This is one of those loose ideas that rattled around in the back of my head for years; it was a name and very little else, but then it all came together over about 5 days, starting at CONception. This is what it's all about
1.) What is your game about?
It's a typical fantasy dungeon crawl: monsters, traps, treasures, magic and, of course, heroes.
2.) What do the characters do?
They have a typical fantasy adventure that includes exploring a dungeon or just roaming through a fantasy landscape, trying to achieve immediate goals.
3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?
They use their resources to create scenes: the resources are simple shapes drawn in pencil and a scene starts off as a blank sheet of paper. All the players (no GM) take it in turns to roll dice to see what they can draw next: they make their sketch and, if they think it looks like anything, they write that tag next to their doodle and narrate what happens.
4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
Setting is optional: I use dungeoneering as a default because it is something everyone has some degree of familiarity with. The emphasis of the game is on pastiching (is that a word?)the tropes of well-known genres and, in that sense, using a cartoonish approach to narration reinforces what the game is about.
5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
You draw your character in an iconic way that represents their archetype; the same goes for any Traits you create for them, so again, cartoon reinforces parody.
6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
The game rewards cheek & imagination: when you draw something, you get to say what it is based on your interpretation of what a few simple lines and other marks look like. Players are encouraged to push their luck and squeeze the maximum amount of interpretation from the minimum of amount of information.
7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
When another player disagrees with your interpretation of a doodle, they can initiate a Conflict with you; additional game resources are at stake in Conflicts. So players are rewarded for being contetntious & cheeky by pushing other players to respond with a Conflict, from which they can earn more resources.
8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
Everyone takes a turn at drawing & narrating the scene, but you can spend resources to interrupt another player & edit what they have drawn. Players share the responsibility for telling a coherent story, scene by scene.
9.) What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
This game has a unique style (drawing as well as narrating)and encourages them to think graphically instead of only verbally. Each player is trying to think 'outside the box', so you are entertained by the creativity of others but must also stay alert to what they say in case you want to challenge it.
10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
Pencils are used in a short round of 'Odds & Evens' : both players secretly point their pencils up or down, then reveal them. If they are both pointing in the same direction, the current narrator wins the Conflict; if they are pointing in opposite directions, the disputant wins.
11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
Firstly, pencils are used to resolve things in a game about drawing doodles! Secondly, the resources at stake allow players to edit the scene by drawing anything or erasing anything, at any time.
12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
By entering scenes, characters can gain Traits and increase their die pools; by entering Conflicts, they can gain more resources.
13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
Advancements give players more control over what they draw in future scenes by extending their range of drawing tools.
14.) What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
First & foremost, the game should be amusing: if the players laugh loud & long, the desired effect has been produced. Second, it should exercise mental & physical functions that are little used in roleplaying, e.g. graphic imagination and drawing skills.
15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
The drawing tools: these get an extensive section on what they are & how to use them, including what they CAN'T do. This section of the rules is as humourous as possible, partly to make it less of a chore to read but also to link them concpetually to the tone of the game.
16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
The drawing: I'm not aware of any other game that uses artistic skills to this extent, which makes it unique and noteworthy.
17.) Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?
Whole new areas of their brain get an airing for the first time in an RPG!
18.) What are your publishing goals for your game?
I don't have any experience with publishining: I'd like to see the game reach as large an audience as possible, by whatever means are most effective.
19.) Who is your target audience?
Experienced gamers with a well-developed sense of humour, though there may also be a target market amongst newcomers to role-playing who are attracted by the unique artistic aspect of the game.
DD sounds interesting and
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Sun, 11/02/2007 - 11:56.
DD sounds interesting and quite unique James!
I'd like to know a little more about the resource management and how play proceeds. You say players roll a die to see what they can draw - what sort of things do they get a choice of? What if I'm rubbish at drawing?
I also like the sound of character advancement taking the form of increased range of drawing tools. Can you tell me a little more about that?
The problem with answering
Submitted by James Mullen on Sun, 11/02/2007 - 15:50.
The problem with answering questions about this game is, of course, that you really DO need to see it, but I'll do my best...
You get a pool of d6s at the start of the game which you split between 6 stats: each stat refers to a different set of drawing tools. On your turn, you get one action, which you can use to roll one stat, draw your character into the scene or draw a Trait. The six sets of tools are:
- Simple shapes: very basic lines and polygons, you get to draw multiples of these when you take your turn to roll this stat.
- Special shapes: more sophisticated or felxible drawing tools, involving complex lines and polygons, shading, copying a doodle and so on. For this and all subsequent sets, you must choose just one option out of those you get on your stat roll.
- Narrative shapes: speech balloons, thought bubbles, comic-strip captions and so on, giving you more flexibility in what you write on the sheet.
- Unique shapes: before the game, the players create a set of 6 shapes which reflect what they want to see happen in the story.
- Encounters: you can draw other characters into a scene (pardon the pun) by using this stat. You are free to fill in your 6 encounter options using other PCs or any NPCs from previous scenes.
- Reactions: an adjunct to Encounters, you use this stat to determine the attitude of any PC or NPC in the scene.
You don't have to complete a doodle on your turn: you can just stick your results down on the paper as a grouping without a tag. You can also edit any doodle or grouping on your turn, instead of starting a wholly new doodle. The game builds momentum as more groups and doodles enter the scene and past scenes can be used as visual references.
The increased range of drawing tools still needs a little work: at the moment, all you get is more dice in your pool to allocate to stats and more Traits which you can draw into a scene whenever your PC is in that scene. One thought I've not implemented yet is that XP can be spent on extra drawing opportunities, e.g. instead of raising your Special stat from 4 to 5, you could keep it at 4 but choose two results when you roll that stat, instead of 1.
There is a visual reference sheet for all the drawing tool sets and players are encouraged to draw in a stick figure style (the card game 'Let's Kill' is an excellent illustration (sorry) of this)so no artistic talent is required. In fact, I would discourage people from being too artistic, as fancy, detailed drawings only serve to slow the game down. By keeping the drawings simple and undetailed, the player's imaginations are allowed to exercise unfettered; in some respects, its a little like a Rorshach ink blot test.
19.) Who is your target
Submitted by Malcolm Craig on Mon, 12/02/2007 - 21:31.
19.) Who is your target audience?
Experienced gamers with a well-developed sense of humour, though there may also be a target market amongst newcomers to role-playing who are attracted by the unique artistic aspect of the game.
Given the nature of the game and the way that it works, could you see it being a game that could be a game to engage kids in roleplaying? In this context, I'm meaning an age group below that which would normally be expected to play RPGs, like those in the 7 - 11 bracket. There are very few games which are specifically aimed at this market (The Princes Kingdom by Clinton Nixon is a good example of a game with appeal for younger age groups).
I could easily see it as a game that adults could play with their kids and serving as a great intro to roleplaying as a positive, imaginative, educational hobby.
Cheers
Malcolm
Contested Ground Studios
This is great. Nothing
Submitted by Graham W on Tue, 13/02/2007 - 22:56.
This is great. Nothing useful to say, though.
Graham
Neat!
Submitted by Rich Stokes on Wed, 14/02/2007 - 09:37.
James,
I really like the idea of this. Actually, it sounds totally brilliant. I particularly like the idea of having all the doodles left over after the game as artefacts.
I can't really add anything at this time, but I'd really like to take a look at this for 10 minutes at ConCow. Any chance of a quick overview/demo? That'd certainly help me get this straight in my head. I'm unnecessarily talking about a playtest, just a laying on of hands explanation type thingie.
I'm with Rich, a 10 minute
Submitted by Malcolm Craig on Wed, 14/02/2007 - 11:45.
I'm with Rich, a 10 minute rundown of how the game works would be great. I'd like to see that at Concrete Cow, perhaps over a convivial coffee.
Cheers
Malcolm
Contested Ground Studios
No problem: I'll bring my
Submitted by James Mullen on Thu, 15/02/2007 - 16:56.
No problem: I'll bring my usual folder o' crap to CONcrete Cow and Doodle Dungeon will be in there along with at least 2 other fairly-complete games.
Funny that people commented on this game working well with children: the penny didn't drop for me until the other day at work. I work in a childrens' center and I was looking at the artwork on the walls, some of which I had done and some of which the children had done. At that point I just sort of went "Oh... I should have thought of that sooner" I'm glad other people have picked up on that potential, though, as that suggests it's not just me looking for things to keep the kids busy!
Surely working in a
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Thu, 15/02/2007 - 17:13.
Surely working in a childrens' center = free and willing playtesters? :-)
I did a short playtest
Submitted by James Mullen on Sat, 17/02/2007 - 09:04.
I did a short playtest session on Friday morning with two children: a 5 year old girl and a 12 year old boy, so quite a mix! I just used the basic concept of rolling dice to see what shapes you had to add to a scene and then narrating what was happening. We weren't playing characters, using stats or any of that: on your turn, you just chose how many dice you wanted to roll, but you had to use all the results you got.
It went rather well: we played two games in succession, each taking about 20-30 minutes, and they seemed to enjoy all aspects of it. Our first story was probably the more successful, though, which concerned an engineer being called to fix a bicycle powered washing machine in an undwerwater hedgehog sanctuary built on top of the Cave of the Mole People. The second game had a more coherent story, about a woman being mugged on her way to a party, but even though they'd requested a second game right after the first, they were getting a bit restless, so I cut the game short in order to enable them to go and do something else.
Excellent news! The hedgehog
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Sat, 17/02/2007 - 11:53.
Excellent news! The hedgehog sanctuary game sounds awesome - I take it they enjoyed it? Did they get what they were supposed to do?
They certainly seemed to get
Submitted by James Mullen on Sat, 17/02/2007 - 16:16.
They certainly seemed to get into the spirit of it! I kept it very simple & light, without conflict mechanics etc but they didn't need me to explain the basic idea twice: roll the dice, draw what you get onto the paper, add that drawing into the story.
There was quite a broad age range represented here and I felt that the game could be scaled to appeal either way, targetting either an exclusively younger or older group.
In a mixed group like this, it was still good fun and younger children can easily be given an advantage over older ones to make it fair for all of them.
I've had a couple of other
Submitted by James Mullen on Sun, 11/03/2007 - 09:37.
I've had a couple of other playtest sessions like that mentioned above, so I'm now pretty confident that the foundation of the game is viable: if children under 12 can get it then I'm sure a bunch of adults will! Well, most adults. OK, some of them.
Sorry I didn't get around to showing my notes to everyone who had requested a look at them during ConCow: I should have brought them to the pub with me and made us all look really nerdly!
During Andrew's '28 Nights Later' game, one thing did occur to me: instead of dividing your die pool between stats, just use the same size die pool at the start of every scene! Thus all character creation focuses on drawing your PC, not working out numbers, plus your drawing options are far more flexible. This also resolves some confidence issues I had with conflict resolution and scene-ending mechanics. I think I'm ready to print off a draft document!
I'm all for streamlining
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Mon, 12/03/2007 - 12:45.
I'm all for streamlining mechanics wherever possible, so that sounds like a sensible move to me.
And I wouldn't worry about looking nerdly in the pub! At Dragonmeet Iain busted out his Reel Adventures playtest notes on the table in Wagamama, and we proceeded to discuss the finer points of rules design over noodles!