200 word RPG contest

My entry for the 200 word RPG contest went up sometime today.

I was surprised how good many of them are—it’s like having an open box of oreos (just one more!).

Some are… not as clever as they might think (one sets players in the role of RPG writers for a 200 word RPG contest).

Some are more like rudimentary board games played with pen and paper.

There’s a lot of ultra light storygames, where you have a lo-res mechanic for trading narrative tokens, based around a loose theme. The mechanics are there to tell you who gets the talking stick.

So after reading a few I sat down to write with a couple ideas in mind.
-I’d include useful setting material (not just “you’re on a spaceship”)
-the mechanic would use playing cards (a die roll is a random number generator—a hand of cards offers some strategy).
-some meaningful character differentiation

I was turning ideas over in my head, when the dog thing came to mind (it’s a game where the PC’s are a pack of feral dogs, in what’s implied to be some kind of war zone).

It’s something a little different from the usual genre stuff, but also accessible to pretty much anybody. You know what dogs are like. You can imagine what they can do about as well as you can imagine what a normal person can do—so you can draw on all that to decide what the players can do, what they need to make a check for, and what’s just impossible. Each dog has a niche, so that everybody can do something different.

The basic mechanic is play cards to do stuff >>> get food to draw cards. Manage resources wisely or game over.

Since playing cards were already in the game, I wanted to use them to rough out some kind of environment. Nobody’s investing prep time for a 200 word RPG.

Using them to depict a city grid was obvious, and the combination of suits, face cards, and numbers gives plenty of material for procedural generation.

I started out thinking about cute dogs having adventures around their neighborhood, befriending humans, having little scraps with other dogs, and so on.

like this

Then things took a wrong turn somewhere. So there’s also mechanical support for eating human flesh. Oh well.

Fuck!