Dress Up Barbie Dolls in Accessory Mansions... the RPG
Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2010 4:20 am
OK. So I've been considering seriously remodeling some of my crappy home brew rules in a variety of ways. Maybe even working on something on a level that could be a substitute for D&D for me and my group.
And along with a raft of my usual ZANY ideas I want to do something a bit different.
So here is an attempt at a vague outline before I start trying to flesh this nut out a bit more.
You Are A Barbie Girl
Yeah, yeah, your skills and innate awesomeness are all like, you know, totally awesome and junk.
But your GEAR is really really important too. Putting on a suit of shiny plate Armour or a pretty low cut evening dress really matters and really does, well, stuff.
The items themselves should be important and potentially do things, but also they should be primary key requirements and resources your character abilities revolve around.
So telling people your character is an Agile Amazon Warrior Princess is important, but it is also really important to add "and she wears Skimpy Goddess Plate Armour and fights with Dual Hooked Executioner Broad Swords". Because her fancy suit and her fancy things she hits things with are genuine defining characteristics that set her apart from otherwise identical Agile Amazon Warrior Princesses who wear Leather Cat Suits and shoot things with Electric Long Bow Arrows.
You Are In A Barbie World
As your kick ass important character defining gear gets more important it rapidly becomes really really demanding. As in your Electric Long Bow needs to spend a lot of time between adventures "Resting" in a special vault where it charges up with electricity, and maybe it needs some attendants to... attend to it, or whatever they do...
And that means your Barbie hero needs a Barbie Mansion. And getting (and keeping) a Burning Sword of Kick Ass means you need to add a new wing to your mansion with a Burning Sword of Kick Ass storage room, and maybe a trap room and/or a locked vault door, and maybe a guard room, and maybe expanded servants quarters and guard barracks for the staff, and maybe a special sword bearer attendant to bring you your sword in a hurry if something important comes up, and maybe even a special Burning Sword of Kick Ass training room.
Indeed beyond a certain point your character may even require training rooms, extended private chambers, throne rooms, a private bathroom, a trophy hall, a trophy wife, a trophy wife hall, and special servants and other junk just in order to grow their skills beyond that of mere poverty stricken mortals. Thus even further expanding their Barbie mansions.
And their Barbie mansions will need wealth, which will need to somehow be stored, generated and managed within the mansions.
And they will need even more guards, and maybe even some extra guards to go kick dirt grubbing mansionless peasants in the face for you while you go and do more important things.
What Barbie Adventures would look like
Low Level - Adventures of Homeless Hobo Thieves
Your party are itinerant homeless Barbie dolls. Your gear is actually pretty much depressingly identical to that of peasants and the low level disposable mooks. You are better than them primarily just on basic HP and Energy type resources, and as you advance in experience you pick up low tier skills.
Many of your low tier skills revolve around having swords and shields and magic wands and junk, but for now those items are still the same shit mooks have and almost all they do is let you use your limited skills. Your means of restoring expended item resources is pretty much always "grab it off a mook I just killed".
Your enemies are homeless unemployed Mooks. And other homeless low level barbie dolls. Your adventures occur in regular peasant houses, on the road and in Ruined or Abandoned Barbie mansions filled with homeless Mook and Barbie squatters and crumbling second rate pickings.
Toward the upper levels of this tier you may start building little barbie mansions but for now they mostly are just places to sleep or store your cash type Treasure where you have a few cheap squads of Mooks to keep the riff raff out.
Mid Level -Raiders of the Not So Lost Barbie Mansions
Your Barbie Mansion and Treasure Stockpiles advance to the point that you start buying magic item vaults and training rooms and crap that start making you more awesome as an individual Barbie hero, unlocking higher tier abilities and items.
These higher tier abilities and items allow you to scale up the sorts of encounters you engage in. For you "an encounter" is now primarily a raid on someone else's entire Barbie Mansion in one go.
Back at Hobo level some small subset of the rooms of a REAL Barbie mansion would have been a whole "encounter" for you, and you had better hope the owner wasn't home! Now you do THE WHOLE COMPLEX (and probably the owners too) as an encounter.
You and your buddies and maybe a handful of your favorite mooks take on the ENTIRE Mook body guard compliment and whatever rival Barbie Lords that might be at home in a grand sprawling fight wandering across the entire complex, the abilities that access to the Barbie Mansion Owner level grant you let you do this sort of crazy shit.
High Level - Masters of the Barbie Mansion International Franchise
You no longer have ONE Barbie mansion, you now have MANY. What would have been your whole mansion for the prior tier of adventuring is now something you just pay some suckers to set up in every major city on the continent that you ever visit for more than five minutes. And you keep a super uber main Barbie Mansion in some city, island, or small country or whatever else you own in the way of your favorite personal real estate.
You now unlock powers of the high tier with super uber mansion upgrades, heck it is entirely possible that in this tier you need an ENTIRE FRANCHISE MANSION per ability/uber cool item or something crazy like that.
Your powers are so vast you go and take on entire individual Barbie Mansions ON YOUR OWN, with minimal care for preparation and stealth. And it isn't even hard unless someone else of your tier turns up.
Proper full scale encounters with elaborate preparations are you and your Barbie buddies and top line mooks executing elaborate simultaneous raids on an entire enemy Mansion Franchise.
What This Means for Administration and mechanics
At hobo level this should mean relatively little. Towards the end of hobo level the party maybe has a spare sheet with a map of a tiny proto-barbie-mansion, some rather slimly fleshed out unremarkable mooks and a pile of unspent loot.
The big marker for hitting Barbie Mansion Owner level is when the group sits down and busts out the more elaborate rules sets for building their mansion, starts spending loot and builds a mansion that is at least as elaborate as one or two of the party characters. Maintaining your Mansion Sheet is as big a deal as running your character sheets because it IS part of your character.
At Mansion Franchise level things could go to crazy town. But my main focus here is actually "mid" level so screw it, we can worry more about crazy town later. But ideally Franchise mansions are largely reproductions of each other so a party should probably still have just one (bigger) main Mansion to track and then at most one (significantly smaller) Franchise Mansion Template each with a list of sites where they can find their local outlet and what the special one off feature of each site is beside it.
What does this mean for setting and story
It doesn't have to mean as much as all that. But a strong focus around everyone needing a secret fort and rival characters raiding each other's secret forts will certainly be a major upshot of all this.
But all things considered an enemy secret fort is basically a dungeon. So if your adventure is raiding the secret barbie mansion fort of the Orc King and his Knights of the Green Table then really it's just a more organized adventure where if you do it right the mechanics and structure of the whole thing supports you grabbing Orxcalibur off the wall before the Orc King has even been alerted and put his pants on.
The main change is that eventually the adventuring party has to stop being homeless hobos and has to have a mansion of their own and start worrying about the Orc King sending goblin ninjas to take THEIR cool burning sword of ruination from it's vault and stab them with it in their sleep.
What does this mean for wealth as power
Probably bad things, because wealth, and real-estate, is both a byproduct and REQUIREMENT of personal power. And we know aspects of that are actually pretty bad.
On the plus side the requirement of having a whole damn new wing of mansion to house your uber Flaming Doom Sword makes it feel special, and means that there are real costs, tactical options and adventure hooks inherit in such increases in character power.
So what does attacking a Mansion Look Like
Ideally when you attack a rival mansion you would go through a few stages.
1) Gather Intelligence - You use your relevant abilities to sneak in, insert infiltrators in the rival staff, and prepare to bust in through the doors and sky lights. Failure during this stage leads to a premature triggering of the second phase before all your dudes are in the best positions and before you know where the enemy hangs his magic sword and whether his magic sword is currently on it's hanging hook or not.
2) Big fat combat - Either the alarm has been triggered or you have started kicking in doors. With key Barbie Items in their Barbie Vaults you are motivated to scatter your group and lock down (or just plain take and start using) the enemies Death Blade of Death before they can use it while your ally is on the other side of the compound locking down the enemy Fire Blade of Fire, or assassinating their leader, or keeping a bunch of guards pinned in their barracks, or blowing up the throne room during the Barbie King's grand audience. During this phase alarm propogates through the building (or not) based on various rules and the results of the actions of defenders that have been alerted to the attack. A lot of the combat isn't just about killing things, but managing the alert status to split the enemy and continue to catch knots of them about their daily business unprepared for the attack.
What about Defending your Mansion
Well that should look a lot like the reverse side of being attacked.
Enemies fail or succeed their sneaky phase and suddenly a fight is on.
Your characters determine where they are and what they were up to in the mansion based on the success or failure of the enemy sneaky phase and on some nice little rules about how likely it is they caught you naked in the bath or all dressed up in war gear and ready to step out the door.
Your primary means of preparing for such encounters is in mansion design.
Buying a cool training room gives you a good chance of being busy training and coincidentally dressed up in at least some fighting gear during a surprise attack.
Buying a better private bath room means if you get caught in it you have better guards on hand or the turn over time for your luxury bath attendants to kit you up in fighting gear is much quicker.
Hiring a professional sword bearer means you have a dude on hand near your magic sword vault who's primary job is to grab your sword and bring it to you when the emergency alarms go off.
The potential accessories, minions, and mansion extension options multiply at an amazing rate. Spinning blade hazards activated from a central guard room? A giant glass ceilinged Arboretum that does nothing but give you character points, a potential break in point, and a place to keep your man eating tigers with laser vision? Good lord you could even have a shark tank A GOD DAMN SHARK TANK.
What About being on the road, and places that AREN'T Barbie mansions?
OK so first of all you have encounters in random locations where no one is in their barbie mansion. That should work out a lot like standard encounters, only hopefully the support for mansion sized encoutners either trivializes these encounters or allows for damned big ones in fairly complex "neutral territory".
Then you have your Barbie adventures being ambushed while they are in their Barbie Adventure Camp Site. Which should work a bit like a scaled down cheapo travel mansion, and sometime mid mid level you might even start keeping a "Travelling Entourage" sheet which talks about how many weapon polishers and boot lickers you need to keep with you to keep your magic gear and junk trim and proper and your elite assault mooks fed and well dressed while marching between kingdoms.
Then at some point later mid level you should just start not doing traveling encounters any more because you teleport everywhere from your Barbie Mansion teleporting room, or you just fly your mansion where-ever you go because your Barbie Mansion god damn flies or something.
Back in Hobo tier things may have involved crumbling former Barbie mansions and whatever other places unemployed mooks and homeless hobos hang out in. But those would work a lot like Barbie Mansions when it comes to fighting in them only with different and inferior rules on what sort of guys live there, what can be looted, and how well the environment supports defenders.
"Trevor" may have just gotten a bit screwed
Now while we can sort of a lot of mansion components as free extra side effects of becoming a bigger character, and while you COULD get just one or two interested members of the party to do a lot of the shared mansion administration like hiring guards and designing the floor plan and crap...
This set up somewhat screws the guy who wants the easy sit on a pile of loot and be conan style of thing discussed recently. Because if sitting on a pile of loot with wenches scattered around is actually a complex character decision that gives you real loot and wench related powers... well... then there isn't exactly any simple left for you.
But screw it. I want players to get loot and wench bonuses for their Barbie mansions. I want them to care about putting in a sweet new entry hall with it's kick ass security and character skill bonuses. And that means that in order to care more decisions will need to be made and more information tracked, a scrawled note in your character fluff saying "Lolz I has endless loot pile + Wenches inz myz Bat Caves!" is no longer acceptable.
And along with a raft of my usual ZANY ideas I want to do something a bit different.
So here is an attempt at a vague outline before I start trying to flesh this nut out a bit more.
You Are A Barbie Girl
Yeah, yeah, your skills and innate awesomeness are all like, you know, totally awesome and junk.
But your GEAR is really really important too. Putting on a suit of shiny plate Armour or a pretty low cut evening dress really matters and really does, well, stuff.
The items themselves should be important and potentially do things, but also they should be primary key requirements and resources your character abilities revolve around.
So telling people your character is an Agile Amazon Warrior Princess is important, but it is also really important to add "and she wears Skimpy Goddess Plate Armour and fights with Dual Hooked Executioner Broad Swords". Because her fancy suit and her fancy things she hits things with are genuine defining characteristics that set her apart from otherwise identical Agile Amazon Warrior Princesses who wear Leather Cat Suits and shoot things with Electric Long Bow Arrows.
You Are In A Barbie World
As your kick ass important character defining gear gets more important it rapidly becomes really really demanding. As in your Electric Long Bow needs to spend a lot of time between adventures "Resting" in a special vault where it charges up with electricity, and maybe it needs some attendants to... attend to it, or whatever they do...
And that means your Barbie hero needs a Barbie Mansion. And getting (and keeping) a Burning Sword of Kick Ass means you need to add a new wing to your mansion with a Burning Sword of Kick Ass storage room, and maybe a trap room and/or a locked vault door, and maybe a guard room, and maybe expanded servants quarters and guard barracks for the staff, and maybe a special sword bearer attendant to bring you your sword in a hurry if something important comes up, and maybe even a special Burning Sword of Kick Ass training room.
Indeed beyond a certain point your character may even require training rooms, extended private chambers, throne rooms, a private bathroom, a trophy hall, a trophy wife, a trophy wife hall, and special servants and other junk just in order to grow their skills beyond that of mere poverty stricken mortals. Thus even further expanding their Barbie mansions.
And their Barbie mansions will need wealth, which will need to somehow be stored, generated and managed within the mansions.
And they will need even more guards, and maybe even some extra guards to go kick dirt grubbing mansionless peasants in the face for you while you go and do more important things.
What Barbie Adventures would look like
Low Level - Adventures of Homeless Hobo Thieves
Your party are itinerant homeless Barbie dolls. Your gear is actually pretty much depressingly identical to that of peasants and the low level disposable mooks. You are better than them primarily just on basic HP and Energy type resources, and as you advance in experience you pick up low tier skills.
Many of your low tier skills revolve around having swords and shields and magic wands and junk, but for now those items are still the same shit mooks have and almost all they do is let you use your limited skills. Your means of restoring expended item resources is pretty much always "grab it off a mook I just killed".
Your enemies are homeless unemployed Mooks. And other homeless low level barbie dolls. Your adventures occur in regular peasant houses, on the road and in Ruined or Abandoned Barbie mansions filled with homeless Mook and Barbie squatters and crumbling second rate pickings.
Toward the upper levels of this tier you may start building little barbie mansions but for now they mostly are just places to sleep or store your cash type Treasure where you have a few cheap squads of Mooks to keep the riff raff out.
Mid Level -Raiders of the Not So Lost Barbie Mansions
Your Barbie Mansion and Treasure Stockpiles advance to the point that you start buying magic item vaults and training rooms and crap that start making you more awesome as an individual Barbie hero, unlocking higher tier abilities and items.
These higher tier abilities and items allow you to scale up the sorts of encounters you engage in. For you "an encounter" is now primarily a raid on someone else's entire Barbie Mansion in one go.
Back at Hobo level some small subset of the rooms of a REAL Barbie mansion would have been a whole "encounter" for you, and you had better hope the owner wasn't home! Now you do THE WHOLE COMPLEX (and probably the owners too) as an encounter.
You and your buddies and maybe a handful of your favorite mooks take on the ENTIRE Mook body guard compliment and whatever rival Barbie Lords that might be at home in a grand sprawling fight wandering across the entire complex, the abilities that access to the Barbie Mansion Owner level grant you let you do this sort of crazy shit.
High Level - Masters of the Barbie Mansion International Franchise
You no longer have ONE Barbie mansion, you now have MANY. What would have been your whole mansion for the prior tier of adventuring is now something you just pay some suckers to set up in every major city on the continent that you ever visit for more than five minutes. And you keep a super uber main Barbie Mansion in some city, island, or small country or whatever else you own in the way of your favorite personal real estate.
You now unlock powers of the high tier with super uber mansion upgrades, heck it is entirely possible that in this tier you need an ENTIRE FRANCHISE MANSION per ability/uber cool item or something crazy like that.
Your powers are so vast you go and take on entire individual Barbie Mansions ON YOUR OWN, with minimal care for preparation and stealth. And it isn't even hard unless someone else of your tier turns up.
Proper full scale encounters with elaborate preparations are you and your Barbie buddies and top line mooks executing elaborate simultaneous raids on an entire enemy Mansion Franchise.
What This Means for Administration and mechanics
At hobo level this should mean relatively little. Towards the end of hobo level the party maybe has a spare sheet with a map of a tiny proto-barbie-mansion, some rather slimly fleshed out unremarkable mooks and a pile of unspent loot.
The big marker for hitting Barbie Mansion Owner level is when the group sits down and busts out the more elaborate rules sets for building their mansion, starts spending loot and builds a mansion that is at least as elaborate as one or two of the party characters. Maintaining your Mansion Sheet is as big a deal as running your character sheets because it IS part of your character.
At Mansion Franchise level things could go to crazy town. But my main focus here is actually "mid" level so screw it, we can worry more about crazy town later. But ideally Franchise mansions are largely reproductions of each other so a party should probably still have just one (bigger) main Mansion to track and then at most one (significantly smaller) Franchise Mansion Template each with a list of sites where they can find their local outlet and what the special one off feature of each site is beside it.
What does this mean for setting and story
It doesn't have to mean as much as all that. But a strong focus around everyone needing a secret fort and rival characters raiding each other's secret forts will certainly be a major upshot of all this.
But all things considered an enemy secret fort is basically a dungeon. So if your adventure is raiding the secret barbie mansion fort of the Orc King and his Knights of the Green Table then really it's just a more organized adventure where if you do it right the mechanics and structure of the whole thing supports you grabbing Orxcalibur off the wall before the Orc King has even been alerted and put his pants on.
The main change is that eventually the adventuring party has to stop being homeless hobos and has to have a mansion of their own and start worrying about the Orc King sending goblin ninjas to take THEIR cool burning sword of ruination from it's vault and stab them with it in their sleep.
What does this mean for wealth as power
Probably bad things, because wealth, and real-estate, is both a byproduct and REQUIREMENT of personal power. And we know aspects of that are actually pretty bad.
On the plus side the requirement of having a whole damn new wing of mansion to house your uber Flaming Doom Sword makes it feel special, and means that there are real costs, tactical options and adventure hooks inherit in such increases in character power.
So what does attacking a Mansion Look Like
Ideally when you attack a rival mansion you would go through a few stages.
1) Gather Intelligence - You use your relevant abilities to sneak in, insert infiltrators in the rival staff, and prepare to bust in through the doors and sky lights. Failure during this stage leads to a premature triggering of the second phase before all your dudes are in the best positions and before you know where the enemy hangs his magic sword and whether his magic sword is currently on it's hanging hook or not.
2) Big fat combat - Either the alarm has been triggered or you have started kicking in doors. With key Barbie Items in their Barbie Vaults you are motivated to scatter your group and lock down (or just plain take and start using) the enemies Death Blade of Death before they can use it while your ally is on the other side of the compound locking down the enemy Fire Blade of Fire, or assassinating their leader, or keeping a bunch of guards pinned in their barracks, or blowing up the throne room during the Barbie King's grand audience. During this phase alarm propogates through the building (or not) based on various rules and the results of the actions of defenders that have been alerted to the attack. A lot of the combat isn't just about killing things, but managing the alert status to split the enemy and continue to catch knots of them about their daily business unprepared for the attack.
What about Defending your Mansion
Well that should look a lot like the reverse side of being attacked.
Enemies fail or succeed their sneaky phase and suddenly a fight is on.
Your characters determine where they are and what they were up to in the mansion based on the success or failure of the enemy sneaky phase and on some nice little rules about how likely it is they caught you naked in the bath or all dressed up in war gear and ready to step out the door.
Your primary means of preparing for such encounters is in mansion design.
Buying a cool training room gives you a good chance of being busy training and coincidentally dressed up in at least some fighting gear during a surprise attack.
Buying a better private bath room means if you get caught in it you have better guards on hand or the turn over time for your luxury bath attendants to kit you up in fighting gear is much quicker.
Hiring a professional sword bearer means you have a dude on hand near your magic sword vault who's primary job is to grab your sword and bring it to you when the emergency alarms go off.
The potential accessories, minions, and mansion extension options multiply at an amazing rate. Spinning blade hazards activated from a central guard room? A giant glass ceilinged Arboretum that does nothing but give you character points, a potential break in point, and a place to keep your man eating tigers with laser vision? Good lord you could even have a shark tank A GOD DAMN SHARK TANK.
What About being on the road, and places that AREN'T Barbie mansions?
OK so first of all you have encounters in random locations where no one is in their barbie mansion. That should work out a lot like standard encounters, only hopefully the support for mansion sized encoutners either trivializes these encounters or allows for damned big ones in fairly complex "neutral territory".
Then you have your Barbie adventures being ambushed while they are in their Barbie Adventure Camp Site. Which should work a bit like a scaled down cheapo travel mansion, and sometime mid mid level you might even start keeping a "Travelling Entourage" sheet which talks about how many weapon polishers and boot lickers you need to keep with you to keep your magic gear and junk trim and proper and your elite assault mooks fed and well dressed while marching between kingdoms.
Then at some point later mid level you should just start not doing traveling encounters any more because you teleport everywhere from your Barbie Mansion teleporting room, or you just fly your mansion where-ever you go because your Barbie Mansion god damn flies or something.
Back in Hobo tier things may have involved crumbling former Barbie mansions and whatever other places unemployed mooks and homeless hobos hang out in. But those would work a lot like Barbie Mansions when it comes to fighting in them only with different and inferior rules on what sort of guys live there, what can be looted, and how well the environment supports defenders.
"Trevor" may have just gotten a bit screwed
Now while we can sort of a lot of mansion components as free extra side effects of becoming a bigger character, and while you COULD get just one or two interested members of the party to do a lot of the shared mansion administration like hiring guards and designing the floor plan and crap...
This set up somewhat screws the guy who wants the easy sit on a pile of loot and be conan style of thing discussed recently. Because if sitting on a pile of loot with wenches scattered around is actually a complex character decision that gives you real loot and wench related powers... well... then there isn't exactly any simple left for you.
But screw it. I want players to get loot and wench bonuses for their Barbie mansions. I want them to care about putting in a sweet new entry hall with it's kick ass security and character skill bonuses. And that means that in order to care more decisions will need to be made and more information tracked, a scrawled note in your character fluff saying "Lolz I has endless loot pile + Wenches inz myz Bat Caves!" is no longer acceptable.