making a game out of character creation: Scrabble!

[anonymouse]

Random bit of system piece..

So, random chat over in #indiegames and I hit upon the idea of using Scrabble, or a similar system, for character generation.

You'd get a big pool of tiles, and you'd try and come up with words to serve as descriptors/traits for your character. If you were playing a standard fantasy game, maybe you wanted a guy with a weapon, and you'd try and cobble together Sword or Mace or Bow. The score for your word would be its value; maybe the value is a roll-under TN, or it's the number of dice you roll (I roll 45 dice as I use my Xylophone trait! suck it down, Maestro!.. uh, anyway) in a contest.

You could take the system further, and -any- time you wanted to do an action, you maybe needed to place a word for it or something you were going to use in the contest; in a fight, you could try using obvious things like Sword or Weapon, or maybe Cliff (I push him off it) or Mud (he falls down), et cetera.

Most people don't like this sort of thing because it relies on player skill, but I see that as a feature rather than a flaw.

[Lorenzo Rubbo-Ferraro]

You are completely off your tree..

But I would like to try it one day :-)

[Daniel Solis]

I wonder if you could bust open Boggle and use the lettered dice from that game. It's still what you describe, but you can also add elements where certain mechanics allow you to roll more dice with more possible words at your disposal.

Actually, that would probably be easier to use in play by pulling tiles from the bag. Hm.

Okay, you always have in your posession a certain number of tiles as a bare minimum. Higher stats (of some sort) allow you to pull more tiles. The numbers on each tile show how many times they can be used before being tossed back into the bag. If you're using some sort of hit point mechanic, the sum of the tile-numbers is the amount of damage you do. A 'gun' actually does less damage than a 'chainsaw.' Mostly because, well, chainsaws are cool.

There could also be a mechanic for trading letters with other players.

[GB Steve]

I have come across this idea before but nobody has taken it very far, possibly because of copyright issues.

Mind you Fudge has some scrabble magic rules and I found these on RPGnet:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=90628&highlight=scrabble

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=41446&highlight=scrabble

Sounds interesting though, what are you going to do with it?