Falling Into Places

Mike had a really brilliant idea that he never got around to telling me about until last night. He was thinking of trying to make a Neko Machi RPG as a birthday present for me, but he didn’t get far before I posted about Raspberry Heaven. So the idea, which I think is exactly what RH needed all along, is to play cards for each of the 4 panels (kishoutenketsu again). I still need to figure out where to go from there with the idea, of course. I want to make a sheet with spaces for the cards and explanations of what goes where. It could be a deck of playing cards where highest card played gets narration rights (possibly with a requirement of a given suit for each stage of kishoutenketsu), or playing cards with some significance to what is played, or maybe (borrowing from the Bullwinkle RPG oddly enough) a deck of custom cards with plot elements. As Moonsick is already going to involve a deck of 90 or so custom cards, I’m not too hot on doing that with yet another game, but we’ll see. Regardless, quirks will definitely fit into how the cards are played in some way.

I’m not really into card games (or board games for that matter), but cards are really neat. :3

Also, Mike is working on his own music-fueled RPG, which we playtested last night. There’s an initial post about the idea here on Story Games, and more recent stuff here. IMHO he’s got a solid start on a game — a musical, rules-light Shin Megami Tensei/Persona kind of thing — that’ll be awesome after some more tweaking and whatnot. It’s tentatively titled “PodCasters”, which very unexpectedly is growing on me, despite how terrible it is.

Yet Another Game: Dandelion Complex

I think I’ve mentioned before that I was thinking about designing a game somewhat similar to Raspberry Heaven, but specifically based on maximum random zaniness. (So its main inspirations would be Pani Poni Dash and Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei instead). For whatever reason I wound up starting working on it, and it’s tentatively called “Dandelion Complex” (or “Tampopo Complex” in the imaginary Japanese version). It’s still very referential Engrish, but much more subtly so this time. So far the game is looking like a mashup of Maid RPG, Teenagers From Outer Space, and just a tiny bit of Best Friends. If I ever get both games to where I’m fully satisfied with them, I’ll probably put them in one book, though I have no idea what I’d call that book.

Anyway, in Dandelion Complex each player has up to three schoolgirl characters, and the GM is the Teacher. Players have tokens to spend on various things, including random events. The game is divided into “lessons,” in which the Topic, Setting, and Cast (which schoolgirls, if there are multiple per player) are determined by a mixture of the Teacher picking, players spending tokens, and random rolls. Both random events and the teacher deciding it should be so can require schoolgirls to do “Tests,” comparing attribute levels (1-4) to difficulty numbers, and they can spend tokens to make up the difference if need be, but doing too well on something brings out the Unintended Consequences tables.

I’ve been poking at Raspberry Heaven itself too. The main thing I’ve decided is to make it so that characters accumulate “Likes” rather than simply increasing bond levels, and (1) the total number of Likes is what determines how effective you are at helping, and (2) you can help even better if you have a Like related to the task at hand.

But mostly, I need to get through finals week before I worry too much about that kind of stuff.