GameIdeas.org

When you think about it, it’s absolutely amazing that people actually buy pen and paper role-playing games. There are so many barrier to entries to this hobby, only a geek could like it.

Let’s say Joe, a 22 years old accountant with free time on his hands, decides to try that role-playing thing he’s heard about. He’s never played any rpg and doesn’t know anyone who has, so he’s got quite a few obstacles in his path to play Dungeons & Dragons — he must:

• find a hobby store — a strange place he’s never set foot in
• Buy a rather expensive set of books ($56.67 for the 3 core books of D&D, he’d still need some sort of universe description) and dice with too many sides
• Read all of this — we’re talking about a thousand pages of material
• Find a bunch of reliable friends who can all schedule a simultaneous whole evening of playtime every week
• Explain that 1000 pages of material to said friends
• Make characters for all of those players (a 2-3 hours process for each)
• Come up with an adventure

…and then he can play and have fun!

We’re talking about an investment of about a hundred bucks and 30 hours before anybody has fun, or actually any idea what role-playing actually is. On the other hand, trying video games for the first time only require going online and downloading a free demo of a casual game. No wonder the rpg industry is doing so badly.

You may say I’m a bit harsh, and you’d be right. Most people will learn about rpgs through word of mouth while they’re still in school, making the learning curve much smoother. Nevertheless, it’s much harder to play a pen and paper role-playing game than it should be. The first rpg I played was 15 years ago (damn, I feel old all of sudden), but even with that experience I’ve had a hard time getting into a new game in the last months — and my places of work had the highest concentration of gaming geeks you’ll find anywhere.

That got me thinking: what could be done about this?

Reinventing the RPG

The idea I had was for a role-playing game you could play during your lunch break at work rather than require entire evenings. It’s a lot easier for a few geeks working at the same place to use a conference room to play during their lunch-time or after work than the traditional gaming-evening.

To achieve this, the RPG would have to match the following requirements:

1. The rules should take about 15 minutes to read and understand
2. Character creation should be feasible in 15 minutes or less, while still allowing for customization
3. It shouldn’t require any esoteric material: a couple of 6-sided dice, pen, paper and that’s it
4. It should be affordable and easy to get
5. The game world should be familiar enough not to require reading a virtual encyclopedia to understand
6. Game pace should be lightning fast

A challenging set of requirements, for sure, but nothing impossible.

The most important thing is simplicity, especially when it comes to the rules. Fifteen to read rules mean they shouldn’t take over 8 pages or so. Most rpg rules take a whole lot more than that, but it’s certainly possible to explain a complete, functional system in very little text. The brilliant Feng Shui rpg has its core rules resumed in 4 pages at the end of the rulebook. Simple rules can be played faster (nobody refers to an obscure rule on page 117) and there’s no reason why they’d need more dices than what you can find a box of Yahtzee.

Character creation is trickier. You obviously can’t give as much control over the character in a 15 minutes creation process than in a 3 hours one, but you still want to give interesting choices and customization options to players.

My solution is to offer an express character-creation system that works by asking 15 questions, like “Someone has stolen a large amount of money from you. After some research, you found him. What do you do?” Each question has 4 different answers, at the end you’ve got a sheet that gives specific traits depending on each answer. Answering “I convince the local population to create a mob to get justice” to the above question would give points to the stats and skills of a social-oriented character, while “I murder him in his sleep” would help create a stealthier (and eviler) character.

A fully “manual” character-creation system could still be offered, but I think this quiz-based approach could be fun and fast.

The world can be easy to communicate to players by making it grounded in the real world. If you make a game about pirates in the Caribbean, you don’t have too much to explain since everybody has a good idea what this is about. Pirates in a fantasy land would be another matter entirely, since you’d have to explain everything about that new land. There’s plenty of interesting stuff in the real world to base games on anyway.

Of course, rpg makers make a lot of their money selling more information about their universe. It may seem like basing a game on the real world would make that impossible, but nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most popular rpg of all time was Vampire: The Masquerade and it was set in the modern world. There can still be plenty of unique things about the game world even if the core of it is familiar.

Which brings us to the business model. How do you sell and distribute such a thing?

The Business Model
The internet makes online distribution a possibility: you could sell a pdf version of the books and expect players to print the thing. I don’t know about you, but I’d hate having hundreds of pages in a binder printed from my computer (not to mention the price to print that out on an inkjet). That approach might work if we only sell a very thin core rulebook, but if we’re to sell thicker books to returning customers, they’d need to be bound in real books.

Actually, the internet makes that kind of stuff very easy too. Sites like Lulu.com allow to create and sell actual books, without having to worry about inventory or any of that messy stuff. A 150 pages book costs only $7.53 to print, and it’s only printed when somebody orders a copy so you don’t get ruined having to buy a bunch of copies before you know how many you’ll sell. There are other similar self-publishing companies online, some might even offer better deals.

If I were to actually do this, I’d offer the core rules and universe description for free online. You’d get all the basic rules, a short version of what’s important in the game world, the express character creation process I described above and an adventure to get started. It’d be enough to play with custom characters and custom adventures for free. The goal is to get new players hooked by offering them enough so they have fun and want to get more information about the game.

In addition, I’d offer a fully-fleshed out rulebook for purchase on a service like Lulu: detailed information about the world, more character creation options, but equipment and similar stuff, maybe a few additional rules for special circumstances (car chases or whatever). People who buy this book will probably have started with the free starter kit, so it’s ok to add more complexity now that they’re familiar with the world.

Then, additional books on specific aspects of the game could be made and sold: more equipment, more information on the world, new rules, etc. Creating a good game-world filled with intriguing mysteries is essential in keeping players hooked to the game. I have a few friends who kept buying books of their favorite rpg months after they’d stopped playing simply because they wanted to see about the game evolved.

I think such a business model could have a chance of success. I don’t think anybody would get rich with it — I don’t think anybody ever got rich publishing pen and paper role-playing games — but it may be enough to make it worth one’s time.

I guess the bigger question is whether I will do anything with that idea. Frankly I don’t know. The nice thing about it is that I could possibly do this in my spare time — plenty of people write novels during their free time, why not a rpg? On the other hand, I already have far too many hobbies as it is. Adding another project to the list probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Still, it would be an interesting project — anybody interested in seeing anything made out of it?

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