Dice Amp; K9

[Cori Riska]

This is a role-playing game about playing a role player. In the course of this game, you will get to define your game master/dungeon master, the game you play, your dice, who plays at the table with you, your future, and the story of the game. Will you rise to become a paragon of tabletop role playing or fall into failure and obscurity, doomed to be haunted by the dice rolls you will never make?

In the course of your role playing life you will get to hold down a job, perhaps school, deal with parents, significant others, and all the other monsters of madness that lurk away from the table. You will be able to play as any gender and any sexuality both at the table and within the story of the game itself.

-Roleplay as a role-player.
-Customize not only your own character, but also many other characters throughout the game.
-Play both the game within the game and the game of the life sim of the real world: hold down a job,
pay bills, go to school, date, practise religion(s), and, of course, game.
-Enjoy simulated alternate reality fandoms.
-Play as any gender and any sexuality.
-Experience the life of a tabletop gamer in all its good and all its evil.
-Enjoy a mostly optional metagame plot with many different dimensions.

Now, it is important to mention that these fandoms, being in an alternate realty from our own, are more or less mirror inversions of the fandoms in our world. i.e., We have Mary Ploeter instead of Harry Potter, involving the story of an aristocratic French girl hunting and slaying monsters and spell casters in an ongoing inquisition rather than the story of an English orphan wizard. Same treatment for the other fandoms, more or less. So, picking a fandom will mean that its inversion will be in the game and not the original fandom itself, in some mutated form. If a fandom is not selected, it is possible that the fandom will still exist in the game in its original format, though in a much more limited format.

-Harry Potter, i.e. Mary Ploeter
-Lord of the Rings, i.e. Hoard of the King
-Marvel (and other comic franchises) Swellmen and the Legality Foundation (yes, DC won in this universe?)
-My Little Pony; i.e. My Unique Unicorn

So one of the tropes for the genre of media that have role playing games within the game is for the main characters to have a character sheet with standard rpg stats. While we do have a character sheet in the stats screen that will generate during the character creation chapter, it more tracks the protaganists psychology and spirituality than the standard d&d stats.

iii-There are various instances of open licenses and IP/Copywrite involved, not sure legally of how presenting character stats for a given system would play out with all that accounted for. So, a can of worms left unopened.

That said, could certainly make the game without the stats in the standard rpg/d&d format, or could keep the stats mostly hidden to avoid concern 2 and 3. However, there is something just lacking about an rpg game without a standard stat table.

Do you want the prot and other main characters to have a displayed stat table on their character sheets and if so should it be one system or variant depending on which rpg the prot and company mostly play?

Overall, I am happy with these results. I feel that both of the fandoms that were selected I can make alternate world versions that aim to keep some of the tone and genre while giving a nice alien world twist to the story and ways of the fandom. Some of the others would have been more problematic, as they are so iconic that I can only think that even in an alternate universe they probably still exist, and while it would have been nice to make Star Guard were the United Empire of Planets battles dreamy versions of Vulcans and guilefull Klingons or something, it would have been a bummer not to include the original fandom in a limited way in the game.

In addition, I did want to let everyone know that for the time being I have pulled the plug on my patreon page due to an expanding list of reasons. Not 100% but I may add at some point one of those tip jar things I see some creators using, but we shall see. At least in the near term, production goals for my games shall remain the same, though that may differ late '23, early '24 as I anticipate a steadily decrease to my free time to make these games and other creative content, sadly.

Just a heads up that the coming update is taking longer than I figured it would. Probably sometime in October now, but not 100% sure. More real-world stuff (medical appointments for a family member, more hours at work, etc.) and then more time spent on my other creative projects has meant slower progress than I would wish. My apologies for the delay.

So the good - update away! Though it is probably a quarter size of what I was aiming for. I did add in some of the features previously discussed, though lots more to go. There also are a fair amount of bugs; unfortunately, one section has an accidental infinite loop that I need to clear out so I can use random test to hunt down the bugs and defeat them.

What will you find in this update?
-The first television or movie section for each fandom and a bonus fandom.
-General skeleton for unworked sections.
-Some lead into tabletop character creation and probably about 3/4 of that with unfortunutly a ton of bugs and problems.
-Lead into a dialogue scene with ally NPC.
-I did add in trans gender for prot per request; I will aim to add that in for NPCs as well, though its gonna take a while.

Main goal will be to fix the current bugs, then resolve what is missing. Probably will do it in two updates, one per each of those. Not sure on ETA. October was brutal as we had a family member in the hospital and then that family member needed greatly increased care - honestly needed a little me time after that, so thus the initial delay. And then November and NaNoWriMo hit and other projects were monopolizing my time. Hoping the bug fix will be done relatively soon, more substantial update probably early 2024.

Before each game begins, the players collectively decide on one of the four available maps, scaled by difficulty. (The box has dozens of sheets of paper, each double-sided and showing one of the four dungeons available.) All of the maps are laid out in similar ways, with green start spaces featuring all of the possible pair combinations and other spaces that delve deeper into the dungeon with other numbers, dice symbols, monsters, and treasure.

Looking at my sheet, I could cross off a 7 in my green spaces, then cross off a 10 if one was adjacent to that 7. Or, I could cross off the 7 and the 10 in my start spaces. Once a space is marked, future moves into the dungeon must be adjacent to any previously-marked square. When a player marks off any space next to a monster, future pairs can be applied towards damaging a monster, assuming that monster has a number that aligns with your die rolls.

Other spaces might score gems, worth points at the end of the game. There are map-specific spaces aligned with set collection, minor treasure rewards like gold, and special abilities that grant players more health or access to the black die as a passive player. (To begin play, each player can use the black die three times per game as the passive player, but this can increase during play.)

A game of Dungeons, Dice and Danger ends when the players collectively defeat all of the monsters on the map. Damage points are subtracted from player scores, producing a winner with a score that usually ranged in the 60-80-point range during my four tries at the game.

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Which is why I wanted a flexible, imaginative system, and why I created mechanics for altering the dice after the roll. While my setting is somewhat hard sci-fi, with a creamy layer of spiritual and supernatural, it needs to have the epic feel of stories told around campfires. Heroes (and villains) need to be able to reach beyond boring charts and static numbers and tell stories to inspire.

It is with not a little pleasure that I've been reading some of the postings here on The Forge relating to the mixing of dice-based and diceless role-playing mechanics. All very interesting, all very insightful.

Long, long ago, back in the dim and misty past of role-playing, sometime before 1979, I had the pleasure of meeting a rather brilliant role-player/Game Master, a guy by the name of Mike Cuba. Visiting the "Weregamers" (the RPG club at Wayne State University; an organization formed when a flyer featuring the art of Kevin Siembieda was circulated around campus). Mike wandered into a meeting, knowing next to nothing about role-playing, and immediately became one of our favorite role-players.

I rolled up a Thief. With two (2 -- count 'em -- 2) hit points. It was pretty obvious from the very start that Mike wasn't the kind of guy to pull punches as a Dungeon Master. Neither his monsters, nor his traps, were lightweight, and most delivered damage very much in excess of my character's crummy duo of life pips (bear in mind, I was responsible for disabling the traps).

So I responded in the only way that seemed reasonable. I completely avoided rolling the dice. No close combat, and no taking chances. If I had to deal with a lock, or a trap, I learned that I could just keep asking questions, and Mike would keep supplying imaginative answers. The campaign went on and on, and I dissected every trap, every lock, every mechanism, and every arcane bit of machinery. I used every sense, every trick, and role-played my little heart out whenever possible.

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