My Ideas: The Seconds Simplest RPG

Well, I covered some of my more recent RPG situations, and my history of Dungeons and Dragons. But my love of RPGs goes back farther than that, though the term gets pretty vague in this case. And the word "tabletop" is right out.

The game in question had exactly one player at any time, making the total group my friend and me, and at this point I don't even know which of us started it. The idea was simple, at least at first. One of us would play a hero of the most generic sort, though he sort of morphed into a high-tech spy, and the other would be the game master. Everything after that was, well, improv. There were no adventures, no rules, and almost no drama. It was mostly a font of silly jokes of the sort we found funny at the age of, say, the 9-12 range. If we wanted to resolve something, we used exactly one random element; a single coin. If I remember right, heads meant something good, bad meant something bad. And the results were pretty vague and often ridiculous. Once, a "bad" result teleported our collective hero into jail for no good reason.

Even then, our styles of game control varied. My friend's style was intentionally silly, much more random, and surprisingly punishing. Often, he would create an impossible logic puzzle or impenetrable barrier that we struggled against until enough random things happened for us to move on. I already leaned towards larger plots and drama. For examples, we would occasionally pit the hero against an equally random boss, like a psychic little girl. I leaned towards making the defeated ones into an adventuring for the party, and I even made a final boss of sorts to climax the game's laughable plot.

We made a second game after this one. This one used the same resolution of actions, but it had a structure besides that. We actually started with a team of heroes that were basically the four from the last game, but with actual names and unique items. There were hit points and values for the characters' attacks. It was like a real RPG, except everything was still coin-based. We also were more structured with the plot. We had a series of MacGuffin quests and alternated control between them. Our gaming psychologies were similar; they just got more entrenched. In my friend's methods, things were just as painfully random, but now the damage was real. In my case, I set up settings, regular boss fights, even NPCs to assist the party. Sadly, this one never ended; we got up to the last mission, but then we lost interest. Why? Who can say? Video games and actual role-playing games (and even more complex versions of this same madness,) proved to be too alluring to resist.

I won't deny the results were often laughable, both when intentionally so and even when I try to make things more coherent. Overuse of the coin system was often to blame. One bit in particular I still remember a good 15+ years later.

Me: (Flips coin) Suddenly, dragons appear out of nowhere! (Flip coins again.) ...and then they leave.

Why, brain? Why would you do something like that? But sheer, inspired lunacy mixed only with the vaguest hints of coherency proved the perfect primordial soup for my creations. From these ideas, the game and concept that would become the mono-plot began to form. This mono-plot, in one way or another, is connected to almost every idea I ever seriously created and worked on. It also specifically created some of my favorite characters, from token comic relief to an entire species. The mono-plot won't be found in this blog, but the next proto-RPG, where the plot moved from pre-natal concepts to a struggling infant, will be, as will that species.

Part of me, now that I think about it, misses this sort of thing. I write 400 page design documents. I have 50 years of development of the mono-plot, not counting the trillions of years of backstory. Everything is linked in ways both brilliant and surreal to everything else. It's inspiring to me, but Lonny is that a lot of baggage.

What if I tried something like this again? Not just a new system, a near-total lack of system itself? Would I be clever? Would I manage to make a plot out of it? Would I make the same jokes I made when I lived at home and anywhere I wanted to go to was within biking range? I wonder sometimes.