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Tabletop role-playing

Sheet really is Happening

Right, I’ve got permission from the Reversed Engineer guy to use his idea about a contest to design a (very small) RPG based on a character sheet designed by someone else.

(Here‘s my original post about it.)

At the moment there’s been interest from lathany, bateleur, seondhand_rick, smiorgan and ar_gemlad‘s friend Tony P. And me of course. Any more for any more? If you’d like to give it a go, just drop me a comment below / a mail, or leap straight to sending in the character sheet. (And please do feel free to pass it on to anyone else who you think might be interested.)

The challenge- Design a character sheet. NOT A GAME. Just a character sheet. You have until 8th October 2006 to send it in. Everyone may submit a design, but they may only submit one. Submit it in any sensible format that isn’t going to require the opener having various obscure fonts installed.

After 8th October the sheets will be distributed to the designers (randomly and anonymously, but you won’t get your own one back). Using only the character sheet as a guide, the designers will have until 29th October 2006 to design a game that uses that character sheet.

Note that the game should be very short — no more than two sides. And obviously it doesn’t have to be tested, complete, detailed, or anything like that — the idea is just to come up with a cool and interesting-looking game skeleton. It should be a reasonably conventional RPG, ie. you sit round a table to play it, using a pencil and paper.

Note also that unlike the original version of the challenge, I’m not going to tell game designers whose character sheet they’ve got.

Any questions for public consumption, comment here; any secret questions, mail me — otherwise, get started!

13 replies on “Sheet really is Happening”

Yes, I think that week is “design a new kitchen” week. While I guess I could submit a character sheet based on that, somehow I think “Kitchen: The Cooking” will never quite catch on as a multiplayer game. (Especially not if one of the players is …)

Sounds like an excellent idea, and I am tempted, but the last time I tried to make an RPG system I got obsessive and spent months playing with probabilities, and besides have been out of the field for so long that am unfamiliar with the current systems, so better say not.

What I find interesting about current systems (such as My Life with Master) is that they are rules-light and imagination-heavy, tending toward mutual-storytelling-aids. So the contest is more about “find a good hook around which interesting interactive dramas can be set” than “desgn a system”.

I’m afraid I should probably drop out.

I liked the idea so much I’ve organised a small group of people to do something similar, only with the second stage being running a one-off based on the character sheets rather than designing a game… though some game design is implicit in running the one-off I suppose.

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