A Very Different RPG

[Onix]

Well at least it's almost an RPG. You play a role it's a game.

I recently played Space Team. It's only available for iOS but it is a free game. The graphics are horrible and the story is simplistic and never changes. But it will probably be my favorite game on iOS.

The game requires 2-4 players each with their own iOS device. You connect with each other over Wi-Fi.

The point of the game is that you're trying to get your falling apart ship to go to hyperdrive before the star explodes.

The game is simplistic, you pick up how to play in a few moments. You're presented with a tiny representation of your ship at the top with stars going by. Under that is a bar for instructions that the game gives you on what the next step you need to accomplish to go into hyperdrive. Under that is a control panel. Simple so far.

The real brilliance of the game is that you're playing with your friends in the room. The instructions you get are sometimes for you and sometimes for someone else, but you usually don't know who needs to carry it out. For example, you might have an instruction that says "Stir magnetic tanks". It could be on your control panel, it might not. You have to call out the instruction, hope that the player that has the control hears you and finds the control and activates it in time. Only everyone is calling out instructions at once.

It's a crazy party game that if you can get past the bad graphics, will reward you with a really interesting game experience.

So the reason I wanted to bring it up was because it is a nearly entirely social game. There's a little bit of fun because of the button mashing but it's mostly getting your buddies to yell ridiculous things at each other. There's no strategy, other than not talking over one another. There's no substantive story happening. The fun is in each person getting the reward of telling the teammates what to do and trying to carry out the orders they give you. I find that really interesting.

If left on it's own, you could make this kind of thing into a board game I suppose. But I'm interested in trying to figure out how I can use the experience to make my (and your) RPGs more fun. I'm interested in what's happening in this game that makes it enjoyable and distilling it into a concept.

I may not have fully conveyed the game but do you have any thoughts on this? It's free as long as you already have two iOS devices available, if you're interested check it out and then let me know what you think makes the game fun. Do you think the core experience of calling out instructions to your team mates could translate into an RPG?

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

It sounds a bit more like a party game or story-telling event that an RPG - but good fun none the less.

Take a look at this video review of a board game called . It is pretty much exactly what you are describing. Each player has a role on the ship, and a little mini-game they have to complete in a short amount of time. How well they do, and how the captain assigns energy points determines the overall effectiveness of the ship.

I suppose one thing we could do is make a bunch of little pocket-mods, so each person has their own, not necessarily mutual, rules. Also hidden in the folded pages might be whether or not one of them is a traitor/alien/paranoid/commissar, etc. So maybe one person uses d8s and another 2d6 and they have different target numbers - and may or may not lie about their success. Then again, that is being less co-operative, and more "Star Trek" meets "Paranoia". (Which could be fun in its own right...)