My journey continues... onward to creating a TTRPG!
Simplicity is not a simple thing
This is part 2 of a 3-part series on developing a 1-page TTRPG.
Welcome back readers to Part 2 of my (con)quest to create a one-page RPG.
In Part 1, I described my goals for creating a game where you play as a travel photographer exploring a foreign land. The next step was to create the play mechanics that allowed our dear photographer to take photos while travelling.
Actually, I approached this backwards. Since I already had clear destinations in my head, I began writing them and their event encounters to match the number of dice rolls.
Dice versus coins, or to flip or not to flip?
Wanting to keep the game simple, I decided that the player only needed two common objects: A six-sided die and something to write with. If they didn’t have access to a die or d6 app, they could flip a round-shaped currency with two faces. A coin, that is!
So, at minimum, I would have to come up with 6 locations and 6 events to match the dice rolls. Easy enough. Using a coin? Not so much. A single coinflip offers 2 permutations. Two coin-flips - 4. Flipping it 3 times leads to 8 possibilities, and so on.
Try as I might to write a matching number of events for both the die and coinflips, I soon learned that I struggled to match the uneven coin permutations with the dice rolls. In other words, to match a single dice roll with 6 possibilities, the player had to choose to flip the coin once, for two possibilities, and then twice for the other 4.
For two dice rolls at 6x6 = 36 possibilities, the player would have to flip four coins twice each (16 x 2). Noting down heads-tails for each pair would be tedious as well.
Travel is supposed to be interesting! And this was more confusing than necessary.
So, after several hours of trying to match up currency tossing with dice rolling, I tossed aside my lucky coin for the tried-and-true die.
Location, location, location.
I wanted a mix of realistic “every city” places and a few epic ones to keep things interesting. I then wrote 10 locations, which I pared down to 6.
As you can see, 2 of the 6 locations were written to be grand and epic - thus a remote castle and mountains fit the bill.
Other locations I removed were:
A lush nature reserve home to thousands of flora and fauna
A recently completed shopping mall with a rooftop view of the city skyline
Distributing player resources
My original idea was to keep the game simple where the player starts with a fixed number of action points. The game ends once they run out. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong.
While creating locations, I found it challenging to split these action points to add varying “difficulty” levels to make each location unique.
For example, the remote castle was assigned with 4 AP, and the common downtown location, 1 AP. If I made all locations the same AP, a player could easily complete all of them. On the other hand, giving the player a fixed AP would mean I had to balance the locations perfectly such that the player could have a diverse, but fixed number of choices before they ran out of AP.
I tried adjusting both the player’s and locations’ AP several times, including swapping out the locations’ AP for transport options:
Walk = 1 AP
Public Transit = 2 AP
Drive = 3 AP
By making the player choose how much AP to spend to get there, it removed the fixed AP it took for the location itself. This helped to balance the game. However, after further tries, I discovered that I would have to be precise in giving a fixed AP pool to prevent a player from walking to all 6 destinations and still have AP left over. They couldn’t “end” the game.
Thus, after some more experimenting, I added a time block to each location. This time block did double duty: To help the player finish the game, and to choose a location that interests them. I then added a day/night cycle of 6 hours each, which affected the number of time-blocked locations a player could go to per cycle.
I decided to also randomize the transit choices so the player’s AP usage would vary with every new game. Finally, I re-introduced an old idea for action points. I decided to merge both the time limit and action points into an if/else end state, where the game ends when the player reaches the 12th hour, or runs out of action points. To make it more realistic, I renamed action points to stamina points (SP).
Writing the events
At last came the events for the journaling, roleplay aspect of the game.
I didn’t have a shortage of personal experiences and friends’ travel stories, so I expected the process to be smooth sailing.
Since one of my main goals was to engage players to write their own journey,
I wanted a mix of commonly encountered tourist events and events that stalled the player’s progress. This was to keep the gameplay interesting by adding friction, especially if they chose to play with someone else.
After writing roughly 10 common encounters, I added more unique encounters that would inspire the player to come up with imaginative descriptions. Coming up with these was more difficult than I liked. It was here that I encountered another obstacle in matching dice rolls.
Since my original idea required 36 possible dice-rolls, that meant coming up with 36 event encounters. With only 6 locations, I did not want to bore player(s) with repetitive events. Furthermore, I had written 6 extra events for the epic (zone 2) locations.
By this point, the game mechanic was:
Choose one of the six locations
Roll to confirm the transport that takes you to your preferred location
Deduct the SP that the transport requires
If this is your first location, roll once from 1-6 to initiate the event encounter
For all subsequent locations, roll 2d6 to initiate the event encounter
Describe what happens during the event
After the event, you can choose to take a picture. Describe what you take a photo of
An optional added difficulty for two players adds dice rolls for photo “quality” tied to a high score system
I ended up not counting for a roll of 1 for all subsequent rolls. Since all subsequent rolls relied on 2 dice rolls, that means that the player would never be able to get 1. So I inserted an addendum for the player to initiate the 1 encounter if they rolled a 1.
With that sorted, I decided to keep only 12 events and 6 more for the Zone 2 locations to keep the game concise. The common Zone 1 locations would have 1 photo chance per turn, and the Zone 2 locations had 2 photo chances.
If a player landed on the same event on a Zone 1 location, they were given a free re-roll on their next turn to trigger a different encounter without having to leave the location. Both Zone 1 and Zone 2 locations triggered two photo opportunities, but Zone 1 cost another turn. This would keep the game engaging to make up for the lack of events.
To sum up…
Figuring out the play mechanics and game setup became a fun, yet challenging experience for a newbie like me. Would I have fared better if I decided to push through and write 36 events for 2d6 gameplay, instead of patching it with modifiers and time blocks? Possibly, but it didn’t seem to suit the game’s context.
And that’s all for now. In the next part, I’ll venture into the final bits and bobs: Lore and Playtesting!