Categories
Tabletop role-playing

Sheet has started to Happen!

Part 1 has, anyway — the submission of the sheets, and their allocation to designers.

See here for a page I’ve set up relating to it.

Sheet Happens

This is a creative game-design contest / exercise which I got from Kevin Allen Jr — his version is called Reversed Engineer.

How it started

I announced the challenge on 20th September 2006. The idea is that participants design a character sheet for a game that does not yet exist. Just the sheet — no rules, system, anything else. These sheets are then submitted and redistributed randomly among the participants, such that each gets allocated someone else’s sheet. They then have to come up with a game idea which will fit that sheet.

The sheets

We had 6 character sheet entries in by the deadline of 8th October 2006, and here they are:

The allocation

Having rolled the dice, and had someone check that it hadn’t assigned anyone their own one, this is how the allocation came out:

  1. TonyP
  2. UndyingKing
  3. Lathany
  4. Bateleur
  5. Smiorgan
  6. GBSteve

(NB I can change these to your real names if you prefer / aren’t too embarrassed.)

The next step: design the game

So, the next step is this: download your allocated sheet, by clicking the appropriate link above, and by the next deadline of 29th October 2006, design a game that will fit to it.

Some important things to say about the potentially rather daunting task of designing a game in this way.

  • It should be a pure round-the-table roleplaying game, requiring accessories no more complex than pencil, paper and dice.
  • We’re not looking for a complete system including terrain-specific wandering monster tables, etc. Just a couple of sides of notes which cover, at minimum:
    • the game’s name, if the character sheet designer didn’t provide one
    • what the basic setting and theme of the game is
    • what the characters are
    • what they’re trying to do
    • any important and/or novel system mechanisms
  • For each element on the character sheet, the rules should make it apparent how it relates to playing the game, but not necessarily in detail.
  • The overall idea is not that a novice can pick up your rules and right away run a session of the game, but that an experienced GM will be able to say “aha, OK, I see what that’s about and roughly how it would work in real life”.
  • The other important thing to say is that you’re not attempting to recreate what was in the mind of the character sheet designer when they produced it. So don’t feel bound by thoughts of “this new idea of mine probably isn’t what X had in mind for that particular stat”. For one thing, their idea might not have been as good as yours: or they might not have actually had a firm idea, but just bunged the box down because it looked nice. Better to treat the sheet as an alien artifact dropped from space, not necessarily the product of an intelligent mind!

No doubt more points for discussion will come up — comment below if so!

8 replies on “Sheet has started to Happen!”

Heh, partly that remains to be seen I guess — if the designers are all freaked ot to the point of insanity by what they have to work with, that’ll be a bit of a shame — but I’m very pleased with what we’ve seen so far.

When you say “accessories no more complex than pencil, paper and dice” are you leaving the door open for other resolution mechanisms such as standard cards, poker chips, bibliomancy but perhaps not Jenga or roulette?

Yes. When I wrote that I was meaning to exclude things like simulating fights with LARP weapons, requiring a special deck of cards, dressing up as giant robots… but your examples are good too. Requirements should not need unique construction / fabrication, and nor should they be uncommon or expensive. Nor should they place physical demands on the players (other than that of staying awake).

Leave a Reply to bateleur Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.