real hero, according to some of my fiends, I mean friends) was a major influence.

Which is cool and more than enough to interest me.

However, one of the things that throws me is that you have a second character, a ‘hero’ who is carrying the artifact _someone else_ is playing. More than that, each hero has their own destiny which is gong to be contrary to the artifact’s goals.

And that’s where it gets funny in my head. Playing an artifact or multiple characters doesn’t bother me but having conflicting goals... That doesn’t bother me. I just don’t know how it would go. I’ve played a lot of different RPGs so not having a good idea of what Wield would play like is kind of weird for me.

There’s also a mechanic I find strange. Artifacts have control over their ‘heroes’ and they can give them great power. However, the more power they give, the less control they have. Which makes absolute sense with the idea that the artifact is the real character and the heroes are disposable hit points. But it is weird from a traditional, thematic point of view. I get more of Stormbringer’s sweet soul-drinking power AND I get more autonomy? Woo hoo!

I think what I need to really wrap my mind around is that Wield isn’t about the ‘hero’. You might go through a bunch of them. It is the story and the legacy of a scary magical item.

Which reminds me. Where is my Elric TV show? Seriously. You’d really think that would be a property that would get snatched up in today’s market. I have to assume that the rights must be in some kind of legal limbo but I want my albino emo-teen cursed-sword guy TV show.

The Zombie Clock is ticking... yea!

The word that came to my mind after reading John Wick’s The Shotgun Diaries was desperation.

I’m not a big zombie fan. It feels like, too often, the default theme is humans are the real monsters overlapping with who we really are without society’s rules. Powerful themes but it gets repetitive. And too often, the zombie genre can become some kind of escapist fantasy, that a zombie apocalypse beats the nine-to-five job.

The Shotgun Diaries doesn’t come up with a new theme for zombies. Instead, it strips the zombie genre down to almost the most basic level. You play almost helpless survivors struggling to stay alive with minimal, dwindling resources. 

Seriously, characters are basically one-hit-point wonders who each have one meaningful skill. If that skill doesn’t apply to a situation, you are helpless. You do have access to a group pool of dice but that is hard to replenish and using it increases the overall danger level.

But the hook, the something special that makes The Shotgun Diaries something worth playing, is the Zombie Clock.

Every ten minutes _real_ time, the Zombie Clock goes forward one tick (indicated by adding some sort of token in front of the GM, glass stones or plastic zombies or mouse skulls or whatever) When that happens, a day goes by, the player’s dice pool loses a die and things get more dangerous.

The GM can trade one of the tokens in to do bad stuff. And if the Zombie Clock gets too far, the characters’ shelter get overrun and really bad things happen. 

The Zombie Clock is great because it creates a real time mechanic for ratcheting up tension and danger. I remember when I first played Dread (the one that used a Jenga glee) how having a physical structure that was inevitably going to collapse and cause catastrophic failure added a visceral level of fear and tension. In that first game, we the players started hugging the wall to keep away from the Jenga tower.

The Zombie Clock isn’t quite that extreme but it makes the game more real. You can’t sit back and make detailed plans while the game world is on hold. No, you are literally on the clock.

As I’ve said, I’m not big on zombie games. And there are other zombie games I’d played before The Shotgun Diaries (Like All Flesh Must Be Eaten or Zombie Cinema) However, the potential of the Zombie Clock does make me want to try The Shotgun Diaries.

Mix index cards and sorrow to make game

Sad Things on Index Cards is a tiny RPG/Storytelling Game/social activity by Ben Wray and Marshall Miller. The closest thing I can classify it as is a Game Poem but it has less context than I’m used to seeing in a Game Poem, which seem to have some kind of narrative involved.

The game consists of either writing down sad things on blank index cards or editing sad things written down on index cards to make them sadder. At the end of the game, you give cards to other players for them to read later.

I have to admit, when I first read Sad Things on Index Cards, my first reaction was ‘Man, why didn’t I write this?’

While my initial opinion of Game Poems was pretty meh, they have really grown on me. To my mind, the object of a Game Poem is evoke a specific emotional response. Which could be sorrow or wonder or humor or even boredom. 

Sad Things on Index Cards strips away any kind of story and goes straight to the emotion. In fact, it seems less like a Game Poem than the skeleton of a Game Poem, like a model that you can slap any set of clothes on. It’s like a protoplasm Game Poem :D

I can see a lot of fun and value in both using the game as a framework to create a narrative and to just play it as is. It is such a simple idea but I think has a lot of potential and replay value, as well as being an easy entry for folks who aren’t used to unconventional game designs. 

Sad Things on Index Cards is a super simple game that fits on one piece of paper and takes just a few pilfered office supplies to play. However, there’s brilliance in that simple little design.

MASHed: much better than I expected... and maybe too real

I hadn’t planned on reading MASHed. Because, well, I assumed it was based on the TV show. And I really liked the TV show when it was first being aired (and would probably still like it now) but I’m not interested in playing a game based on it.

However, what I discovered when I started looking at MASHed was that it was focused on being a historical recreation. Mind you, I don’t think it would have been developed without the tv show. I mean, I don’t know if I’d have any clue that MASH units even existed without the show.

So... this is a game that has a focus on a real historical event, a war that was recent enough that people who experienced it are still around to remember it. And it doesn’t focus on combat but what happens after the combat is over... at least for the folks who have to go under the knife.

I’ll be honest. MASHed has some of the highest bleed potential I have seen in an RPG. (Bleed: when people start getting feels from the game) The only game I have looked at that is more extreme is the Grey Ranks, which is listed as an inspiration. And I think MASHed might be more extreme for American audiences since it is easier for us to relate to. I know I’m being super self-centered but MASHed is about Americans. 

And I’m now curious about Korean MASH units. Was there something about that war (The front moving back and forth a lot? Having a larger number of civilian doctors? Was there a larger number?) that made its medical units unusual? Or is it just that Richard Hooker wrote a popular book?

(My son’s grandpa (hi dad!) has made the argument helicopters made rapid transportation easier than WW II. And Vietnam was much more defuse and probably had faster helicopters. But neither of us know much details about those wars so those are just guesses)

So I went from having no interest in MASHed and only owning it thanks to Bundle or Holding to actively reading it and cross referencing parts of it. That said, I don’t know if I’d _play_ MASHed. To play it without trivializing the subject might be too traumatic.

Collaborative world building, it’s a thing

I was listening to Matt Colville, who I listen to very erratically, and he commented on how world building is a DM’s thing and how the players investment in how they have drama in that world.

However, I have been in campaigns where the DM assigned world building to the players. You, you’re playing an elf? Okay, you get decide what elves are like in our world. It shares the work and lets players get more invested in the world.

Oh, in the game did end up having an over arcing story. The DM just tailored it to the players’ interests after he learned what they were.

However, what really came to my mind was the games where the whole point is for everyone to work together to create the world. Games are where everyone gets to take part in the world building.

My first experience doing that was... man, 1997. If there were any world building games out at the time, we didn’t know it. We just each took a piece and developed it. We ended up with a world of islands floating in the volcano with renaissance duelers and steampunk monks who didn’t wear goggles. We never ended until doing anything with it but it was pretty.

However, there are now a number of options for collaborative world building. The first one I heard of was Universalis, which I still haven’t really looked at. Downfall is another one I want to look into. I have actually played the Quiet Year, which explores building a community but also has a definitely helping of collaborative world building.

The world building game that I have, by far, had the most experience with is Microscope. If someone asked me to recommend a world building game, which has never happened and probably never will, I’d recommend Microscope. In fact, that the first Microscope game I was ever in had the goal of creating a campaign world for D&D and the player who was the DM used it for more than one campaign.

World building hasn’t been on my mind lately. However, after my mind was poked, I not only remembered that I enjoy it, there are systems that really explore it.