Townsfolk Power 19

[chronoplasm]

1.) What is your game about?**
2.) What do the characters do?**
3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?**

In Townsfolk, players don't play the roles of fantastic adventurers going on quests and doing dungeon crawls. Rather, players play the roles of simple townsfolk just trying to grow their crops and survive through the winter.
The problem is that the world this game takes place in is populated with all kinds of monsters and ancient curses that turn even the simplest of tasks into matters of life and death.
Players in this game assume the role of townsfolk and select various jobs that they must perform in order to keep their meager civilization going. Characters must farm monsters for resources in a terrain randomly generated by the players so that they can contruct buildings, harvest the crops, and attempt to trade with nearby towns.

4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
All the great cities of the Alchemists were destroyed during a great war. All that is left now are vast desolate frontiers warped by magical fallout and a few isolated patches of farmland and wilderness that managed to survive.
For the most part players are encouraged to stay in town and perform their duties. The lands outside of the charted territories are populated with powerful random monsters so any travel outside of the town is a huge event that requires the preparation of the entire village populace.

5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
The first step to creating your character is to choose what job you want your character to perform in the town (baker, miner, farmer, etc.)
The second step, stats, is integrated into the random world building. When creating characters, players draw cards from a deck and assign the values of these cards to various attributes. The players also place these values on a grid to create the world map.

6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
Players and their characters are rewarded for doing their jobs and contributing to the overall well-being of their town.
Jobs are divided into four categories:
Runners
This category includes Scouts, Merchants, Messengers, and Trailblazers, etc.
Runners are rewarded for two things:
1) Exploring the wilderness in search of resources, potential dangers, and other towns.
2) Moving resources, goods, and workers from point A to point B.
Collectors
This category includes Lumberjacks, Fishermen, Farmers, and Miners, etc.
Collectors are rewarded for extracting resources from monsters.
In this world, the trees come to life to fight back against the Lumberjacks, the fish are all of the man-eating variety, plants uproot themselves from the ground and gang up on the Farmers, and even the mountains themselves will refuse to give up their ores without a fight.
For this reason, Collectors work as combat specialists each geared toward fighting a specific kind of enemy.
Lumberjacks use their axes to chop down enemies hundreds of times taller than themselves.
Fishermen use bait, traps, and patience to catch aquatic enemies.
Farmers use their dogs to herd large groups of small plant enemies into an enclosure where they set to work hacking away at them with weaponized farm implements.
Miners dig through layers of defense to chip away at stone enemies with high HP.
Processors
Once the Collectors extract the material and the Runners bring it back to town, Processors must then fight against the materials to make them conform to a desired shape.
Processors include Blacksmiths, Brewers, Cooks, and Carpenters.
Maintainers
Maintainers keep everything running smoothly and keep a look out for the various unpredictable dangers that wander the world.
Maintainers include Deputies, Doctors, Administrators, and Entertainers.

Characters cannot survive on their own in this world, so players must work together each performing their assumed roles in order to prepare for the dark winter that lies ahead.

7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
Goblins.
When players do something right, they get draw a card and recieve a goblin as a prize.
At one time goblins were considered vermin. Now the goblins, useful for doing mundane housework, are valued as a kind of status symbol or currency.
Goblins tend to gravitate toward more successful communities that produce more food and wealth.
Success may attract other kinds of supernatural creatures each with their own benefits to offer to the community.
Trolls protect the town from other monsters at night.
Elves leave various treats (coins, sweet foods, toys, etc.) laying around for good humans to find.
Dwarves help miners to escape cave-ins and poisonous gas.

8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
There is no GM for this game.
Rather, events are randomly generated using a deck of cards and all players contribute to interpreting the rules and events to narrate the game.

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?)
Killer carrots.
'Nuff said.

10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
I'm trying to work out a card based resolution system inspired by Go Fish and other simple children's games.

11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
Early on I figured "If fishing is an important activity in this game, maybe players could play a game of Go Fish to determine success when fishing?" This idea evolved so that players would all play a card game similar to Go Fish to resolve actions. My newer ideas are starting to stray from this idea however. I'm not sure about this part.

12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Yes. By doing their jobs, characters earn XP and become more skilled in their areas of expertise. Characters can also branch out and learn how to do other jobs over time.
Mainly though, the game is all about the characters working together to advance the town. As characters build up the food supply, construct various buildings, and attract immigrants and goblins, the characters gain more options like cultural or technological advancement.

13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
It's all about contributing to the good of the town.

14.) What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
Cooperation. Friendship. Solidarity. Fun.

15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
Still working on that.

16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
I'd say the class system, since thats what inspired this whole thing anyway. Maybe thats the answer to #15.

17.) Where does your game take the players that other games can't, don't, or won't?
I'm not sure.

18.) What are your publishing goals for your game?
Not sure at this point.
A friend of mine might be starting his own business making miniatures and collectables. If he does, I'll see if he wants to get in on this project.

19.) Who is your target audience?
I think I would like this game to be for everyone. Hopefully with simple game mechanics based on popular children's games, I will be able to get little kids in on this.

[whiteknife]

An interesting idea. I think the key would be to keep it entertaining and fresh without a GM or the inherent thrill of killing things and taking their stuff to keep player son their toes. Thant being said, I think that it's entirely possible to pull that off and it'd be cool if you did.

On a side note, one thing that came to mind when I read your post was a Nintendo DS game called harvest moon: rune factory. If you're not familiar with the series, most harvest moon games are about farming and starting a family in a game that's vaguely like the sims. However, in this game you do that plus you go and kill monsters and clear out the dungeons in order to farm in them. It's not exactly what you're going for, but if you need some inspiratipn you might want to look it up.

Good luck, and I'm interested to see where you go with this one.

[dindenver]

Kevin,
  OK, here is the good and the bad:
Good,
  Seems like a solid concept and there is no point where I saw an obvious glaring hole in the execution of your premise.

Bad,
  I don't see the "fun" in there. Being a villager in a medieval fantasy is a boring, back-breaking grind. It makes working at McDonalds seem like a dream job. So, what do the characters do that is fun? I see the potential for a sort of OG OC thing going on where all the villagers are intertwined in some sort of soap opera. But I don't think that is where you are headed. I see the potential for some sort of Hero's journey where you start as a farmer and grow up to be king of the world, but you sorta said you don't want that. I guess you could play it as a politcal intrigue game, but it doesn't quite match the tone you are setting.
  Or, to put it another way, What do the characters do besides chores?

[chronoplasm]

Good question dindenver.
I touched on this a little bit in the first post there but I'll describe it in more detail here:

The magical radiation from the great war wiped out most of the normal animals. The cows and sheep and such were all wiped out by plagues conjured by alchemists somewhere. The only animals left are all chimeric monsters.
So lets put it this way:
You're not milking cows in this game; you're milking giant scorpions.

Most of the trees are sentient now and will fight back if you try to cut them down. When you take the logs back to town, the carpenter has to strap them down just in case the residual energy inside them causes them to spring to life and go on a rampage.

Mad spirits and vermin monsters run rampant at times and will often try to raid the grainery.

Legions of undead soldiers left over from the great war still roam the countryside in search of civilizations to attack.

[dindenver]

Kevin,
  Gotcha, now that is interesting. So, two questions:
1) If they are normal townsfolk, how are they equipped to deal with this danger?
2) OK, so you have normal chores with a twist, what keeps it from becoming repetitive normal chores with a twist (e.g., the same twist won't be as interesting the second time around, much less the 10th, right)?
  Anyways, seems like a solid concept man, good luck!

[chronoplasm]

1) How are the townsfolk equipped to deal with this danger?
With torches, pitchforks, and good old fashioned mob mentality.
2) What keeps it from being boring repetetive chores with a twist?
Thats the most difficult part about this. How do I prevent this game from being all about pure grind?
I guess thats where some kind of random mechanic comes in.
Maybe just come up with hundreds of things that could possibly go wrong, arrange them on a chart, and integrate it into the resolution mechanic?
Just trying to make some tea could, with a succession of failed skill checks, explode into a bitter ordeal where the gods of tea launch a crusade against the vile infidels who presume to spill the sacred tea.
That's one possibility I guess.

As you advance though you get various goblin helpers and such to do your boring chores for you while you advance to the more exciting stuff like building bridges.
So... power creep, I guess.

I think this is the most difficult part of fleshing this idea out.

[dindenver]

Kevin,
  Yeah, hard core tables is not what I was looking for.
  But the gods of tea battling in your backyard is AWESOME!
  Seriously, pimp up stuff like that and everything else will fall into place. At this point, its about setting the mood and trusting the players to come up with 100 ideas and arrange them awesomely, right?
  Like saying, your character is a normal farmer in a weird farm is a good start, but then you have to show what you mean by weird (like the apple trees building a human mill so they can enjoy pork chops and human sauce).
  Good luck man!

[chronoplasm]

Thanks.
I'm thinking of looking to the Thoth tarot deck for inspiration.
Considering that I'm wanting to base my resolution mechanic on children's games like Go Fish, it's kind of an interesting juxtaposition doing that with tarot cards.
"Do you have The Devil?"
"Go fish."

I'm thinking of assigning possible scenarios to each card and then leaving it up to whoever draws the cards to interpret them to create a plot point.

[dindenver]

Kevin,
  Have you played the card game once upon a time? It might give you inspiration, ideas, comfort with this idea.
  I feel like you are trying too hard to assign meaning to cards, situations, values, etc. When the players are more than capable of coming up with it on their own, right?
  I don't think the mechanics from that game apply to your situation at all, but the game play might show you how to set up a framework to make your tarot cards work (which is another inspired idea, FYI).
  Also, I am not 100% proficient on tarot (so this suggestion might be all wrong), but unless you can include the deck with teh game, set it up to work with any tarot, k?

[chronoplasm]

I was thinking of even making my own tarot deck specifically for this game and then put a text box on each card that describes a vague interpretation that could relate to gameplay. Maybe come up with my own set of suites entirely.

Once Upon a Time, you say? I'll check it out. Thanks.

[JohnG]

Chronoplasm, I've read through and decided that I have to bring up Dindenvers point again, don't be mad at me lol.

I'm concerned that your game might have a strong "eh" factor.  It's the phenomena that occurs in a gaming group when someone says "Wanna play Townsfolk" and everyone else says "Eh..."

I have to agree with Whiteknife that Rune Factory is worth looking up for you but it still places the player character in the position of being an exceptional character like a traditional adventurer so it deviates from your idea there.

So here's what I'm thinking, the villagers are on their own, they've got no one to really protect them and the exceptional individuals who might be better suited to doing so have wandered off to find fame and fortune.  All that's left are farmers with pitchforks against the power of the assembled monsters in the wilderness, you have two ways to go with this premise, fear or fun.

If we're talking fear then the farmers are cowering, sneaking around, trying to survive the wilderness or maybe they're rebelling against whoever controls their land and does nothing to protect them, but of course all they can do is make minor jabs at him like stealing crops, ambushing his guards, robbing one of his governors or something.  This style lends itself to a much grittier game.

The next option is to make it all about fun.  The world's bleak and these people are trying to scrape out a living, which could be hilarious.  Your party gets together and manages to kill a kobold, something an adventuring party would roll their eyes at but these villagers are dancing and cheering and super excited.  Or maybe they hunt down one kobold and a hundred more emerge and you get to narrate them running screaming for their lives, or one of them is captured and hung upside down over a pot of boiling water and the rest have to save him from being dinner without any fighting or they're toast.  Hell maybe they smack a goblin in the face with a rake and he covers his nose and says "hey!  that hurt you wankers, I don't come running into your house and slug you in the beak do I?!"  So while adventurers ransack dungeons the townsfolk are finding out that the monsters just want to be left alone or something through a series of misadventures.  I can just imagine playing some kids and the adventure for the day is stealing Mrs. McGregor's fresh apple pie.  The end of the session comes with either delicious pie or sore backsides.

I would recommend something for your system though, I would give bonuses based on how many villagers there are that are working together in a mob.  If squashing monsters is done with pitchforks and shovels and lots of angry people then there should be some kind of Mob bonus that keeps people from running screaming even when they know that they have no chance against the troll individually.

[chronoplasm]

I'm not mad.
I was having the same concern, actually.

I have a few ideas for possible scenarios:

1) Outsiders come to town, and then the crops start dying. It seems that one of the outsiders might be a wizard.
2) Miners dig too deep and accidently awaken a balrog or something.
3) Monkeys are raiding the storage sheds. Go kill the monkeys.
4) The floodgates have broken and the whole town is flooding. Gators are taking advantage of the situation.

[JohnG]

I think part of the trick is to make things either really difficult or more grand than they actually are.  "Oh My God they killed the rabbit that was plaguing my garden, they're heroes!!"  Once again though this is a matter of if you want fear or fun to be the premise of your game, of course it could be run either way though I think that would require each way to have its own system quirks that the other doesn't.

[chronoplasm]

I think I want it to be more fun, but I could try it both ways.

[JohnG]

definitely worth trying either way, though the hilarity that could ensue in such a game with the right group would be biblical in proportion.  lol