If you've been following my livejournal at all, you may have seen a new game I developed called Happy Birthday, Robot! I basically created that game over a weekend with Megan's help, but it is getting waaaaaay more actual play than any of my other designs, including Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

Now to be fair, Robot takes a lot less time to play, has a lot fewer rules, and has a premise that's easier to digest in a quick pitch to your friends.

Still, I hope you can indulge my temptation to drift Do's design at the last minute to be closer to Robot. I feel like someone who invented a hammer, but is still trying to drive a nail into a wall with a dinner plate. These are the grumblings of a frustrated game designer. I just have to get this out of my brain in some fashion, so don't pay much heed to what you see below. This is just a loose idea for how the two games might be combined.

• You pick a trouble card to resolve, just like the current design for Do. Each trouble card describes a troublesome situation going on on the planet you're visiting. This description ends with one or more exclamation points. (!). Those will be important later.
• Three colors of stones in the bag instead of two: This is probably the most radical departure from Do's current design, in terms of mechanics. I see black, white and blue stones in a bag. (These would have to be chips, I guess.) Let's say there are 15 black, 15 white, and 30 blue stones.
• Scratch that last idea. There are still two colors of stones in the bag. Black and white. But they still come in larger quantities than they do in the current design. Maybe 15/15.
  
• You may draw up to three stones at a time until you get a total of four or more black stones or an overall total of 8 stones, whichever comes first.
• You must draw at least a number of stones equal to the !s on the card, but that usually isn't a problem.
• Now you may describe your pilgrim resolving this trouble, but you must say this in one sentence with a limited number of words. You may say one word for each white stone.
• Write this sentence on a new blank card.
• You may say the free words "pilgrims," "of," "the," "flying," "temple." You may also use your pilgrim's temple name as a source of free words, so if your pilgrim's temple name is "Thrashing Bull," then you also get "thrashing" and "bull" as your free words. Lastly, if this is an ongoing game, you may have bought some new free words already.
• If you drew fewer than four black stones: You may keep a number of stones equal to the ! on the card you just resolved. You may keep either the black or white stones in any combination. Otherwise, put all the stones you drew back into the bag.
• For each stone you keep, you may "own" a new word. The words you may own are listed along with the letter the pilgrims are answering this session. For example, in the letter "Swallowed Whole" the free words might be "cat," "house," and "whale." When you own a word, no other player may use it in their sentence. I guess this is kind of a niche protection mechanic, in a way.
• If you drew four or more black stones: The other players turn your card into a Trouble card by adding words to the sentence you just wrote. They may add a number of words equal to the black stones you drew plus the number of exclamation points on the card you resolved. They may also say the free words "and," and "but." They may also use your pilgrim's temple name as free words, too. The new trouble ends with one more ! than the one you just resolved.
• The benefit to drawing four or more stones is that it lets you swap out as many of your owned words as you like. You can still only have a number of free words equal to the number of stones you have saved up. You may swap those free words for other words not currently owned by another player, but you cannot have more words than stones.
• You may also trade words with other players, but only on a 1 for 1 basis.
• The session ends when one player has ten stones.

Phew. Okay, I think that's about all I had in my head at the moment.

Can the collaborative storytelling from Happy Birthday, Robot! be used in traditional gameplay like dungeon crawls, character creation or task resolution? Here are some loose thoughts:

• Character Creation: Each species and class gives you free words you may use in your sentences. Elves might give you the words "graceful" "leap" "arrow" and "tall." Wizards' words might refer to their magic, so "magic missile" "flaming sphere" and "study." Each combo only gives you about seven free words though, so you don't get analysis paralysis.
• Dungeon Crawls: Each dungeon is a list of sentences like "A dragon lurks in the center of the labyrinth, holding the village's children hostage." and "Lava flows throughout the caverns, sometimes breaking through the walls unexpectedly." and "Goblins patrol the halls regularly. Your task is to change as many words in a sentence as you can on your turn, based on some kind of die roll, I guess. When the sentence is completely changed, you can move on to the next one.
• Leveling Up: When you use each of your seven words, you level up after the current dungeon is complete. When you get a new level, you can replace any of your words with new ones offered by the new level. So if you're an elf wizard who just leveled up to Level 2, you can replace any of your words with "hypnotic disc" or "lightning bolt" or something like that. (Can you tell I haven't played D&D a lot lately?)

Here's another idea, if you want to get really hippie with it. What if you want to keep the same feeling from Happy Birthday, Robot! where no one claims ownership of any one character, but you still want to tell a story with an ensemble cast? Here's one idea, if you were going to make pilgrim characters in Do. (This is totally stolen from the planet creation in Emily Care Boss' Sign-In Stranger.)

Get a sheet of paper for each player.
Now add one more sheet so that there are more sheets than players.
Write down an adjective.
Fold the sheet over so you can't see the word you just wrote.
Pass the sheet to the left.
Without unfolding the sheet, write down a noun.
Pass the sheet to the left.
Unfold the sheet.
Taking inspiration from the two words on the sheet in front of you, write down an emotion.
Pass the sheet to the left.
Taking inspiration from all the words listed on the sheet so far, write down a verb.
Pass the sheet to the left.
Taking inspiration from all the words listed on the sheet so far, write down another verb.

So the first two words are the pilgrim's name: Billowy Horse, for example. The other three words are free words that you can incorporate into a sentence wherein this character is the star, like "Loyalty" "Stampede" and "Leap."

Been thinking about my options for publication of this little game. Format, art, etc. Here are some loose thoughts:

I'm thinking of using the Step Into Reading books from Disney as a framework for how I'd pitch the game. Let's pretend to be stuffy academics and call story games "procedural group storytelling formalized by some randomness, some decision-making and some resource management."

If that description is at all accurate, then Happy Birthday, Robot! functions very well as "my first story game." If the rules are a little too complex, the first pages could be a very, very trimmed down version of the game that is basically the Norwegian children's party game that Jane mentioned in the actual play last post. Then the proper game could be for slightly older kids, maybe 8 and up.

So let's assume Happy Birthday, Robot! is an introduction to story games for little kids and Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is for more advanced players in their pre-teens to early teens. It's a pretty steep jump from one to the other, so I was talking to Megan about what could be a bridge between the two. We're thinking Big Pet could be that halfway game.

Big Pet is an idea I've had percolating in my brain for a little while. It was inspired by some early thoughts on how to use Do's stones-in-a-bag system to emulate the light side/dark side struggles of a young Jedi knight. That changed into something more approachable: You and your friends have a big pet named Big Pet. You have to make sure Big Pet doesn't get into trouble or, if he does, that you pull him out of it. All the while, you have to make sure he grows up to be a good pet. So it's kinda like Clifford meets Pokémon.

So the three games could be loosely part of the same family. Happy Birthday, Robot! introduces the concept of formal, procedural storytelling in a group. Big Pet introduces the idea of character creation and of using the stones-in-a-bag system to have a direct influence on probability. Then it all culminates in Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, which involves some more high-level social storytelling advice and some fiddly mechanics.

And then there's the question of art. Megan and I are enamored with these Danbo pictures:



And we like papercraft robots:



We were thinking about making little papercraft robots, then photographing them expressing curiosity in a strange world. It would be cute and easier to do than full illos. Alas, it also loses that rushed, notebook doodle look.

The other option is to make half of the book more of a coloring and activity book that helps you practice playing the game. There's a page from a he-man coloring book that I can't find at the moment, but it shows he-man and she-ra at the bottom of the page looking towards something enormous. But that whole part of the page is blank. The instructions for that page are to "Draw what He-Man and She-Ra see." That's something that could totally work for a game like this. The art can be simple coloring book drawings and then I can post people's cool artwork on a flickr set.

Anyhoo, loose thoughts.