[GAME] Relationship Dice

 This is a little game I Invented when I was travelling Russia in 2010, I had broken up with a girl and was feeling depressed about the baggage we both brought to the relationship and how it broke us up, and I was thinking about this.. like.. imagine we could "see" this baggage and somehow mitigate it.. and it lead me down this path to invent

Relationship Dice:

What you need are several pairs of dice, but it is possible with only 2 dice and paper & pen(cil)s instead.

Its multiplayer and its roleplay, you should describe the results to the other players, get them engaged in your story.

The Idea of the game, is to get married before your friends, but be warned, if your friends get married in the same turn, and their relationship score is above yours, they might win, and further more, you might actually lose the game by getting married too early. Its a risk-reward game of dice and numbers, but if you roleplay your numbers, well, it can be so much more.

START

First, you roll your "looks" score on d6. If you are a girl you add 1 straight away.

Second roll your "baggage" on d6. If you are a boy you minus 1 straight away.

Your personality is 10, minus looks and baggage, +d6.

TIME LINE:

Timeline is approx 1 year of life, starting from 16. 

For the first 3 turns, you can add d6-1 to your looks, if you roll a 1 or a 6 , you can add 1 to baggage.

Each turn you are single, add 1 to baggage, and 1 to happiness if at least one other friend is single too.

If you are single, you can roll for a new relationship, and if you are in a relationship, you can roll on the relationship chart.

If two people are single, and 'team up' they both reroll 1s and 6s for their relationship roll.

NEW RELATIONSHIP:

When you 'meet' you roll 2d6, this is the 'score' of your partner when you meet them. If their score is within 3 points of your "looks" you can choose to gain them as a 'partner' and are dating. Caveat: If you want to, you can 'pursue' them for a 2nd turn, and add your happiness to your looks, to win them over.

IN a RELATIONSHIP:

If at any time you want to end the relationship, you may choose to do so with a -1 happiness and +1 baggage. also, lose all love, gain half the love score as 'sadness' and +1 baggage if your love was above 10.

If at any time, your baggage is above your love, your relationship will fail, lose 2 happiness, gain 2 sadness, you are now single.

In the first turn, you roll 2d6 and add it to your love score and halve any sadness you have. If you are not happy with this score, you can end the relationship and roll again for a new relationship, with a -1 happiness and +1 baggage. Else you can end your turn and be single.

2nd turn: roll 2d6 for love, d6 for baggage and +2 happiness.

3rd turn: roll 2d6-2 for love, d6 for baggage and +2 happiness.

4th, 5th and 6th turn, roll 1d6-1 for love, d6 for baggage and +1 happiness IF your love is at least double your baggage.

7th+ turn, +1 to baggage and +1 to happiness IF your love is at least above baggage.

AT any point you decide to get married. First is the Pre wedding jitters turn, roll 2d6 add it to baggage(you found out about an ex- that is still in the picture), -1 from looks, (you saw them on the toilet?) check your scores against the rules.

Then on the wedding day, you get to add 2d6 (for how great they look in their wedding dress) to your love score. and 2d6 to the baggage score for all the ways they disappoint you in the year following, minus 1 for each year you were in the relationship prior (i.e. 7 years of relationship = -7 to the love and baggage rolls) and add a bonus +1 to happiness.

On the turn anyone declared they are getting married, all players get to complete that turn, and everyone plays one final turn. The First Married couple minus 2 from the love score (post honeymoon jitters)

Once the final turn plays out. Add up your happiness scores. All players who got married get 1 "game" score, The player with the highest happiness scores 1 "game" score. the player with the highest love score gets 1 "game" score, the player with the least baggage gets 1 "game" score, The Player with the most relationships gets 1 "game" score, and the Player who said this is a dumb game gets 1 "game" score. 

Score up your game scores, and compare it to your own lives.. we're all winners and losers. 

To Extend the game, you can add in, Children Dice, Job Dice and Health dice. Fun for all ages!

Game Design: Roll to Move

I was watching some game design videos and how they complained about 'roll to move' and I just felt like, hang on, where they dissing it because they don't understand it? or just because everyone says that its bad?

Why and When Roll to Move is the correct way to go.

If we look at the mechanics of a roll to move, for example, we'll use a single d6. if both players tokens are standing at the beginning of a 6 spot track. then yes, roll to move is a poor mechanic. The likelyhood of one player rolling a 5 and the other a 1, means that neither player had any influence over the event and so its not fun. 

Sure, Odds are, the 2nd roll might be the opposite, and they both win. And yes, you can extrapolate out, if most people are playing a somewhat fair game, then over the course of 10 rolls, with a roll average of 3.5, the two players, on average will get to the finish line around the same time.

Here we have red, rolling poorly, and blue rolling well. Blue has a lead of 5 squares

Three turns Later, and Blue is even further ahead by 9 squares, so blue feels like he's winning.

Yes, If the Law of Averages comes in.. 

While Contrived, Blue and Red have 12 turns each, and arrive at the end, in the same round.

In such a game, going first, has higher odds of winning, because he's cross the line first.

Yet, there is no point to this.. regardless if you roll once or a hundred times.. you're not making any choices. So there is no game here, its just an exercise in dice and math, which is why its for kids.. to teach them dice and math, and that's all.

NEXT.. If we look at the squares themselves as opportunities.

In many games, a roll of a dice, gives you a table of opportunities, Lets say 1 to 6. You roll, consult the table, then I roll and consult the table. The table, and its choices are the game.

Roll	Results
1	Take a Coin
2	Take a Shoe
3	Take a Bag
4	Take a stone
5	Give an Item to another player
5	Swap an Item with another player

Now this game is just about collecting objects, You take turns for a set number of turns, say 12, and you want to get a complete set of all 4 items, which earns you a point.

But it can be a little boring to just roll a d6, and look at a chart.. if instead the chart was on the table, like a board.. we can see it..

Hence why many roll and move games have the 'chart' as the next 6 steps you can land on:

Now we see that while red landed on a 2, and took a shoe, blue landed on a 6, and would need to swap an item (to ensure this works, we need rules about what happens if you can't give/swap)

In Blues Next roll, 1->6 will still equate directly to the chart, but for Red, the order has been mixed up, where a roll of a 1 will give them a score of 3. because there is no modification to the dice rolled, the odds are still the same. (see more below)

Now, we have 12 rolls, resulting on 12 checks on the chart, and the roll->move structure is actually just a timer for how long the game lasts for.

In essence, provided there is enough rounds.. 12 or more, statistically, most players are going to have a fairly even chance of getting each roll once, and as long as you design in the rule to allow some exchange with a player who didn't roll often enough, or rolled too much of, it balances out.

This actually is pretty much exactly how Catan works. just the 'movement' track is in your head, for how many plausible turns until you hit the end of the game.

Roll modifiers.

IF you could modify the roll made.. then we unlock a whole gamut of possibly interesting choices. Since the roll of a 1 in that second turn, equates to a 3 for red, if red had a +1 token that could be used. Red can choose either a bag or a stone as their 'gain' allowing them more strategic choices.

Conclusion

So, when we look at older games, and think, Oh, Roll and move, how wrong. We fail to realise some of the very complex decisions that are likely to have been made to ensure that the 'track' has equidistant effects and choices for players, to ensure a balanced end game.

DD12 Cataclyzm Playtest Diary

I've been playtesting Cataclyzm to get a feel for how the game flows well, as its not a traditional roleplay and has moments where even I as GM get fazed and left wondering if I'm making a fun game or forcing an idea. So I decided to blog my thoughts..

DD12 Cataclyzm Playtest Diary #1

A Typical Afternoon in Cataclyzm.

Cataclyzm has alot of great ideas, but alot of crummy ones too, so I've decided to play test them out, and see what works and what sucks.

First Characteristics: Most games start with long sessions to create characters, but the draw back is, long character creation = far less desire for players to lose their character. Also, rolling vs choosing, both have their draw backs, but what about situational voting?

So what we do in Cataclyzm is give the group the choice.. Here is the situation.. who is going to volunteer to solve it, why are you volunteering, because you're the best at it, group votes if they should be "the best" or "just good", if they are "the best" they should also choose something their 'not so good at' to balance..

i.e. The Players awoke in darkness, tore the membrane/cloth that covered their face and looked around, the first thing they saw was some insane crossbred horse/turtle with a mouth of teeth. The first to get up and go towards it, would likely be the most courageous, the group votes him "most" courageous, a 21 is assigned as his courage score, and he steps forward to the beast.

As play progresses, We discover who our archer/ranger is because one of them decides he wants to throw a rock, and he wants to be good at it. We discover who our warriors are, because the grab rocks and start stabbing at the thing, one is a fast warrior, the other strong.. again, because the group voted yes to each of them being 'good' at it.

Imagine its dark, that head is twice as large and 7 ft tall!

When One of the group got bitten, the question was.. Do you have enough health to survive this? why? do you have any skills that might mitigate this situation?

As the turtles neck spun around in his direction, our warrior quickly turned his body away at an angle, the bite was harsh, but escaped being deadly as his bones halted the crushing jaws of the beast, just long enough for him to pull free.. a gaping wound, but one that could be survived.

Of course, We can't all be heroes in all ways possible. eventually most players had 3 defining stats of 21, 19 and 17, with 3 counter stats of 4, 5 and 6, while other players had more averaged 18, 16 and 14, with a 6, 7 and 8, the rest of the numbers were in the 10-11 range..

Play testing, I had allowed players to 'spend' the spare points to round out their characters, but they of course min-maxed a few stats, for the future I'll ensure the rule is 'average' out the remaining points.

Skills:

At first I was all "Oh you can be anything you want, are you a medieval peasant, or a caveman or a guy from present day earth or someone from star wars or warhammer 40k", the caveat is, they have to take skills relevant to their character, not the situation.. Also, their characters all have amnesia to begin with, "who am I" so their skill list is empty.. the problem is, they take skills as they need them anyway, not skills that are character relevant, but situationally useless, I'm going to have to bring in some kind of lists and have them roll or something, players could later invent their own lists and hand them to the GM.. they know what skills they 'might' get, but not when they will 'remember', or they could even not remember anything and just learn their skills from the GM never really knowing who they are until weeks into the campaign.

Again, this is to get the game flowing fast, decisions in character creation slow people down, take away the choice and direct their agency into interpreting the situation, gives players creative freedom with creative barriers, often best used when you're not sure whats best.

As the character settled down for the night, lost as to their place in the universe, the pondered their existence. They chewed on their uncooked turtle-horse leg meat, tended their acid wounds, and kept watch.. for the endless night sky and vague silhouettes in the lichen-glow suggested any manner of nasties, ready to devour them.

Ok, so lose the trees, the sunset, the glowing tents, pretty much all light.. so.. nothing like this photo.

Monopoly New House Rule

Just watched an interesting article about how Monopolies original concept was to teach you to hate the rise of the real-estate barons, I guess that's why everyone gets that negative feeling when playing..

Heres the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeLPNVmzerg

But an Idea popped up from watching, specifically from the one point,

Choose your Direction, after you roll.

   In roll and move board games, players are at the mercy of the dice. Many games that use this mechanic (which many board games designers call the worst ever mechanic) don't give you any choice, you roll, you see what it results in, you follow the rules of that square, pass the dice.

   The Idea of player agency, player choice, which makes game more interesting, is in monopoly, which is probably why it did so well, vs snakes & ladders and other games of its time. You roll the dice, but then you have a choice, buy the property at the listed price or be the auctioneer on the property (Original rules had no listed price, you just went to auction automatically). Also, if the up coming properties were already taken, you engaged the players in conversation before rolling the dice, get them distracted about some other topic, roll casually, count out your position in your head and if you landed on someone elses property, pass the dice and encourage them to roll "quick game is a good game" as you moved your piece.. if they rolled quick enough, you escaped the rent.

   Paying attention, in a time when board games were more about an excuse to have conversation and get together, than to actually play, was more critical.

But one rule that was lost to time, was the agency of choice. When you rolled. you could choose which direction you wanted to move, except backwards past go (see there was a reason there was an arrow) you could only pass go in one direction to get paid.

Thinking about it, how many lost opportunities are there for games where this kind of mechanic could be employed. What you gain in not going forward to a bad square and going backward to a safer square, you give up in faster income, also teaching players that sometimes going backwards in life can be the better choice.

What other dice choice mechanics could we be using? 

Roll two dice, and move either the value of one dice or the other.. choice in your possible results.

How about moving one die forward and the other backward, takes longer to move around the board, but give you choice.

Two dice, move either the result or either of the individual dice, or reverse for the same. Now you have six possible choices, throw in the +/- variant and you have eight possible locations to choose from..