A Courteous Night - Romance in two pages of RPG

A Courteous Night, from the Indie RPG Megamix Tape, is an eety, bitty little role playing game for two players. No prep, no GM, requires just a deck of playing cards and should play out in just an hour. 

 

In a Courteous Night, the players play two lovers and they play out three events in the development of their relationship. The game is couched in fantastical terms with one player being the Enchanted and the other the Sotted with both characters being under curses. However, the roles really just dictate play order and a curse can be something mundane like crippling shyness, overprotective parents or heroin addiction.

The game has a simple but very defined structure. An introduction, where you meet the characters, three scenes that define the relationship, and an epilogue.

The scenes are played out in a call and response fashion, with the active player describing things and the reactive player responding to them. The active player will be playing cards face up and the reactive player will be playing them face down.

The value of the cards sadly doesn't have a direct correlation to the story. Instead, the face up cards will determine who controls the third act and all the cards will determine who is the 'winner'.

I have to note that the third act is a consensual seduction. Unlike Emily Karen Boss's romance RPGs, there aren't any guidelines for respecting people's comfort levels (to be fair, A Courteous Night is only two pages so there is size constraints) but including the word consensual goes a long way to keep things from getting creepy.

The 'winner' gets to narrate the epilogue, which describes how they break the _other_ player's curse. So really, everyone gets to be a winner. Yay!

To my mind, A Courteous Night has a couple strikes against it. First of all, I'm not terribly interested in romance RPGs. Second of all, if I did want to play a two-player romance RPG, the first game I would reach for would be Emily Care Boss's very excellent Breaking the Ice.

I also wish the mechanics of the card play were a little more tightly tied to the narrative. They do serve as a place keeper and help determine who controls certain elements. However, you can play towards winning or losing without that reflecting on how you tell the story.

However, there are some things I do like about the game. First off, an hour running time. As I have grown older and life has grown busier and more complex, shorter playing times have became more valuable.

Second, it has a tight structure. I have found that with narrative games, particularly short form ones, having a tight structure helps keep the game focused, which can be very important with the free form mechanics of many narrative game systems.

Third, I like how the player with the higher point total breaks the _other_ player's curse. It creates a cooperative, collaborative atmosphere.

A Courteous Night is by no means a perfect game. But an hour playing time and a structure that should keep the game moving along  does help it have a definite place in a very specific niche.

Taking flight with Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is the story of a noble woman searching for true love in an endless blue sky of shattered worlds. It's also a role playing game system built around a single scenario with a strong narrative focus.

  

On top of all that, it is also an example of a role playing game designed so that everyone, including the game master, can sit down and play with minimal preparation. 

Lady Blackbird pulls off a pretty amazing trick. It uses pregenerated characters and a synopsis of the general storyline BUT manages to be opened-ended enough that the players have immense freedom to make their choices and develop the story. That's a pretty amazing balance.

Lady Blackbird is set in a world that in one part steam punk and one part swashbuckling adventure and one part fairy tale. Sky pirates and sorcerers fly spaceships through the breathable aether. The players portray Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard and the scruffy but good-hearted band of rogues helping her escape her arranged marriage and reach her secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint.

Each player character sheet also includes the rules, which should give you an idea how simple the rules are. Every time you try to do something tough, you build a dice pool and roll, 4,5 and 6 being successes. Characters break down into traits to add dice to rolls, keys to get experience points and secrets that are really special abilities.

I particularly like keys. When you hit a key, you either get an experience point or a die in your personal dice pool. And you can buy them out for extra experience or dice by acting against the key and getting rid of it. Keys help guide roleplaying but also gives you so much freedom that you can subvert them.

The game master section is really what makes Lady Blackbird work. The game master is encouraged, above all else, to ask questions. They then use the answers to build the situations and story. That's collaborative story telling!

While I sadly have not played Lady Blackbird, I have a number of friends who have and who really loved it. And, because it is so open in its structure, it has a lot of replay value. The same group of players can play it again and come up with a completely different story.

Lady Blackbird pulls off the very difficult trick of being mechanically very simple and accessible but allowing for some very involved character development and story telling. If you're looking for a game that'll last two to four sessions that requires minimal prep time, Lady Blackbird is a strong choice.

http://www.onesevendesign.com/ladyblackbird/

Baron Munchausen - no prep, no GM, all fun!

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a game that has cast a long shadow over my gaming life and it's also had a heck of an impact on role playing games in general.

You see, Baron Munchausen was one of the first games you could really call an indie RPG, coming out in 1998, before indie had become  an idea or a movement. 

Of course, at the time, not too many folks considered it a role playing game. Heck, when I first played it in 1999, I didn't think of it as a role playing game, just a fun party game. But, these days, after a lot of exposure to indie games, I think of it as both :D

Baron Munchausen is a GM-free minimalist system that requires no preparation and it can easily be run in just an hour or two. In it, the players reenacting mud.   the life of the actual historical Baron Munchausen. That is, sitting around a bar and telling outrageous lies.  :P

While the actual mechanical rules to the game take up only two pages in what's over a hundred pages in the latest version (and only consist of how to interrupt another player in the middle of their story), the book is a lot of fun to read. It gives you a good grounding on what kind of stories to come up with and, just as important, the tone of those stories.

It's worth noting that the designer, James Wallis, was also one of the designers of Once Upon A Time, a collaborative and/or competitive fairy tale telling game, which even further blurs the line of RPG and party game. 

In fact, while I now do consider Once Upon A Time an RPG, even when I didn't, I considered it a useful way to teach new role players how to play pretend and work together to tell stories.

While Baron Munchausen was innovative in the way that it took parlor games and improvisational exercises and turned into a role playing game, it's not the end all, be all of indie gaming. You're not going to get a deep or introspective game. You're going to get light, silly fluff. Of course, Baron Munchausen isn't promising you anything but that.

Baron Muchausen still holds up as a fun game, after all these years. It's a role playing game that you can literally just sit down, make up funny titles for yourselves and start playing.

Sandman: Map of Halaal - a weird art project of an RPG

I remember seeing advertisements for Sandman: Map of Halaal back in 1985 but it wasn't until I got a PDF copy of the game last year that I really got to figure out what it was all about. (And, just to get this out of the way, it has nothing to do with the comic book that would come out a few years later and be really awesome) 

You see, the gimmick of the game was that it was a role playing game that didn't require any prep work. The idea was that you could just sit down with the game and get playing right off the bat.

Sandman did this by using pregenerated characters, pregenerated adventures, a very simple rule system and by having the game master do every last bit of heavy lifting. Seriously, the players don't even get to see the character sheets. That's all being handled by the game master.

Part of the gimmick is that everyone is an amnesiac. You don't know who you are or what you're good at. The game master gets to reveal that to you if the opportunity comes up. Oh, you're firing a gun? Guess what, you might turn out to have the gun skill. The game master is even stuck keeping track of everyone's hit points.

So, Sandman was set up so that everyone BUT the game master could sit down and play without any kind of preparation. I'd hate to think of how Sandman would go if the game master went in cold without looking at the game. And, frankly, game masters are the ones who really have to do all the prep work in the first place.

And the adventures were all serious railroads, with instructions to kill the characters if they don't make the right choices. Honestly, there's no flexibility for either the players or the game master.

All of that negativity said, I do have to say that the actual storyline of Sandman was pretty interesting, if not to say completely trippy.

I really don't know if I'd ever run Sandman and I can't really play it because I've already read all four adventures. But I did get a kick out of reading it. As far as weirdness is concerned, Sandman: Map of Halaal is in a class all its own.

In the first of the interlocking adventures, you end up in Casablanca. No, not the city. The characters end up in the movie. They will have encounters with Humphrey  Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and so on. From there, you end up in a traditional Arabian Nights adventure. With Nazis.

That is the normal adventure.

Things good increasingly bizarre in the later adventures. Planes flying out of 1940s and landing in the Middle Ages. Tinker Bell helping the players flee from Chicago gangsters to Never Never Land. Psycho drama versions of fairy tales hosted by thinly disguised versions of Disney's seven dwarves. Albert Einstein flying a spaceship out of Ancient Greece with a robot Dionysus.

Sandman reads less like an adventure game and more like an experimental student film. Which, undeniably, did make for some fun reading.

You'll commit punchline is that we never get to find out what this is all about. Sandman was the first in a series of boxed adventures. However, they were never able to publish the rest. What is going on, who the characters are really, The mysterious Sandman that is trying to kill them is, none of that ever gets answered.

My personal theory is that the entire adventure is taking place in the mind of a schizophrenic in a coma, which explains all the pulp culture elements and why time and space don't matter. But it could just as easily be that everyone is dead and in purgatory or its all a computer simulation or maybe the gods are just crazy.

As genuinely fascinating as Sandman is, I have to say that I ultimately viewed as a failure, particularly for at goals. The idea of it being a role-playing game with no preparation needed is frankly a lie. The game master really needs to be familiar with the adventures.

And, these days, the idea isn't nearly so unusual and it is a lot easier to find no preparation games done well. For instance, Lady Blackbird is a game that uses a simple mechanical system and the plot written out in broad strokes. However, unlike Sandman, the game isn't a script with a player somehow need to follow almost perfectly. Instead, it is wide open outline that everyone gets to develop.

Sandman: Map of Halaal is a fascinating experiment. It has some very bizarre but fascinating writing and a laudable objective. Unfortunately, it is far too restrictive.