So, we talked a little about roleplaying games as games last time and looked in detail one specific game we could steal ideas from. Today, we are going to expand our horizons by dusting off the game shelf.
There’s a whole host of ideas buried in the structure of various games that can be adapted. I’m not talking thematic adaptations here – as much as I’d like to talk about how to make a Scythe or Frostgrave RPG, this about mechanical structures.
My aim is to give you specific tools to use in play harvested from modes of play within the games, although I will briefly mention some games and give you a recommendation for the use of Monopoly near the end. Let’s roll the dice and see what we come up with!
Procedurally Generate Mazes: In several games, perhaps most famously in Betrayal At House On The Hill and many other games, the board is generated as the players move through it rather than by any kind of plan. No one has any idea which order the tiles are placed.
For a change in a roleplaying game that uses minis, maybe when the players are entering a labyrinth or maze, instead of laying it out, take a deck of playing cards and create a quick table where each card equates to a part of the maze – like the 4 of spades is a corridor, the 6 of hearts is the troll room – with the aces and jokers being the six most important rooms in the maze (Big Bad, Reward Room, Important NPC, Clue the larger Plot).
Then separate the aces and jokers, shuffle the deck, then shuffle the aces and jokers into the bottom half of the cards. Lay out the rooms and corridors as the players advance through the maze. The players knowing you have little control over the environment will add a sense of unknown to the proceedings and make it feel less like exploring something you already laid out and more like venturing into unknown territory. You can also cut the amount of cards – don’t feel like every dungeon has to have 54 locations!
Worker Placement Battles: Worker placement games like Agricola are largely about putting ‘minion’ type counter in a place to harvest a resource that does something else. But for a minute imagine a large scale battle, maybe a castle siege or dimensional super invasion or clearing of the sewers or ghoul-men by a tactical team.
These things can be turned into a mini-game of resource management if you are clever.
Draw a map, filling it with rising threats, give the players counters to represent minions and important NPCs that can prevent the threats but make it impossible for them to do everything at once.
React to the resources spent by destroying locations, or killing minions and NPCs. Slowly chart a battle taking place.
Stop occasionally and zoom in on the actions of PCs using the normal game rules, then pick up where you left off once the question of what is happening to the ‘main characters’ has been resolved.
Two notes here: have a system for recording what is happening, because it might take several sessions and be prepared to enact consequences you didn’t see coming.
Intimation Game Curse: There are several great games where you have to work out what is being told to you by a series of words or with no words at all – Mysterium, Dixit, Codewords, etc. This could be a really cool idea for a one-off adventure where you are only allowed to say a couple of words each, maybe as a result of a spell, curse, computer virus or infection. This can create some odd moments and break players out of a groove they have gotten into regarding their characters’ interactions with others. There is even an RPG that sort of already does this – Og, which is a game based around cavemen helping each other with limited communication skills. The one time I played it, it was a fun change of pace.
Semi-Simultaneous Movement For Frenzied Combat: Games like X-Wing are about thinking ahead and have mechanics that mean you separate the planning of a move from the execution of all moves.
Implementing this in an RPG would lead to really interesting, messy combats that feature all kinds of unpredictability.
There are ways to do this without interrupting the flow of the game too. Have everyone write what they are going to do down before each round in secret and then count down the initiative order (or equivalent) as usual.
This can lead to a sort of mad frenzy of play where some players try to both do the same thing, or misread what an enemy is going to do, but are unable to change what they are doing in time (kind of like a real combat).
Once the countdown section has begun people cannot change their mind about what they do but obviously their rolls still affect the game in play and having a high ‘initiative roll’ can still be planned for.
Finishing My Sentence And World Building: While I tend to be one of those people isn’t the biggest fan of Cards Against Humanity (I’ve seen it do real world unintended damage to players who thought they could handle it) the structure of ‘begin a sentence/end a sentence unexpectedly’ is a really fun idea and can be channelled into an RPG at any point by simply asking players to add bits to the world.
Try it next time the players walk into an inhabited area they’ve never been to before – ask ‘What building is the focal point here?’, ‘What odd tradition is commonplace?’ or ‘What type of people here are the underclass?’ and watch as players add play details you’d never thought of. You can even create tables to roll on yourself so you aren’t asking players the same questions over again, it could be filled with things like:-
1. “The House At The Edge Of Town Was Destroyed Because….”
and
2. “Last night a stranger rolled into town, they were….”
So, we talked a little about roleplaying games as games last time and looked in detail one specific game we could steal ideas from. Today, we are going to expand our horizons by dusting off the game shelf.
There’s a whole host of ideas buried in the structure of various games that can be adapted. I’m not talking thematic adaptations here – as much as I’d like to talk about how to make a Scythe or Frostgrave RPG, this about mechanical structures.
My aim is to give you specific tools to use in play harvested from modes of play within the games, although I will briefly mention some games and give you a recommendation for the use of Monopoly near the end. Let’s roll the dice and see what we come up with!
Creative Commons credit: Isometric World by Roman Berger, Alpha Wallpaper by Sir Realest and Dhel by Cam.
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