[Restaurant of the Jade Dragon] - my first try at design

[Rorimack]

Restaurant of the Jade Dragon
-or Uncle Jün-Li's cooking exam-

0. Introduction
So one day I realized that I have written an rpg. An rpg I didn't planned, or _wanted_ to write. What follows is the translation of the game, the story behind writing of it, and the story behind the game, and some concerns of mine. I didn't have time to actually try it (and with my current group it'll turn into a cup-ramen contest;)) – but if you do, I could guarantee that even if it might not be the best roleplaying experience in your life – it could be the most delicious. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Here is the contents of the following posts:
Post1 :
0. Introduction
1. Inspirations and writing the game
2. Who should play it and when?
Post2:
3. Background story
4. Rules A : rules of the exam
Post3:
5. Rules B: rules of the game
6. Rules C: rules of the fortune cookies
Post4:
7. The Endgame and the fate of the assassin
8. Concerns

(The rules are also posted here on the rpg.net:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=184945)

1. Inspirations and writing the game.
There was an rpg.net thread, called  So why is my troll army attacking human lands? http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=165186 It inspired a slightly different thread on rpg.hu, started by rpg.net's Attila: So what could you get out from this situation?

In the later thread, the readers are challenged by strange situations, and they should outline an adventure, a campaign, or, if they want, a whole rpg from them.

One of  the last ,,challenge" was the following: write a campaign or a complete rpg which occurs entirely in a restaurant!
You just couldn't do that – I thought after turning off my computer and before taking a long bath. Emerging from the water two hours later – I've got Jade-Dragon. It was supposed to be a short, one or two paragraph long summary, but I couldn't stop until I wrote everything down.

This is the translated and slightly modified version of the ,,original" Hungarian post. I hope you'll enjoy it.

2. Who should play it and when?

Who: there are two criterion for the players:
1. They should willingly participate and follow the rules. It is too easy to break or bend them, but that would just spoil the fun.
2. The game is for 3 to 5 players. If there are much more players, choosing a Master Chef to coordinate the simultaneous games would be a good idea.

One more thing: the players should respect the customs and regulations of other players, regarding food. It is better to ask about allergies, religious and other restrictions. Following these regulations is obligatory, breaking them (,,I wonder whether they will recognize that there _is_ meat in it, hehe") should result not only exclusion from the game, but from future rpg sessions too.

If the game contains alcohol or other psychedelic drugs, it is necessary that all of the players must recognize this, and nobody should be forced to consume these substances.

Where?

This game is perfect for 3-5 days long rpg-marathons, but it could spice up (;)) your regular rpg-sessions, providing an excellent alternative for the boring chips-cola factor. If you want (and have access to a well-equipped minibar), you could use it as a party game with cocktails.

In the case of the latter two, the name and background story should be changed – for example: Silverclock: the caffé-house, or Shake it Mixer!.

[Rorimack]

3. Background story (For the Jade Dragon)

Uncle Jün-Li was an immigrant. At the time of arriving to this country, his small wealth was only enough to buy a small mobile kitchen, and start selling his soup, which he made using his own recipe. These were hard times for someone like Jün-Li: you couldn't a Chinese restaurant in every corner, and must be brave enough just to stop by the cart of the funny-clothed, always smiling Jün-Li, and order his soup – a soup that could be three weeks old, and god knows what did it contained.

But Jün-Li was lucky (or was it his talent?). It didn't take too long, and there were people searching for the strange Chinese with his wondersoup, and there were long lines before his ,,restaurant".

The rest of it is history: there was the first real restaurant made out from an old trailer, in which he worked alone. And there were the others, but at that time he already needed assistants.

After half a century, Jün-Li had a restaurant in the most extravagant district of the town. Not only a restaurant – the Jade Dragon looked like a beautiful Chinese castle.

,,The Soup" is still on the menu, but Uncle Jün-Li didn't stop at that – his restaurant isn't only the best Chinese one in the town, but if you want to take some gourmand food, the Jade Dragon also provided excellent French, Italian or Thai cuisine.

Uncle Jün-Li is said to be the biggest talent in the history of gastronomy, so it isn't a big surprise that a lot of master-chef applies for his restaurant to work there, even as a under-cook.

So this is the story of Uncle Jün-li's cooking course: the final test for the masters of cooking.

Receiving the diploma of Jün-Li equals success: good ranking in the Michelin catalogue, visiting stars and celebrities every night, etc.

But there are peoples who doesn't like the success of Jün-Li – and finally they decided to send an assassin for the contest...


Rules A: Rules of the exam (still fiction)

The candidates have one week to impress Uncle Jün-Li – which is really hard.

They made the best dishes someone could imagine, and Jün-Li comes, taste them, and sometimes give advices – you should have used less pepper, it must be turned once more etc. And after one week, he judges the candidates...

There are strict rules: the candidates, although they could observe the others, are not allowed to communicate – those who fail this rule automatically fail the exam too. But they are lucky – it is almost a tradition to present a fortune-cookie for every dish they serves, not only for Chinese food, but everything you could order in Jade Dragon. The participants realized that these fortune-cookies could serve as a cryptic communication channel.

[Rorimack]

Rules B: Rules of the game

The main concept of the game:
Every player prepare a meal for the other players. Since every other member is also cooking, the amount of food should be relatively small. This is why the food that is easily divided (such as most of the Chinese cuisine) are in favour for dishes like steak, etc.
After eating the dinner (for example), there is a secret vote to decide who made the most delicious food. Voting for yourselve is not allowed. When this occurs (i.e. there are five players and there are five votes for the same person), then there must be another vote without that person. Moreover, he will not have the rights to participate in this next vote, and if he is the winner, he doesn't get the usual privileges, and not allowed to give out fortune cookies.

If there are equal votes for two or more people, then the final order is decided by dice, or with another vote.

Those who gets the more first place/votes during the game is the one who passed Jün-Li's exam.

Those who got the less votes have the following privileges:

1. They are the ones who decide the criterion of the next cooking-session (ie: the next time everybody should prepare vegan food, or the food must contain pumpkins, etc)
2. Allowed to guess who is the assassin. This occurs before giving out the fortune cookies. If there is a Master Chef, he will ask her, if no, the concrete person. The answer is between two of them, but it must be a sincere yes or no. How to communicate the results (or to communicate it or not) is up to him – but he could only use the fortune cookies.


Rules C: The Fortune cookies

With every meal, fortune cookies are also served. (I use the expression of fortune cookies, but there is no need for actual cookies – the important thing is the messages themselves.)

These are the only communication sources between the players: this is the only way to tell others if we want to cooperate, or know who is the killer, or to pass on some other information.

There must be an actual message, but it most follow the rules of fortune telling: never be too concrete, always have a double meaning. So for example, a message like ,,Jack is the killer", where Jack is one of the players, is not valid.

If someone receive a message like this, it must be ,,destroyed" – the receiver would declare that the message was ,,complete nonsense", or she could speak with the Master Chef to disqualificate the message. The punishment for the writer of the message is the same as for someone who voted for himself.

The message would be meaningless in the search after the assassin: using this concrete information against someone is not allowed (that is one of the reasons that this game needs cooperative players).

Giving out the fortune-cookies: normally it would be random (so it is hard to write a message to a certain player). But those who won the actual vote (or maybe the second (third?) player too) could give out a certain amount of fortune cookies to specific players.

Even in this case the message doesn't have to be personalized, and all of the messages could be the same (or all could be different).

[Rorimack]

7. The Endgame and the fate of the assassin

If the identity of the assassin remains secret until the end of the "course", then the assassination was successful: Jün-Li is poisoned at the last supper – there is no winner (only an assassin with a succesfull mission)

If this is not the case, then the assassin was not able to kill his target. (Although he could win the cooking-contest).

Other variants: logically other variants of the game could work with cookies, shakes or even with cocktails.

8. Concerns:

Why should somebody play this game? Of course, cooking is fun, and trying out new foods is interesting, but why do you need this whole game for that?

And why do you want to discover who is the assassin, when you could easily ask it ,,out of game", and even if you find out, it wouldn't change anything drastically?

These are the two main points where this game could turn into disaster.

So we need players who are ready to play a (cooking-)game, but still need some ,,rpg-coating" to enter this kind of contest. Not a wide spectrum for an audience.

Final note: it is important to repeat that the food must be prepared by the players themselves. Microwave dinner does not count, and your grandmother's applepie is out of the game. Unless she also join, but in that case, you should be carefull: she might be the fearsome assassin... ;)

[Bill Masek]

Rorimack,

Your game has an interesting premise.  I like the idea of incorporating food into a game.  Your description did, however, leave me with a couple of questions.

1.  How can the players acquire any information into who the assassin is?  This seems to be the crux of the actual game (as supposed to the simple joy of eating) and I see no mechanism for any player to acquire any information about it.

2.  Why do the players need to communicate?  You make a big deal about communication through fortune cookies.  However there doesn't seem to be any payoffs for successful communication in this game.

I think you have a fun (and tasty) idea.  You are off to a very good start.

Best,
       Bill

[Rorimack]

Thank you for reading the game.

When I edited and reedited the posts (still in word) I somehow omitted those parts. Now I know why.

For your first question: my basic idea was that after every meal, the person who made the worst food have the right to ask one player whether he is the assassin or not.

After then they distribute the cookies. But the only person who has the right to controll the distribution of these message is the actual winner of one voting session.

I think this will answer your second question too. The payoff would be the discovery of the assassin - and maybe that's why I subconsciously forgot about these parts. And this will answer my previous concerns too).

Because I have just realized, that I'm talking about two different games.

One is nothing more than "hey, let's prepare tasty foods and eat i!'".
This is not really a game.

The another one is "let's catch the killer while communicating with cryptic messages only".
And this has been done several times before Jade Dragon. A party/camp game, which has (almost) nothing to do with rpgs or with the Forge.

The Dragon died.

But I hope someone will find some crumbs in it which could be used in a future project. :)

[Bill Masek]

Rorimack,

Hold on a minute.  You are right that you have two parts of your game.  And you are right that both have been done before individually.  However, this is the first time they (at least in my humble experience) they have ever been combined.  It's the way that these two completely different elements interact that will make your game interesting.  I really like the idea of using cooking skills instead of dice for a game.  It's a very unique, very cool idea.  Don't give up on in!

As for the cryptic message part also works nicely.  Its weird and sort of twilight zoneish but I could see it being a lot of fun.

The major issue I believe that this game has, in its current form, is the player goals.  Currently players have two goals, to find the assassin and to win the cooking contest.  As you've said, the assassin thing has been done before and the cooking contest has game roleplaying elements.

It seems to me that you have a couple of options.  The most obvious way would be to incorporate game elements into the cooking contest goal.  The cooking contest thing could be handled many different ways, but the first to come to my mind is a 'cheating' mechanic where players can secretly mess with each others food.  Not ruin it (it must be tasty!) but perhaps steal appetizers, switch name tags and other goodness.

The other option would be to give each player some kind of goal instead of just the assassin.  Make sure that these goals are mutually exclusive.  Let people use their cooking skills as a way to via for effectiveness to plot their individual schemes.

Those are just two of the possible solutions.  I think that you have the beginnings of a really cool game here.  Your game does not have to be completely unique.  Almost every cool idea has been done before in some way.  What your job is as a game designer is to put them together in different ways and make them unique.  Work on the goals/victory conditions of your game and you will end up with something that is a lot of fun.

Don't give up!

Best,
       Bill

[daMoose_Neo]

Does show quite a bit of promise I think, just need to get it to mesh a little better, and could even be played in conjunction with a regular gaming group- each "night" of the competition would be the groups regular game night. Everyone makes a little something for the "competition", the gamers get a decent meal, the characters get another stab (heh) at finding out who the assassin is, and then you go back to trying to kill the vile sorcerrer.

I think more work needs to be fleshed out on the assassin. Maybe I'm blind (which could be, I think my retinas have burned out after proofing my own game this weekend), but I didn't see how the assassin was determined. Possibly an "Introductory" dinner, where the Master Chef (Coolness ^_^ "I'm not the Game Master! I'm the Master Chef!") cooks and hands out the cookies, one of which labels the person's character as the assassin. Make a nice random way of determining. The players then all sign the backs of their slips and hand them back in to the Master Chef, thereby allowing the MC to know who the assassin is for the future.

Should also have some criteria, ala Clue for determining the assassin, so its less "Is it Bob?" "Is it Jane?" (which would be a little too quick for a small group) and more "Is the assassin Male? (yes/no)", "Does the assassin wear glasses? (yes/no)" Finding the assassin should bring some kind of reward, which could be interesting if there happen to be 2 assassins. Think all is well and good and POW, the second assassin strikes. This works if, for example, the game is agreed to go on for 5 dinners and on the 3rd dinner the 1st assassin is revealed, but you continue with the next two dinners per prior agreement "If the assassin is found before the 5th dinner, the game continues through the 5th dinner".

[Rorimack]

Thank you for your replies.

Bill, I was hapy to "give up"- I knew that there was something wrong, but couldn't find it myself. So I presened my idea - and got helpful answers.

Since my first idea was exactly what daMoose_Neo describes (a little cooking between two dungeons ;)), I'm afraid that this "focus" will be lost if the emphasis goes to cooking or if there would be more "character classes" (if we count the assassin and the Master Chef as class) with different aims.

In the former, the game takes much more time than it was supposed to do. (Which is bad because then combining with a regulal gaming session needs the same extra time as combining it with another game.)

In the later, which, I think is an even more interesting suggestion, further describing the PC-s will lead us to a game where the cooking part could be emitted. I don't say that this is a bad thing - I already started taking notes - but it is another game.

daMoose_Neo:

As I've noted earlier, your first paragraph summarizes what JadeDragon would have been. :)

Thank you for the suggestion for the assassin.

I was thinking about two (or more) assassins, but realized that it is almost possible to discover two assassins in the same game. I think it is true even with the Clues.

[daMoose_Neo]

I didn't really see classes as much as titles. The "Master Chef" would be akin to a Game Master, and the Assassin would just be a neat little "title".
Possibly also hand out secret murder related dishes as well that the player should make one night of the competition, but don't hand one out to the assassin- they get to make their own. Can either duplicate one made (which would, of course, narrow it right down to two of the players), make one up/add one not used (which is more difficult, "Okay, which one of these is unlike the others?").
Results of the vote should be kept secret, unless breaking a tie, and for the Assassin skip the usual punishment. As I read your rules, the player with the least amount of votes gets to decide the rules of the next match and guess the assassin? I'd almost reverse that, unless you have a particular reason for doing so.
Ideally, winner of each night should get something rewarded, either as part of Jade Dragon or even a bonus in their campaign for the session. Assassin should also have some ability in Jade Dragon that makes it cool to be the assassin.

Also, I don't see food prep as a big deal. You know in advance everyone is expected to bring something, I didn't see where it was required that all cooking be done on the premesis, so if everyone puts together a small appetizer which they bring or show up a few minutes before to prep, you have a munchie plater for the Campaign, a few minutes of which are taken up by Jade Dragon.
If communication is an issue concerning the preperation, consider that if they're going to do it, they'll do it. A group thats having fun with the idea will automatically respect the communication barrier for the sake of a good game and a full belly ^_^