1000 Blank White Cards: The RPG

[lpsmith]

A while back I read http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14371 and some of the comments near the end made me think of the game http://www.trouserarousal.nu/cards/">1000 Blank White Cards (aka 1KBWC).  "Why not," I thought, "make 1000 Blank White Cards:  The RPG"?  And while the title is probably all you really need, I http://bioc.rice.edu/~lpsmith/IF/1KBWC-RPG.html">wrote it up.

What's particularly interesting to me about the original game is how easily and naturally it can be Drifted for a particular group.  The same should be true of the RPG.  I'd play it myself, but my gaming group is online, and making silly drawings is a significant part of the charm.  I swear I'll try it sometime, though.

[Mike Holmes]

Is the "More Structure" stuff meant to be used as a block? Or are they just ideas to be taken as people like. That is, when you wrote them down were you thinking of them as a coherent whole, or as just some additional ideas?

Mike

[lpsmith]

Hmm, that's an interesting question.  They were intended to be both--you could use them as a whole to play a game, or you could steal the ideas you liked and make up new ones to replace the ones you didn't.  My intuition is that if you elect not to use one of the line-items in the 'More Structure' bit, your group would have to come up with something else to replace it.  For example, if your group didn't want to have a GM, you'd have to come up with some other order of play rules to replace the 'GM plays a card, one player may respond with a card' rule (even if it's just 'anyone may play a card at any time').

It might be worth dividing that section further to make 'chunks' of rules that can be used or replaced.

[Mike Holmes]

Well, what I'm wondering is, sans a very well defined system, that you're not creating a whole lot here. That is, it all sounds like freeform with cards thrown in, to some extent. The thing is that, if the group is able to function at that level of "rules-lite" already, then why do they need to create more rules? If they feel like they need to have more rules, then won't they flounder without a bit more structure from which to work off of?

That is, what I think would work best is to make the "more structure" part the normal part of the game, solid it up a bunch, and make it more clear how it all hangs together (including doing some tweaking on your own to get it really good). I think that might actually be something. As it is, it seems very much like just a Nomic (http://www.nomic.net/) with the addition of a starting rule that you use cards to create your rule effects.  

I think the idea has legs. I think you should just develop it a bit more. Seems more like a bunch of ideas for a potential game than a game right now.

Mike

[Andrew Cooper]

I think there should be a 4th type of card called "Rules".  This way you could play Rules that defined how things worked.  Rules cards could determine whether there was a GM or not or what order players took turns or how magic worked... etc etc   I'd think of them like Gimmicks in Universalis.

[Mike Holmes]

I think there should be a 4th type of card called "Rules".

So that the rules don't have to be advanced via "Stuff, Events, Stats," and such? I mean, my assumption was that the other three cards do, in fact, introduce rules. Sometimes it's just "Swords do +3 damage" but it could also be something like "When showing the sword card, draw three more cards" or the like. Just as a bad example.

Mike

[Andrew Cooper]

Or so that Rules don't have to be tied to Stuff, Events or Stats.  "GM plays 2 cards at a time.' would be a rule not tied to anything specific.  "No Monty Python jokes." is another example stolen from Universalis.