What started out as a fun little experiment has grown into a full blown challenge.
Design an RPG, Setting, Hack, Expansion, or whatever in 200 words or less.
Email your submission to davidschirduan@gmail.com.(Email it as simple plaintext or PDF. Once I've got them all, I'll put them all into one document, and we'll vote on which ones are our favorites!
Submissions due by May 1st!
I don't have any prizes yet, but I'm trying to scrounge together something. If you'd like to contribute a prize (maybe blast your own game/hack, let me know)
Good luck with the contest!
On the blog announcing it, there are prizes-
The Top 3 Finalists will recieve a PDF of “Con’s Prial” by Sean Smith.
The Top 2 Finalists will receive a PDF of James Wallis‘ “Baron Munchausen“
The Winner will receive a PDF of Grant Howitt’s recently kickstarted Goblin Quest.
And there may be more prizes, I guess.
So. While I doubt anything the Den comes up with will win the popular vote, I am dead fucking curious to see what Denners come up with. You guys are better than the movies.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Um....I can only assume that the author means "outline" when he says "design" Because: "The Orc and the Pie" clocks in at 92 words if you include Monte's byline. And This one page chess rules summary is 406 words of text.
You can get a decent blurb in 200 words, as the first two paragraphs of Feng Shui 2 playtest gamma show us.
192 Words wrote:
In Feng Shui, the action movie roleplaying game, you play heroes of the chi war,
protecting humankind’s destiny in a titanic struggle across space and time. Victory
depends on your gravity-defying kung fu powers, your ancient magics, your post
apocalyptic survival instincts, or your plain old-fashioned trigger fnger. You might be a
maverick cop, a cranky kung fu fghting master, an everyday hero, a masked avenger, or
an enigmatic drifter from a post-apocalyptic future. Your battles pit you against a legion
of fearsome foes. This confict rages between four key time periods, pitting you against
sinister eunuch magicians of the past, imperialist oppressors of the colonial era, secretive
conspirators of the present, and cyborg rebels-turned-tyrants whose excesses collapsed
the future.
Chi warriors grasp the fundamental truth of existence: the power of the Earth. Certain
sites that harness and intensify chi, the life force that animates man and nature, extend
across the planet. Those controlling these sites beneft from the increased fow of chi, and
gain great fortune in matters both mundane and mystical. Since ancient times, the
Chinese have honed their knowledge of Earth magic—or geomancy—into the discipline
known as feng shui
But fitting a complete RPG with chargen, action resolution, opponents and advancement into that tight a wordcount is really an exercise in lossy compression - which I am immediately tempted to try with any of the RPG core books on my shelf.
But the contest also allows "Settings (Dinosaurs with Lasers!), Hacks (Roll 3d6 instead on 1d20), Expansions (Not Yet Another Elven Subculture) or "whatevers"" and those categories are vague enough to be handled in nanofiction-scale wordcount.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Apr 22, 2015 5:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
One or more players, and a DM. The players each name and describe their character. The DM describes what the characters observe. When players want their characters to do things, they say so, and the DM tells them to roll a die: if high, DM describes success; if low, DM describes failure; if middling, DM offers two different choices for action to kind of succeed but not really, and the player picks one. Continue play until the car gets to its destination.
82 words, I bet FATE Ultralite could fit in 200 if I was more clear on how it worked.
Nope, it's meant to be a complete playable game. Foxwarrior's is close, just replace "if high" and "if low" with "on a 4-6" and "on a 1-3." There are a bunch of submissions already up there.
Foxwarrior wrote:Continue play until the car gets to its destination.
If you actually plan to submit this, spend some more words playing up that the game is intended to have a duration of 'one car trip.' Maybe talk about how the game is about fictionalizing the car trip as a spaceship journey and people should draw inspiration from things in and around the car. Indie game consumers love that kind of thing.
Nocker's system wrote:Roll a d20 for everything you want to do and check the follow table:
1 : you fail hilariously bad
2 - 7 : you fail
8 - 14 : you and the DM argue if you should succeed or not
15 -19 : you succeed
20 : you succeed so good, people will talk about it afterwards.
There are some intriguing ideas here. In Kintsugi, your skills get better each time they fail, up to a cap, then become unusable. That's kind of cool. Force Blade Punk has you roll multiple dice and then assign dice to various effects; I had considered doing something like that for Identity Crisis. Unfinished has characters that self-destruct automatically, which actually breaks the concept of that game but could be interesting in a different one.
Orion wrote:Unfinished has characters that self-destruct automatically, which actually breaks the concept of that game but could be interesting in a different one.
I would bet my life savings they chose that name specifically so it would be impossible to find with a Google search. I don't suppose you have a link to somewhere with more details?
Orion wrote:There are some intriguing ideas here. In Kintsugi, your skills get better each time they fail, up to a cap, then become unusable. That's kind of cool. Force Blade Punk has you roll multiple dice and then assign dice to various effects; I had considered doing something like that for Identity Crisis. Unfinished has characters that self-destruct automatically, which actually breaks the concept of that game but could be interesting in a different one.
I swear to god I once was convinced I had somehow writtend an rpg in its entirety hand scrawled in complete chaos on a single side of an a4 sheet. I think I may have been kinda sick or medicated at the time. Possible in the early hours of a morning while travelling overseas.
It was a weirdo single session lite concept rpg where everyone got to be a country at the University. It had a very very basic war game economy element, a political influence system where you chose some political keywords you liked and hated and got scored for doing little mini speeches before the un on sheer dumb counts of keyword condemnations and praises. It also had a unique vote thing where you got to change all the game rules "democratically" including changing or removing the gm (who goes around calling himself chairman of the un)
All on a single page which I promptly lost.
Now I would LIKE to pretend I was just an incompetent rules lite beginner who operated his genius and after long hard years learned better.
But seriously I lost that thing and within like i don't know maybe as little as A DAY i not only couldn't remember how the fuck it worked but couldn't figure out why the fuck I thought it would.
I mean seriously 1 a4 page it wasn't even all written the same way up and I swear the catchy title (can't even remember that) was scrawled large across the middle top (portrait) with at least one exclamation mark.
Phonelobster's Self Proclaimed Greatest Hits Collection : (no really, they are awesome)
Orion wrote:There are some intriguing ideas here. In Kintsugi, your skills get better each time they fail, up to a cap, then become unusable. That's kind of cool. Force Blade Punk has you roll multiple dice and then assign dice to various effects; I had considered doing something like that for Identity Crisis. Unfinished has characters that self-destruct automatically, which actually breaks the concept of that game but could be interesting in a different one.
Link? I googled for Kinstugi RPG, and that lead me to strange places.
"No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style." - Steven Brust
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
I want him to tongue-punch my box.
]
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
The game is played for laughs, as a series of skits intended to last 5-20 minutes each. The story of each skit is decided collectively, but should be based on fantasy clichés (dragon slaying, ruin exploring, magical schools etc). On each skit, a different player is the DM, and the other players are the heroes. The DM's job is to narrate the scene and make whatever task the heroes want to accomplish to fail in the most spectacular way possible.
DWW heroes, monsters and things are made of up to five short sentences like "Good with swords", "Knows magic", "Kills with a touch", "Wears black clothes" etc. Each sentence improves the character's chances on one or more of the five Areas of Expertise (AoE): Combat, Exploration/Sneaking, Socializing, Problem-Solving or Winning.
To do anything in the game, decide the AoE the task falls under, roll a d20 and consult the table:
1 : fail hilariously bad
2 - 7 : fail
8 - 14 : players argue if the task should succeed or not, using their related sentences as trumps. Each trump can be used once per roll.
15 -19 : succeed
20 : succeed so good, people will talk about it afterwards.
So, is this submission-worthy?
@ @ Nockermensch
Koumei wrote:After all, in Firefox you keep tabs in your browser, but in SovietPutin's Russia, browser keeps tabs on you.
Mord wrote:Chromatic Wolves are massively under-CRed. Its "Dood to stone" spell-like is a TPK waiting to happen if you run into it before anyone in the party has Dance of Sack or Shield of Farts.
Pick two strong stats and two weak stats.
Weak = 1D6
Normal =2D6
Strong = 3D6
Roll and add together.
Player A declares action, other players may choose to oppose or contest.
Opposing attempts to stop Player A and uses the opposing stat. Contesting attempts to do the same thing as player A and uses the same stat.
Unopposed actions succeed on a 4 or better.
Opposed/Contested actions: All contesting players roll, highest wins, subtract the looses scores from his. If the result is less than 4, he wins, but he fails. Describe his failure as creatively as possible. Every player drinks a shot.
Action Modifiers
Basic +2 bonus. Example : Peeing on the floor.
Simple +0 Example: Peeing on the floor while drunk.
Difficult -2 Example: Peeing in the toilet while drunk.
Impossible -4 Example: Peeing in a Shotglass while drunk.
Super Impossible -6 Example: Peeing in a shotglass from a swinging chandelier while drunk.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Sat Apr 25, 2015 12:30 am, edited 4 times in total.
200 words exactly wrote:Polite Fiction:
a micro-RPG of flattery and logic for 5 or more players
Write a name on a card in front of you. The game has more meaning if you pick names of celebrities, politicians or historical figures, or characters for some other RPG you are already playing.
The game starts when a character makes a flattering Superlative declaration about another character: "(Character) <<X>> is the best ____ here" (The game always starts with one of these.)
The subject <<X>> of this Superlative cannot accept it and must either
*Accuse the declarer
or
*Deflect it with a Comparative declaration involving themselves and a third character: "Actually, I think that <<Y>> is a better ____ than myself"
Then the subject <<Y>> of such a comparative may
*Accuse declarer <<X>> ,
or
*accept it and start a new superlative declaration
or
*deflect it and nominate <<Z>> with a new comparative
Accusations:
*"You can't really mean that, because you previously said ______ and ______, which contradicts that" All players consider whether the Accusation is based on what was actually said and whether it is actually a contradiction. If so, then the Accused loses the game. If not, then the character making a false Accusation loses.
suggestions for editing, formatting and clean up welcome before I submit it to the actual contest.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Sun Apr 26, 2015 7:56 pm, edited 3 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
