So, if it can be said that I have one hobby, my hobby would be tabletop RPGs. Dungeons and Dragons and all that. And I like to make them! I enjoy playing these games, so I tend to see everything as a potential board game!
And you know what? After over a decade of loving role-playing games, I think I've found my target to hit; I'm a very good dungeonmaster, and I love the idea of having my friends play through games that I've made up.
Here they are, in order of how complete they are!
The Hocus Conspiracy
You play supernatural investigators in 1920s Chicago, working your way through gangsters, vampires, and all sorts of denizens of the city's underground.
There was no gameboard, and for the most part, it was all up to the players to decide what they were going to do. All I had to do was come up with a few different plots that the bad guys were going to do. Sometimes working together, sometimes working alone, and all of them ended catastrophically if the bad guys were going to get their way.
And so the brave agents of Hocus, with their varied understanding of the occult and limited magical power, faced down these many many many terrible things happening to Chicago, forged strange and fun alliances, and saved the day.
I plan on starting this one up again someday. It was easy to run, and didn't take a bunch of work for me to do beforehand!
Completeness: Could use some tuning up, but I've played this for hours with friends. It suffers from a standard problem with my games: Me, Woody, the Dadmaster, needs to be there for it to work as well as it does. I turned it into a system that is fueled almost 100% with improvisation, characterization, and bluster. I am VERY good at all three of these things.
Umbra
In an attempt at a more magical, less violent world, I made a simple world: everyone has a unique magical ability that is embodied in a shadow spirit called an umbra. And if you kill someone, that spirit leaves their body and kills you! So lethal violence was a really bad idea.
It was an interesting world, because although it was your standard fantastical swords & sorcery setting, there wasn't widespread war or violence. You took up your non-lethal weapons to fight others and incapacitate them.
The players enjoyed the world, because they had to think outside the box, rather than the usual "I cleave the foul brigand in half with my sword!" Also, rolling was story-related. In a normal action, you rolled one die. 6 was yes-and, so not only do you succeed, but something else good happens. 5 was yes, you did it just fine. 4 was yes-but, so you succeed, but something unexpected happens. 1 was no-and, 2 was no, and 3 was no-but.
It put a good amount of pressure on me, because I had to come up with unexpected results to happen all the time, but I enjoy doing that! It's a skill of mine, and it results in a bit of fun-as-heck mayhem. And again, violence isn't as important in this game, so our heroes are usually unraveling a mystery or escaping some dungeon!
I made a cheesy little conspiracy system, where you learned about different strange occurrences, leading you and your companions to uncover ONE BIG CONSPIRACY. It was shaped like a hexagon with triangles inside of it, each line a thread you could pursue and follow.
Completeness: Check it out, I made this game in ONE NIGHT, because Hodey was in town and said he'd be down to play one game. So I made it quick to learn, easy to grasp, and memorable. I've played two hours-long sessions of Umbra, and everyone really enjoyed it! There are some things that I want to follow, such as the conspiracy system, and how you take damage. But it's a lot of fun for not a lot of effort! However, it still requires the Dadmaster. Give me one day, I'll have it complete again!
Rollerpunk
I decided I would take things in another direction here. I decided to make character creation short and sweet. It's a futuristic game, but I feel like the system could scale to anything.
The character sheet is a four-piece puzzle that you mix-and-match, and I really like the design of it. Your equipment is tied to your role and one specialized skill, your level of cyborg-ness is tied to your ability scores, and it all fits together to make a really fun character design.
Gameplay is simple, a bit like Umbra, where you roll one or two normal six-sided dice. I made it as an introductory game for newbies, and I playtested it for the first time with these first-timers. Probably not the best idea, and there was a lot of stuff still not-quite-nailed-down.
But it was FUN. And I loved making the character sheet. If there's nothing else I keep from Rollerpunk, I will keep that
Completeness: It needs loooooots of work... but, well, keep in mind, even for needing lots of work, I have played this with people and it passed muster, meaning that people were laughing at their antics and legitimately concerned for their characters' well-being at the end of it.
Dire Dire Dice
Now here's a fun one, and one that I've even tested several times! So I know it's FUN, it's just not entirely fleshed out. (Even Daniel has played it with me!)
There are dungeons that you need to clear out, and every time you return to town, the dungeons get harder. Each dungeon has a boss.
When you enter a dungeon, you see the boss, and you see three minions below him. You roll five normal dice and put them randomly in the spots for the boss. The minions each get one die, so the boss has two moves. Each of these does something different, sometimes it's an attack, or a block, or something special.
When you defeat a minion, it uncovers one of the boss's more powerful moves. So, as you fight through the dungeon (which is just one paper), the fight gets harder. I really like this game, because it's a bit simple and intuitive.
You play Yahtzee rules for your own dice, also five, and you place them in different spots. If the enemy is going to attack with a 4, you can block it with a 4 on your own shield. With a match, you can heal yourself. And you get better equipment as you go.
If you defeat two minions before running away, you get two gold pieces you can spend on your equipment. If you defeat two minions but then get roasted by the boss, your character doesn't die, but instead you manage to escape back to town, but don't gain any gold. And you
Completeness: In a way, this might be the most complete? Kind of? In this list, it's the only one that doesn't require the Dadmaster. It has a set list of rules, that I even wrote down! This almost means it's the most restrictive game. That is to say, you can't exactly go off the rails and decide to start raising horseshoe crabs on the moon. It's not quite as much a tabletop rpg as it is a board game. But it's listed here because I love it and I'm very proud of it.
Legend of Zelda: Forsaken Age
This one is barely more than half-baked dreams in Microsoft Word, and I only playtested it once, enough to assure me it's far from ready.
But! I'm really excited for it.
First off, I love the world, because it's a sequel of Ocarina of Time, one of the most popular videogames of all time! It's especially popular with me! Because I'm a bit of a nerd! Woo! Second, I think it'll be fun to have different characters coming together to play through dungeons, unlike the normal game, which is single-player.
I can simplify a lot of the game by making it streamlined in the ways I want. In normal open-world rpgs, you can tell me "Okay, I rob the store and leave the owner tied up in the roof." In this one, I can tell you "No. You're heroes." Or, I could just let them ruin the world and roll with it!
Completeness: I was able to playtest one room, so that's at least a little bit of it! However, it showed me that the main mechanics of it need to be changed, because the heroes were able to easily dance around the bad guys.
Charon
Charon is a dream that keeps on giving. Meaning that everytime I think about it, I imagine up an entirely new facet of it, and so it becomes less and less reachable.
Let me explain what I can. Keep in mind, it's the least complete of these, although I've thought a lot about it.
You start out as one character, living in a desolate land, and your only shelter is Charon Tower.
Your goal is to expand the settlement you have, attracting anyone else who is wandering the wastes, and explore to discover what has happened around you. But the more you expand, the more threats are coming to find you.
That's as much as I can describe, because a big part of the game is that you aren't certain what the world is like when you start. You're building houses and cultivating farms, doing the sorts of things that aren't exactly exclusive to any scenario. Is this a fantasy world with magic? Is it a new planet? Is it a post-apocalyptic Earth? The scenarios change every time you play, and so do the end goals.
I have an idea where you can do special quests to turn the nameless people you come across into actual characters, with personalities, and you can give them classes and shifts and equipment and all sorts of different things to make them better-suited to playing the game.
In Charon, the entire world is against you, but no matter what, you can't LOSE. You can just get beaten back so hard that you and your little group of heroes have to huddle back in Charon, almost back to the beginning. But the threat of attack or disaster is only as big as your settlement, so if your thriving city is destroyed by alien zombies, the worst that can happen is that you have to start again, but with more heroes on your side, so it could take longer.
But, because the very idea of it is so certainly vague, Charon has, over the years, been a factory for making other games. The entire game of Dire Dire Dice came from me trying to create Charon and falling short.
Completeness: Hahahahaha, not very complete at all! The dreaming is there. I've printed out papers and drawn up ideas, and they haven't amounted to much, but it was Charon that got me to print out a hexagrid and glue it to the back of a board game, and I've used that board as a jumping-off point for a bunch of stuff! It's not at all complete, but it's right where it needs to be.
So, there you have it! I'm glad to have it all written down. It feels good to see the progress that I've actually made.
