Game neeping

[avram]

Basically just sat around on my ass all day, then went to Games Club. Got my butt kicked in Quiddler, played a couple more games of Agora, played an overly crowded game of Apples to Apples. Agora doesn’t work all that well with two players. If one player gets a decent lead, it looks pretty much impossible for the other to catch up. In three- or four-player games the additional players can help gang up on the leader.

drcpunk picked up a copy of HeartQuest, the shojou manga RPG, which I’ve been wanting a look at ever since the main author first started talking about it on the Fudge mailing list. It’s turned out pretty much as I feared it would, just a generic Fudge ruleset with skill and gift lists tuned for shojou games. This got me thinking about how I would do such a game, and I even came up with some rough ideas:

Three attributes: Attractiveness (determines how likely it is that another character will fall in love with you), Shamelessness (you have to roll against this to do potentially embarrassing things, like tell the object of your affections how you really feel), and Luckiness (handles most other stuff). There’s a short list of skills/abilities, from which each character gets one for free. Also a list of personality traits, one for free from that too. And each character picks one skill/ability/personality trait she’s attracted by, and one she’s repelled by.

Most resolution is simple. If you’re, say, fighting with another character, and the other character has a fighting-related skill and you don’t, you lose, make a Luckiness roll to see how badly. If you’ve both got related skills, make Luckiness rolls to see who wins. The game isn’t really about fighting, it’s about finding love, so why have complicated rules for other stuff?

At certain Dramatic Moments (when you meet another character, when he opens his heart and tells you his deepest secret, when she pushes you out of the way of a truck, when you find out he’s got a trait you’re attracted to, etc.), you roll to see if your character falls in love. This is based on the other character’s Attractiveness, with bonuses if you’re attracted to his traits. I’m not sure if being repelled by his traits should lower the fall-in-love roll, or just make more difficult the Shamelessness roll you have to make to ask him out.

akawil suggested that characters could be defined as Destined Lovers, but I think that ought to be something the players can decide on in play, once they see a pair of characters with the appropriate chemistry. They should start out hating each other, of course.

mnemex and I started talking about ideas for a MegaTokyo RPG. The game ought to have two different, but compatible, rulesets, since Piro is basically a shojou romance character and Largo a shonen gonzo action character. Mnemex pointed out that the angels constitute a third level, which complicated things to the point where I couldn’t really think about them usefully at 3 AM.

And then on the way home Wil told me about seeing some shojou tentacle porn, and I briefly attempted to write a parody of “Teenage Popsicle Girl” about it, and failed. Just as well, really.