[sic]The Ultimate Elvis Challenge! - final opinions

[ja-prozac]

Special thread for feedback for finished game as stated in the rules.
Post here if you want to share your thoughts about my game.

[Filip Luszczyk]

The game certainly has its wacky appeal, especially for Six String Samurai fans. I expected it to be pretty limiting one-shot system, but now that I look at it, there's actually quite a big scope of possible situations to play with, so it probably has some potential replayability. Dunno if there's any replayability in the rules themselves, although the performance part might actually fuel some additional attempts.

The idea of using karaoke in a role-playing game is the win, anyway

It doesn't seem like you did many language mistakes, although there are some odd sentences here and there.

I'm not sure if I follow your reasons for using 4d6 for rolling the phrases. With these probabilities, those in the middle of the table will be most common, while those on its extreme ends will be very rare. It doesn't seem like a very good design choice to me here, as it will often produce rather similar characters. Maybe there could be 36 phrases rolled with two dice (one for "tens" digit and one for "ones" digit)?

The way you distribute control over the scene among the players sounds tricky, and it might be confusing, I suppose. Only playtesting can tell, but I'd expect that at least one of them won't have much most of the time. I suppose having only one narrator/director in each scene and giving NPCs' roles to the rest of the group as needed would be more streamlined, and it would make the required number of players flexible.

I don't like the way key phrases roll works - i.e. in the style chart, every die result has its distinct effect, but when it comes to phrases, there's no practical difference between 5 and 6. However, I think you could easily increase the phrase cap to 6 without really changing the probabilities and all - if in a duel the player had to roll equal or higher than phrase level.

Audience awards sound somewhat fuzzy - i.e. you can award 1-4 points, but there are no good benchmarks for measuring the performance. Also, given the competitive nature of the game, I think there might be some risk that these awards will be used strategically at some point.

Other than that, sounds like a pretty fun game, with all those Six String Samurai references and karaoke thing