Encouraging players to tell their own story...
With the least amount of words
This is the final part of a 3-part series on developing a 1-page TTRPG.
Welcome, once more, to part 3 of my (con)quest to create a one-page RPG.
In Part 2, I finagled with the ins-and-outs of play mechanics of taking photos and journaling with the power of dice rolls.
After a challenging learning curve, I end my journey by testing it, tweaking it again, and finally taking up my Apple pen to remind myself how to draw all over again.
You're a travel photographer invited by a small country to promote their diverse sights with your photos. With only one day left and no luck so far, you're banking on your remaining 12 hours to sightsee and take amazing photos that will be front and centre on their official website.
As discussed in Part 1, the goals of the game remain:
Add room for player actions: Taking a photo, visiting places and encountering events
Add a clear start and end state: A timed deadline in the form of hours and action points
And most importantly, encourage player imagination.
With the first 2 checked, what’s left was a way to encourage player(s) to tell their own photo-stories.
Lore
With the introduction and events complete, I decided to playtest a Google Docs mockup with a close friend. This way, I would find out if my storytelling and scenarios made sense! After pitching the game and its goals, we spent the next hour roleplaying two renowned photographers competing with each other.
Thankfully, both the events and score-based system turned out easy to figure out.
My friend and I soon got so involved with describing scenes and photography styles that the hour flew by pretty quickly. At the end, my friend didn’t keep track of his score (he won!) and just enjoyed his time playing.
To me, that was the biggest compliment for moderating and creating my first tabletop!
That said, the main points of friction were:
The day/night cycles
When to roll
How low rolls affect scoring
The Day/Night Cycles
With only a handful of locations and hours to choose from, adding a day/night cycle on-top of the 12-hour pool made it more complicated than necessary. This 6 hour cycle “soft-locked” the game where both of us could not progress from more than 2-3 locations, or could not choose another Zone 2 location after travelling to one before.
Since a Zone 2 location was 4 hours, the remainder 2 would have to be used on a Zone 1 location. While that was my original intention, it took away the opportunity for more varied discussion and journaling. I learned quickly to remove it and enjoy giving players the choice to travel freely between all 6 locations.
When to roll
On paper, the 3 rolls to start and end a session seemed simple enough. Choose a location, then roll for your transport. Roll again for an event. Roll a final time to take an award-winning photo. Partly because I wasn’t good at explaining, my friend got confused if he had to roll to choose a location, and roll again to choose a transport mode.
The next blocker came in forgetting to roll after responding, often at length, to an event. You could say the engaging events made players forget to take a photo! During this time, I regularly asked my friend if he wanted to take a photo or move on to another location in the next round.
How low rolls affect scoring
Since we were being vaguely competitive, we included the photo “quality” high-score mechanic into our gameplay. A roll of 3 or less produced an “Average” photo, while a roll of 4-6 produced a Ministry of Tourism “Approved” photo.
Each Approved photo scored 2 points. A player was allowed to re-roll again on an average photo and take the better score of two, but they would minus 1 point and spend 30 minutes for every retaken photo.
Either way, it didn’t matter much to me as I ended up on a losing streak; consistently rolling less than 3 while my friend scored Approved rolls on every turn.
During these sessions, having to spend 30 minutes and lose 1 point per re-roll required resource and score management, disrupting a fun gameflow to keep score.
Learning from this, I decided to streamline the scoring system and keep points in the positive integers: 2 points for an Approved photo, and 1 point for an Average photo. It still cost 30 minutes to retake.
To ease the cost of retakes, I reworked the retake opportunities. Zone 1 allowed the player to stay for 2 sessions, and the second session would cost half of the original time spent.
Whereas, Zone 2 locations were locked to one session, but had 2 photo opportunities.
Art
(or how I don’t draw but did it anyway)
Ever since I started on this RPG, I always wanted to add a sketchy “map” to emphasize its spontaneous aspect. While I graduated secondary school (high school for North American readers) in fine art, I was never that good or committed after. As you can tell, writing took precedence over drawing and painting.
I decided to give it my all or go broke. This was going to be the first time I put my (Apple) pen to Ipad to draw and colour the 6 scenic locations.
The game took me a week to finish, but the art alone took me two weeks on and off. Using reference photos, I outlined the general shapes and perspectives, then filled in little details from personal experience to keep the sketchy style. By using the same brushes, I could still experiment with colours without detracting too much from the look and feel I wanted. With that, I’m proud of what I came up with!
Final Design and Name
With all content complete, the whole RPG had to fit on two standard sheets of paper. Taking a leaf from my print design days, I paid homage to the Rule of Thirds and squeezed the gameplay into a trifold on one side, and the events and map on the other.
Then, I paired a retro serif header font with sans-serif for legibility at 10 points. Since there was a lot of text, I further laid them out in columns within each box. With a final sprinkling of icons around for visual emphasis, I kept the entire design monochrome so the map stands out!
And so I introduce… LensFlaire!
There were lots of firsts in making this RPG, but I thoroughly enjoyed and learned from the experience. In my next project, I will be expanding from the 1-page limit, so stay tuned!