At the beginning of 2021, I taught a D&D Winterim with a coworker. As is common in almost all of my Winterims, the big assignment of the students is to make their own version of whatever it is that we're studying. When I taught Lord of the Rings, I had the students make the beginnings of their own language. When I taught video game theory, they created a concept of what video game they would like to make, had they the time and expertise. When I taught D&D, they made their own TTRPGs.
I usually find it enjoyable to make a similar product while the students are working. It isn't always very good (my Quidditch game from the Harry Potter Winterim was an interesting, albeit very flawed version of multi-leveled chess), but it's always really fun. Last year…er, rather, eleven months ago…I started making my own version of a TTRPG that was heavily inspired by Bloodborne. (I had finished the game for the second time just a few weeks before and it was big in my brain…still is, as a matter of fact.) I wanted a game that had the same sort of frenetic kind of action, one where the dice rolling happened simultaneously and frequently. I started it off as simply a Bloodborne RPG, using the names of weapons and locations from the video game as my starting point. Eventually, I pushed away from the streets of Yharnam and instead created my own city wallowing in its own destruction, a place called Drimdale. I concocted an interconnected introductory campaign in a single location to help me conceptualize what the game would feel like and play like, only to hit a bit of a roadblock part way through the summer. Maybe, I thought, I'm looking at this from the wrong medium. I started writing a novel set in Drimdale (it was part of my abortive attempt at winning NaNoWriMo this year), I tried to write lore and a catalogue of background information…it just wasn't working. While I really like what I've made, it wasn't gelling as it was supposed to. As the year has worn on, a new hobby emerged: Miniature painting. This is also directly influenced by Bloodborne, as I bought the board game of the video game from a Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately (or not, depending on how I look at it), I "accidentally" bought a good $200 worth of the game--with four expansions on top of the base game. They contain dozens of miniatures of creatures from the game, and I quickly ended up spending several orders of magnitude more on painting the figurines than in playing the game. (I still play it, occasionally, and I have a lot more fun with the painted minis than I do the unpainted ones.) As my hobby time and money started flowing into this new exercise, I picked up a lot of interest in wargames (Warhammer, as cool and robust and deep as it is, can't justifiably fit into my budget--though some of the Age of Sigmar and Necromunda stuff is just so tempting). Nothing was quite right for me, though, despite some really cool looking things. Then, on Black Friday, two things happened: Miniature Market had a massive clearance sale on its Wrath of Kings stock, and Amazon was selling one of the most highly-rated board games of all time, Gloomhaven, for about $80. I had received a $200 Amazon gift card from a student's orthodontist's office (I don't know who the student was, but I'm flattered that they thought of me) that was burning a hole in my pocket. What better way to use some of that unexpected money than buying a new board game that I would likely only end up playing by myself? I'll give another post about Wrath of Kings later (once I've actually managed to, y'know, play it), and this isn't a review about Gloomhaven (which I'm liking mightily). The point is, this all converged in making me want to revisit some of the core mechanics that I made for Drimdale. I'm still trying to figure out how to get the flavor and theme of my own board game to stick right, but the modification of my TTRPG ideas into a modular, tile- and dice-based board game is coming along really well. I've created a bunch of small cards, a player mat, the tiles, and a few thousand words of rules. I've even used my 3D printer to give me more tactile, more interesting versions of some of the terrain. (It makes a big difference when you can see a pile of stones and think, Hey, that's a pile of stones, rather than a red cube and think, What is that supposed to be again? Oh yeah. A pile of stones.) Utilizing a lot of the miniatures that I've acquired over the past dozen months--including the stuff that I've 3D printed as well as purchased for Gloomhaven or the Bloodborne Board Game--I've cobbled together a fairly strong prototype. It's far from finished: I want to have five classes with different abilities depending on the gender the player selects, as well as a card system to help mitigate the randomness of the dice-rolling process, and a host of other issues. However, it's basically playable in its reduced form right now. In fact, I played it with my son yesterday. We started at about 12:30 and didn't end until 2:45. I hadn't realized that I'd created a multi-hour experience. More than that, though, is the fact that it was actually fun. I mean, I know that's the point of a board game--of games in general--but this isn't the first time that I've tried creating something like this, only to be severely disappointed in my prototype. Part of what really speaks to me--and, indeed, is the core inspiration for the combat mechanic--is that I get to use a lot of the dice I've collected over the years since I started playing D&D. And by "a lot" I mean that, at the two-player minimum level of play, you need to have approximately 25 dice of different types. There are times when you're holding entire fistfuls of dice and dropping them on the table, then picking through them like a prospector seeking out some golden nuggets. This game was designed for dice-goblins (you know who you are) and fully justifying having spent way too much on plastic polyhedrons throughout the course of one's life. It's also fun because you get to play as your own character, but also as the enemies who challenge your opponent. (It was originally thought of as a co-op game, but that possibility no longer really fits…I think. We'll see.) So your turn involves making life harder for your opponent while struggling to win the game yourself. It means that turns are quick, and you're never long from rolling dice again. And again. And again. The fact that there are still a lot of kinks and bugs to iron out is frustrating only in the sense that it's hard to playtest something solo. My son is a good sport and I think he really enjoys the game…but he's also 11. He has other, more digitally based things to do. So I often find myself sitting on the couch, staring at slips of poorly-trimmed pieces of paper, a notebook with so many contradictory notes scrawled into it that it's essentially incomprehensible, trying to devise what I actually want from a Trap Card, and always thinking…Who's going to play this? That is, of course, the wrong thing to consider at this point. Having almost fully given up on creative writing because I got so enamored of the idea of publishing that almost all desire to write has evaporated, I don't want to accidentally poison my passion for this game by trying to think that it will become more than what it is. Then again, there's a strong motivation in wanting to see one's internal vision become external and tangible. The dream of seeing the game fully realized with artwork, miniatures (original ones, rather than stuff cribbed from other sources), and polished to the point that other people might enjoy it? That's a powerful dream. I've learned, though, that powerful dreams can sometimes overpower reality, and that discrepancy can really hurt. So I'm trying to manage my expectations. Still…it is a lot of fun. |
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