Games where nobody wins
Here’s a fun thing I didn’t realise when I decided to send these on the second Friday of the month: December’s edition felt too early for an end-of-year round-up, and this one feels too late. I’m free! You’re free! No recapping of the past! Only looking to the future! (Like … with jetpacks?)
Coming right up
Merely Roleplayers starts the year drunk
Project Bigbird
Roleplaying game wishlist
Badges to show camaraderie
Uh oh, it’s Dr Magnethands
The Merely Roleplayers podcast is kicking off the new year with a bold experiment. To put it another way, we’re kicking off this year by doing something no-one in their right mind would do.
Dr Magnethands is a roleplaying party game by Grant Howitt. It specifies in the rules that it should only be played by people who are drunk. A load of us got drunk and played Dr Magnethands; that’s not the inadvisable part (though, always drink in moderation, friends), the inadvisable part is that we recorded ourselves playing it while drunk and are making the result available to the general public. This is either going to make us incredibly relatable or utterly destroy whatever credibility we have as artists and performers. Make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast to find out which.
In other Merely Roleplayers news, I’m just in the process of registering self-employed so I can properly account for the no-doubt substantial income I’ll get from starting selling roleplaying game materials. Once that process is done, and once I’ve recovered from finding out the post-Brexit tax and tariff situation with selling PDFs internationally from our newly buccaneering (bleurgh) island, I’ll make The Sherrydown Enquirer available from my Itch.io shop. If you follow me there, you should get a notification when the Enquirer goes live.
Project Bigbird
Project Bigbird is my working title for my first original roleplaying game, which I’ve been working on in the background for a while now. It’s a talent tournament RPG; it started life with the Merely Roleplayers production Upstaged!, where we played a theatre company who entered a national televised theatre competition to win money to save their local theatre (and kids’ arts club).
I want to expand the system I cobbled together for that recording session into a system that can handle any kind of talent tournament story, so you could use it to play a band entering a battle of the bands (like Pitch Perfect or School of Rock), figure skaters trying to qualify for the Olympics (like Yuri On Ice), or a dance crew using their talents to save their community from development (like the Step Up movies).
The winner-takes-all knockout tournament gives these stories their structure, but they’re never actually about winning the contest. They’re about growing closer to your bandmates or supportive friends and learning what’s really important to you.
If that sounds a bit trite, I think it’s because we’re conditioned not to value that kind of story. We’re taught that “it’s not winning that matters, it’s taking part” is a consolation for people who don’t have what it takes to win. We’re taught that stories that value friendship, community, and understanding over competition and defeating others are feminine and frivolous (thanks, the patriarchy). Roleplaying games are games that don’t have a winner, but the stories we tell with them are still very often about winning or beating others. We’re fed stories that teach us these things because capitalism needs us all to believe we’re in constant cutthroat competition with each other at all times. But based on my experience of the world, I can’t say I’m convinced that competition is the way to create better lives for us all.
Plus, I like the idea of an RPG about entering a competition, which takes the view that competition is actually less valuable than cooperation and community.
I’m trying to do that in Project Bigbird with the Motivation system. Each main character begins with a different motivation for taking part in the tournament - such as Victory, Company or Artistry. Each motivation makes certain kinds of actions more likely to succeed - someone primarily motivated by Artistry is better at devising a truly original performance, for example, while someone motivated by Company might be better at convincing rival groups to let bygones be bygones and work together. But everyone’s actions are even more likely to succeed if they’re backed up by other main characters whose motivation matches theirs.
In Upstaged!, I tried to make this idea work as a Powered by the Apocalypse game, since that’s what we were all familiar with. So players got to add +1 to their roll for each other main character in the scene who shared their motivation. But just adding +1s didn’t feel quite satisfying enough to me, and if you go replay Upstaged!, you might notice hardly any of the players tried to change the others’ motivation, which made me think it didn’t feel satisfying enough to them either.
So I started looking at Forged in the Dark games, where improving your chances of success looks like adding dice, instead of adding numbers to the roll. I like the feel of rolling a dice pool where every die represents a friend who shares your outlook and has your back.
I want the game to encourage stories that start with tense, fractured groups of individuals each trying to do things their own way, and arc towards groups of friends pulling together, united by a shared outlook forged by their experiences together.
My aim for the next few months is to get a minimum viable version of the game down on paper so I can start playtesting this year. If you’re interested, stay subscribed for updates, and keep an eye on my twitter - I’ll tag anything to do with this game with #ProjectBigbird.
RPG wishlist 2021
These are not New Year’s Resolutions. They’re just games I’m making it my business to run or play this year.
Heart: The City Beneath (Rowan, Rook and Decard). It’s about adventurers descending into a subterranean realm where reality is more broken the deeper you go, getting more broken themselves as they go. The lore is my kind of weird, and I love how the Resistance system makes things like combat and dungeon delving, which can be very slow and mechanically detailed in other games, fluid and improvisational. I’ve run the quickstart, but now I have the full rules, and the book won’t stop whispering until I run a campaign…
galactic (riley rethal). A Star Wars-ish game designed, as far as I can tell, from the perspective of wanting to tell the stories Star Wars has the potential to tell, rather than the ones it tends to end up telling. I bought it on sight, nearly a year ago, and haven’t run it yet. I’ve got my eye on this as a possible Merely Roleplayers Studio production.
Good Society (Storybrewers). Another strong candidate for a future Merely Roleplayers Studio production, Good Society is for telling Austen-esque stories complete with epistolary sections. I’ve had my eye on it for a while, and picked it up in December while it was on sale.
Kids On Bikes (Renegade Game Studios). Of all the games I’m running or playing in, my ongoing Kids On Bikes game is the one that’s been the most disrupted by lockdowns. I want to get it back up and running on a regular basis this year.
Badges of camaraderie
In the spirit of community over competition, this issue’s badges are for other actual play RPG shows that, from one perspective, Merely Roleplayers is in competition with. But that’s not a fun mindset to live in. A rising tide lifts all boats, it’s kind to send the ladder back down after yourself, there’s enough attention out there for everyone, etc.
Left: Flintlocks & Fireballs, a piratical adventure podcast - the Napoleonic Wars but with spells, using Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Their live show headlined PodUK 2020 (which we were gearing up to attend around this time last year) to amazing fan turnout. They seem like good people who attract a good community. Very long episodes, so jump aboard if that works for you.
Right: Questing Time, formerly a monthly live show at the Phoenix off Oxford Street, now a Twitch show. It’s D&D played by comedians, which means the host, Paul Foxcroft, usually ends up having to chuck out roughly two thirds of his notes for each session as the characters chase wild tangents. Wizards of the Coast should really be talking to Paul about his custom character sheets, designed to be easily readable and referenceable by players who will not learn the rules of the game.
Until next time, remember the divisions between you and your ‘competitors’ are as imaginary as any border.
Matt x