So this last week I participated in the Gaming Blogosphere Blackout we like to call Game Chef. If, in the unlikely chance that you weren’t aware of them, you can find the details of the challenge at the website. I came out of the fray with two game titles and one half-baked half-implemented almost-game.

Our Steel, King’s Law

My “alpha entry,” the one that I will stand up and claim as my own in public, is a game in which the players all take on the roles of musketeer-ish Watchmen of the King, arresting criminals in the Night Lords syndicate. It is a pretty straightforward interpretation of Steel+Team+Law. The meat of the game is a big old fencing system where players have a finite number of tactical options and your fellow players try to anticipate what you are going to do. The number of your teammates who are able to correctly anticipate your move becomes the target number for the GM to roll over. I’m curious to play this one, if only to see how the resolution system works out in practice.

Reflection

My “beta entry,” which did not make it to completion, was a weightier undertaking that did not fit as easily into the ingredient list. The premise was that you played one side of a factionalized and emotional situation in one session, waited two weeks, and then played the other side. To give you an idea of how high my target was, I wanted to be able to play Israelis and Palestinians. Yeah, bit off a little more than I could chew, there. However, this is an idea that I might try to develop outside of Game Chef, as fitting it into the time constraints and ingredient restrictions was putting some awkward strains on the design. Chief among them was that, with only two sessions, it was categorically impossible to really come to any resolution of the situation — all the players could do was explore it and their characters’ reactions to it, ending with a stalemate where the players were more informed of how terrible and unresolvable their situation was. (This may mean that I hit my target of Israelis and Palestinians, after all.)

The Ancient and Venerable Art of Tippling

My “gamma entry” was directly inspired by Graham Walmsley’s entry Euthymia in which he uses the level of beverages in the players’ glasses as the resolution mechanic. I made a little joke about it being a drinking game, and shortly thereafter the new genre of the Roledrinking Game took form in my head. It was a sad day for gamers everywhere. In this game, you play generic fantasy dwarves knocking back a few at the local pub and boasting about their exploits. Everyone is trying to one-up each other, and the resolution mechanic is a drinking game — if somebody doesn’t buy your story, they take a drink; if you want to counter their protest, you take a drink; if they want to push their protest, they take another drink, and so on. It has mechanics named “I’ll Drink To That!”, “Go Bottoms Up,” and “Drown Your Sorrow.” The best part of all, however, was that I was actually able to reduce the rules to an 8″ x 3″ rectangle, which means I can print them on ceramic steins from cafepress. How’s that for a Con product?

After I posted Tippling, another Game Chef was inspired to write The Incredible Ninja Drinking Game, so there are at least two examples of the species thus far. Judson has suggested that we run a Roledrinking Game contest much like Game Chef later in the year, with the six winning games being printed on a matched set of six steins. A disturbing suggestion; watch here for upcoming details.

Results of the Experiment

I actually wrote 90% of Our Steel the Saturday after the ingredients were released, so I can understand the 24 Hour RPG contest, now. I didn’t really even mean to; I just sat down on Saturday morning and then it was 1am. By contrast, I struggled with Reflection all week and it never took shape out of the clay I was working with. (Tippling was written pretty much on the drive back to work from Taco Bell.)

I am pretty satisfied with Our Steel, and can see a fat load of emergent qualities embedded into the game that should make it pretty fun. There is only one real emergent quality in Tippling, and that’s to get the players shit-faced as quickly as possible.

Our Steel is also, I expect, a challenging game, and while it seems strange, I would actually put a disclaimer at the front of an eventual print product version saying something to the effect of, “This is a difficult roleplaying game. If you win, you will have worked hard for it.” It isn’t difficult like Dogs or Under the Bed is difficult, challenging you to take not-quite-comfortable looks at sometimes emotional issues; it’s difficult like… the only parallel I can think of is that it’s difficult like climbing a mountain in a team of mountain-climbers is difficult. That is, it is technically difficult, requires cooperation in order to succeed, and that success is pretty obvious when acheived. That said, I expect the game is fun whether or not your team actually rips victory from the jaws of defeat.

I did not know what to expect from Game Chef going into it; it seemed like fun and I entered with a pretty open ended “see what happens” attitude. I’m pretty impressed with what came out of it, both in terms of how it led me to stretch, and also in the other designs that I had the pleasure of reading about on the forums. Now the judging of the entries begins, which is peer-reviewed for the first time this year. With two entries, I think that means I’ll be reviewing eight other entries in two weeks, so I’ll have my plate full. I’m looking forward to it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 12:47 pm and is filed under My Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.