One Shot
Back in June, when I was finishing up my latest RPG, Vox, Lulu.com (the POD site I was using to print Vox) announced a new contest to help publicize their latest book format: Photographic Mini Books. The rules were fairly simple: design a Mini Book, publish it by a certain deadline, and -- if the book was deemed creative enough -- potentially win a prize. Unlike many Lulu contests which are driven by sales figures, this one was driven by creativity, and that was what interested me enough to enter.
Lulu provided some examples of possible "creative" Mini Book ideas, including Mini Recipe Books, Mini Guide Books, and Mini Resume Books. but what I didn't see was anything even close to an RPG. I thought that whipping one of those up might very well get me chosen for the final ten (from which the general public will vote on the top 3), and I was right. The book I designed, The House, was chosen from among hundreds of entries to be one of the ten finalists, and from August 4th-17th the general public (including you!) can vote to determine if it becomes one of the top three. Whether you agree that it's the most creative or not, I hope you'll find its design intriguing.
Function Follows Form
In my experience, when designing a game form generally follows function; that is to say, first you decide what you want it to do, and then you decide how to do it. With The House, however, form preceded function. As the entire purpose of the contest was to drive interest in Mini Photo Books, my game had to take the form of either a 5.25" x 3.5" pocket-sized book, or a 3.75" x 2.5" wallet-sized book. In case you don't have a ruler handy, the latter is about the size of a Poker card, and the former is about the same size as a Moleskine notebook (something I usually carry around quite comfortably in my pocket). The larger size seemed to make more sense for a game book, and it's what I chose to begin working with.
Three other "form factors" had to be considered, however, before I could even begin designing the game content. The first was that the Mini Photo Book should contain photos. Second, and more importantly, was Lulu's requirement that Mini Photo Books be purchased in lots of 3 (for the larger size) or 4 (for the Wallet size); for me, that meant that a design goal was to create a game where owning 3 identical copies made perfect sense. Finally, there was the issue of page count, which was driven by Lulu's pricing for these books. The manufacturing cost is calculated by adding a base price for each book ($5.99 for the Compact book, which includes 20 pages) and then $.25 for each additional page. I needed to have enough pages to make the game substantial, but not so many that the book cost would be exorbitant. Ultimately, I settled on 36 pages, at a base cost of $9.99. Since a customer has to purchase 3 at a time, this meant that I could list the book(s) at a retail price of $31.95 -- in my mind, within the realm of reason for something like this. The math whizzes out there will see that $31.95 minus the manufacturing costs of $29.97 only leaves a razor thin profit, of which Lulu takes a further 20%. This is not at all a good margin for any RPG, but winning the contest would more than make up for that.
So, 36 pages. What to do with them? Anyone who bought The House would have purchased three identical pocket-sized, very durable books; this meant that each player would have their own copy of a book that represented a shared virtual space, making it a truly multi-player game. It also meant that the game was highly portable, and could be played anywhere: in a bar, in a car, in a box, with a fox. Portability suggested that any randomization mechanic should be likewise very portable, or easy to come by; hence, a single d6 roll determines everything, since it was hard to imagine being anywhere that was not within reach of a 6-sided die. The game would also have to be highly replayable, as the customer was spending a decent amount on a game, and would not be pleased to buy something that could only be played once. The game's portability further suggested a game that would be played fairly rapidly, in Munchkin-sized bites of under a half-hour. I thought of the Choose Your Own Adventure books of my childhood: they were relatively short, with a fair amount of randomization; all I needed to do was make them shorter, and more random.
Function Follows Flickr
My first thought was to design a fantasy dungeon crawl, but since I was dealing with a Photo Book -- which I felt had to contain photos -- I nixed that idea. How would I go about finding photos of a dungeon? Unlike some people I do not have one below my house. Instead, I decided to turn to Flickr, where a great many people post photos under a very generous CC-By license; in short, this means that the photos are available for use in commercial projects, with the only restriction being that the photographer is properly acknowledged (generally with a link back to the original photo). I know several excellent photographers, and I have a digital camera myself, but this game needed to be designed rapidly and on the cheap, and so Flickr was the perfect solution.
A few minutes searching through photos convinced me that the proper genre for my game would be not fantasy, but horror; specifically, a game set in a haunted house. Not only was this easier to find photos for, but it seemed to me that it would open the game up to a wider audience; I could be wrong, but I'd guess that Horror and Mystery books sell better than Fantasy books. I settled on a sort of pulpy horror feel, fairly generic with just enough Cthulhoid weirdness to make it a bit more creepy. Nothing that would keep the kids up at night -- one of the guidelines for the contest was that the content be family friendly -- but enough to keep on theme.
Fortunately, there were ample photos of strange, creepy and otherwise interesting rooms to choose from on Flickr, and I found that I could easily select a bunch of the more interesting ones and combine them into a reasonable facsimile of a spooky old Victorian mansion. In many cases the photos suggested the room description and elements; for example, I found a photo of a bedroom wrapped in plastic, and that suggested a murder scene, which helped define that room in the game. I did some quick math: 14 rooms seemed appropriate, and if I allotted 2 pages per room (one for the photo, and one for the description) that made 28, leaving eight more for rules, an introduction, character templates, and credits. It seemed about right; I spent a few hours sifting through photos, selected twenty or so to filter through as I began writing, and got to work.
Form Follows Flash
It was at this point that a final design consideration struck, one I was completely unprepared for. Lulu's Mini Photo Books had to be created and laid out within their own custom Flash book designer. This meant that I was restricted to their templates, their margins and font sizes, and everything that came along with that. Their "Vintage" theme worked just fine for my purposes, but the limitations on word count and font size were excrutiating to work with. The introduction to the game, which is needed to set the scene and mood for the entire game, could be no more than about 175 words. The actual rules to the game had to be exceedingly terse so they could fit on three pages. Even the room descriptions, which the entire game rested upon, had to be extremely tight: each room description could only be about 50 words long, and the six random events in each room could only be about 20 words a piece, and had to fit entirely within 9 lines of text.
However, rather than being a limitation, I discovered as I began writing that the tight word counts helped further drive the game design in the direction it wanted to go. I wanted bite-sized chunks that could be quickly read out loud, and random events that could be evaluated in a glance, and resolved as necessary in just a few moments. For character templates, I needed archetypal figures that could be immediately understood within the game's context, with just enough variation to set them apart from one another without imbalancing things. Of course, these limitations meant that this would not be very much a narrativist "story-game," but more of an RPG in the sense that you are playing a game, and adopting a role to do so. Ultimately, what I came up with is something between Clue and Munchkin, with a heavy dose of old school RPGs with simple character concepts, razor-thin plots, and a high mortality rate.
Sound like fun? Let's take a closer look.
Fear Follows Failure
While The House can be played solo, in an ideal situation two or three (or more) friends each choose one of the three character archetypes from the back of the book, and copy their stats down onto an index card, scrap of paper, or bar napkin. The three characters are a Detective, a Paranormal Investigator/Exorcist, and a Fortune Hunter, each with strengths and weaknesses that make them, for example, better at either physical or mental encounters. Each also presumably has a different reason for venturing into a haunted house, whether to investigate the scene, to learn more about its weirdness, or to pilfer treasures left behind by the deceased former owners.
To keep things moving and random, on his or her turn each player MUST select an exit from the room their PC is in. PCs all start on the Front Porch, and can move through 13 other rooms, including the Kitchen, the Library, the Master Bedroom, the Attic and the dreaded Basement. When their PC enters a new room, their player reads the room description out loud and then must choose to either roll 1d6 for an Event, or (if they choose) have their character betray and attack another PC (the reward for such actions being more loot).
Events are where the randomized replayability of the game really features. Each room has 6 possible events, providing over 80 different circumstances that might pop up during the course of a game. Events might include: random environmental effects such as mold in the air, pit traps, or secret doors); the discovery of sweet, precious loot (some of which adds to your ATTack, DAMage or DEFense stats); or the appearance of an Entity such as a ghost or demon child.
When an Entity appears, it is dispatched quickly, or not at all, using the same basic mechanics as attacking other PCs. Combat is intentionally brief and simple, and if a player can roll high enough to overcome an Entity's DEFense rating, the being is immediately killed, and ectoplasmic loot rewarded. Woe be to the PC who misses their attack; if this occurs, another player helps the Entity retaliate, and if the enemy hits the PC, they take damage to their BODY or MIND. Lose all your BODY, and you die. Lose all your MIND, and you go insane, and roll randomly on the Insanity table at the back of the book (with effects that might make you wander randomly, run in terror, or always attack other PCs).
Victory Follows Voting
To win the game, a player simply needs to have their PC collect 10 pieces of LOOT and then escape The House by reaching either the Front or Back Porch. Another possible method of victory is being the sole survivor, after the other PCs have been dispatched by Entities, other PCs, or by going mad and being trapped in Limbo. However, the highly randomized nature of the game -- and the inherent slight imbalance therein -- means that nothing is certain or easy.
This imbalance, as mentioned earlier, was an intentional design decision. A game in which you could figure out the path to victory and always repeat it is a game that you grow bored with, whereas a game where you might die at any turn becomes something you can always pick up and mess around with for a few minutes. Being replayable and random, the rooms are designed in such a way that bad things might happen early on (potentially trapping you in the first few rooms, or sending you to The Basement), or not at all. Shortcuts might lead to quick LOOT and a quick victory, or a quick trip to the Mad House. Repeat playthroughs will reveal some potential strategies for each character, but even these can never be mastered; what is a safe shortcut in one game might, depending on the roll of the die, be a deathtrap in the next. Any room can kill you, in the right circumstances.
The flipside of all that randomness is that any character has a fairly equal chance at winning the game. Rooms that are known dangers can be avoided by using other exits, and a well-timed attack on a weakened PC could make all the difference. There are plenty of ways to help make victory more likely -- nothing is for certain, however, and it is this that I think the game really shines. I liken the game to old school AD&D, which for all its warts was a lot of random fun precisely BECAUSE it was so much easier to die due to a bad die roll, a poor draw from the Deck of Many Things, or a random assassin's blade. The House has no such thing as a carefully balanced encounter where you are always assured victory and a magic item; the game is unfair, just like old school RPGs, horror films, and life itself.
Such a game is not designed for everyone, and especially not for people who throw the dice and kick the board over when they get a bad roll in Monopoly. Rather, the game was designed to be the sort of thing you can pick up and play anywhere and anytime, without anyone having to worry about strategy, or min-maxing a character, and without anyone knowing the exact path to follow to victory. It's a different sort of fun. The House is what might be called a Casual RPG, or perhaps an RPG-lite, and I think that it can be enjoyed as such, whether at a party, on a road trip, on a long plane flight, or while exploring a haunted mansion yourself, whether playing it for the first time or for the 13th.
Considering the financial realities involved in its manufacture The House will almost certainly not be a monetary success, and considering that it is only available through Lulu.com and appeals to a fairly niche audience it is unlikely to win any sales contests. But none of that matters, in the end. Whether or not The House will be a success depends on whether or not the general public (you among them) thinks that it is one of the top three "most creative" offerings from among the 10 selected by the Lulu staff. If it manages to take that honor, maybe The House will be a good way to introduce RPGs to a slightly wider audience, giving them their first taste at what it means to choose a character, roll for attacks, keep track of damage and collect loot. And if just one person tries it out and decides to visit their FLGS for the first time, then it will have achieved everything I could have hoped for.
Cast your vote for The House from now through August 17.
