I have this idea that I have no idea what to do with. Anyone interested in helping me fashion something out of it?
Super Mario (Apocalypse) World
When you make a death defying leap…
When you race your rivals/allies for coins…
When you…
I have this idea that I have no idea what to do with. Anyone interested in helping me fashion something out of it?
I have this idea that I have no idea what to do with. Anyone interested in helping me fashion something out of it?
Hurl a ball of fire…
When you seek your princess at the end of a castle, roll+world. On a 10+, you find her and live happily ever after. On a 7-9, you find her but your happiness is temporary. Cherish while you can. On a miss, she’s in another castle.
When you go mushroom-hunting, roll+speed. On a 10+, you become invulnerable for the next scene. On a 7-9, you become invulnerable long enough to survive an ambush: you gain 5 coins. On a miss, the GM makes a hard move.
MC Hard Moves:
Take their stuff Coins
Take One Life
Introduce an enemy
Introduce a Vine that goes somewhere
Announce that time is almost up
I had actually considered the use of a Jenga tower as a timer, but a communal pool of “time” that everyone can draw from was something I was thinking about. It would be a way the MC could “offer an opportunity at a cost.” Sure you can crawl up that vine, it’ll take time though… (cue discussion about how Mario is eating more than his fare share of time)
There are multiple ways the video game experience could be ported, and each way would impact the way the MC built these moves.
Is it primarily a fighting game? Exploration? Resource acquisition/management? A gauntlet/elimination challenge? Skill?
Stats???:
Leap
Throw
Run
Special
(special is for the per-playbook Moves? Like the Princess Playbook lets you float, the Toadstool Playbook lets you dig faster. The Green Outfit Playbook lets you roll Special instead of Leap)
There needs to be a Open Your Brain equivalent that’s “When you die, and pass through the void, roll + Lives Remaining…”
Devon Apple I think it is primarily an exploration game. Mostly what Mario and Co. do is traverse dangerous terrain. They have a limited amount of time in which to get as high a score as possible.
Borrowing a page from the latest Mario (3d world on WiiU) I like the idea of players cooperating/competing with one another. Working together to reach the end of the level, but working against each other to ge the highest score. Similar to Zelda 4-swords if anyone is familiar with it.
Gray Pawn Yes, Yes, and YES!
/sub
So Suits are Moves, right? And you can loose the Suit in a damage-taking sense, which means you give up the Move?
Whereas some things are just straight-forward Power Ups. Like, a Mushroom gives you +1 to Strong until you take a hit, then you give it up… Hm…
Stars should totally be a ‘spend time like hold’ kind of power up, where you’re invincible, but every simple thing you do costs time, then it’s gone.
+1 to Strong is still a move, +tough is a non-move tag.
For timing I’d have a full old school three digit counter. With an exploration focused game, it can generally be counting down until the big, awful thing in this world / part of the world finds you instead of you finding it. In tighter situations it is the time to get a specific thing done. All moves chew it up a little bit.
You can have rolls based on time remaining, doing plus one per digit with count remaining (or if cruel the value of the hundreds place, when tens are exhausted as well it turns to -1). I think that would make sense for a recovery move if you need a moment to recharge before you keep going. Needs time, eats time, but if you hit a spot of bad luck that happens fast at the start, you can do it. Like when you find yourself stranded in parts of a level between power ups and approach each enemy with caution instead of flying through it at breakneck speeds.
+Tim Groth I’ve been thinking the same thing. Time is a pool of that anyone can draw from for a bonus.
+Grey Pawn I think mushroom is a “suit” as well. It’s a suit that makes you stronger, able to crush through the terrain (Faceless “OH YEAH!” Move?).
I’m back home in Wyoming now and have limited access to the internet (yes really) but I’ll be trying to keep checking in every day or two.
Last night I worked up this basic exploration move:
When you move into unexplored territory roll+ STAT. On a 10+ pick X on 7-9 pick Y.
*There is at least 1 easy to reach coin
*You aren’t noticed by the enemies here
*There are only a few small enemies or one medium enemy here
*You haven’t landed in a trap/environmental hazard
*Getting here didn’t take any time off the clock
The hardest thing I’ve been dealing with is moving through space and what the players find when they get to where they’re going. The most basic thing Mario does is move from left to right, revealing new terrain and obstacles. This is an attempt to shift that burden to the moves/players. Hopefully this move might set it up so that anytime the players look at the GM and say “So what do we see” there will be some prompts to work with.
There was a thread on a site (I think RPG.net) about Mario as a post apocalyptic world engaged in via exploitation type films. So pretty much straight up Apocalypse World. I totally think you could steal some of the setting elements, even if you don’t call it out fully, but that’s not as satisfying as making a game straight up about making a game about exploring a strange new world.
I think that in terms of exploring the principles for the MC are going to have to focus on barfing forth and generating places. I like the idea of a move with a list of things that help define what’s meaningful in a place. I’d also include moves that require looking for specific things. That way when the players do it to trigger the move they’ve given more shape to the world.
So “When you search for coins” or “When you try to find a switch”, that sort of thing that’s perhaps somewhat less specific. But minimal to no “I dunno, I look around.” You get into detail on something or you try to find specific things. The moment the fictional landscape gets fuzzy, a game based on a hack like this falls apart.
As you mention, the moment the fictional obstacle course gets fuzzy, things
fall apart. Some way to make the level, on the fly, is necessary. It could
be tables, moves, or GM prep, but something is necessary. I’m just not sure
yet
Ultimately, moving through any level has a lot in common with a dungeon
crawl except that the basic danger comes more from moving through space
than from combat. Dangers are:
Loss of time (shared resource)
Loss of power-ups (abilities)
Loss of lives (shared resource? Individual resources?)
Loss of coins (individual resource/goal)
These are fine for recreating the video games, but they feel somewhat limited in terms of their viability at the table.
Here’s what I’ve got thus far
Playbooks will be colors. these colors will be associated with the
different characters play-styles (Red for Mario/balanced, Green for
Luigi/agile, Blue for Toad/strong, etc.)
Characters have 4 stats:
Quick:
Nimble:
Strong:
Precise:
Perhaps something along the lines of World Of Dungeons any threat can,
arguably, be tackled with any stat. The GM describes the threat, you
describe what you do to overcome it, they tell you the stakes and what to
roll.
But, since moves are the handles that allow you to grab hold of the fiction and twist feel they are necessary. Even something simple like in Ghost Rails where moves are based around when you employ a stat rather than when you take a specific action in the fiction. I haven’t yet been able to define what are the stakes when moving through space. I feel like I need basic moves for running past obstacles, jumping, fighting bad guys, and maybe searching for secrets.
And I found them… In John Harper’s Dead Weight. Honestly there is a hell of a lot I could steal from this game, right down to carrying stuff. Its a game about running fast, searching faster, and staying on the move. Anyone have any experience with it?
Core move for moving through space (un-hacked):
When you use parkour to flow with the city, roll+quick. On a hit, you get Flow. On a 10+, three Flow. On a 7-9, one Flow. While you’re running, spend your Flow on the following:
– Suffer little harm if harm is threatened.
– Bypass an obstacle.
– Use your speed and momentum to take +1 forward to your next move.
– Maintain your speed and momentum when you otherwise wouldn’t.
– Make less noise than you should.
When you stop running, you lose all your Flow.
Core move for searching for goodies (Un-hacked):
When you stop running to search or scavenge, roll+sharp. On a hit, you find an item worth 1-barter (GM details) and the GM chooses the coin to represent it (or rolls randomly). On a 10+, choose two things from the list. On a 7-9, choose one.
– You find it quickly.
– You find it with relatively little trouble.
– The item is +hi-tech.
– The item is +valuable.
– The item is a convenient size (you choose the coin type)
Paging Jonathan Walton. 🙂
I was going to suggest looking at Joe Mcdaldno’s project Jumpland: http://jumpland.wordpress.com/
Before you get too deep into this, it’s probably important to think about what Mario media you’re trying to emulate. If you’re sticking pretty close to AW, then the thing that’s probably the most appropriate is the various Super Mario cartoons, where the characters actually have feelings and desires and motives and such. Hans Chung-Otterson’s Mushroom Kingdom Stories (from Stage One) is a bit like this: http://littleplasticpeople.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/mk-stories1.pdf
If what you really want to emulate is console platforming, then you’re probably better off starting with a version of the AW engine that’s more sparse and focused, given the minimal choices and scope involved. Working with Murderous Ghosts or Sundered Land as a model might make a lot more sense.
Also, have you seen the old school Super Mario boardgame? It is amazing: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9533/super-mario-bros
If I was doing something that was supposed to feel like platforming, it might look like this:
– Murderous Ghosts / Sundered Land hack
– 1 player plays Mario, whose job it is to get to the end of each level and, ultimately save the princess (or whoever)
– 1 player is the MC, whose job it is to make Mario lose all of his lives before reaching the princess
– core loops are: traveling across the surface, traveling underground, traveling over water (including on a bridge), traveling underwater, traveling in the clouds, traveling through a castle, traveling over lava, and fighting a boss or mini-boss. Generally each level will only consist of one loop, but some have 2-3. Differnet levels in the same stage often use different loops. Sometimes the player can switch loops themselves, such as going down a pipe.
– The loops generate what you encounter in those different environments, including enemies & obstacles but also coins, power-ups, etc.
– When you would otherwise perish, Mario can spend one of his lives to start the level over again.
– Collecting 100 coins or a 1-up Mushroom gets you an extra life.
– Boom. Done (except for all the hard work, which is writing the actual rules for each type of environment you might travel through, and what Mario can try to do in response).
Dang, I had almost forgotten about my Mario game.
I think Jonathan Walton’s got the right tack: you either want something that feels like platforming (in which case, it’s less about portraying a character and more about completing a quest where creative fictional input matters–that is, it’s kind of on a level removed a bit from the fiction), or something where you’re playing Mario characters in the Mushroom Kingdom.
I think the first case will require deeper hacking than the second. I’m also a little skeptical that Dead Weight (cool as it is) is a good fit for this. Mario games are about running & jumping, sure, but the fiction of a Mario game isn’t about that.
Go see if you can find some scans or cheap copies of old Mario comics. I read a lot of those as a kid and loved how they took the world of the videogames (created specifically to make sense of a running-and-jumping game) and fleshed it out and suited it to a different kind of storytelling medium.
Specifically, I read the shit out of this collection: http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Super-Mario-Brothers/dp/0792455304.
It’s probably not as good as I remember it, but all the main Mario characters get fairly good characterizations, and the weird geography and logic of the Mushroom Kingdom is made sense of in fun ways.
Hans Chung-Otterson said: Mario games are about running & jumping, sure, but the fiction of a Mario game isn’t about that.
I’d love to hear some expansion on this idea.
Well, when you look at videogame history it’s clear that you can make a platformer (runnning & jumping) that doesn’t have the tropes & trappings of the Mushroom Kingdom, right?
As a purely mechanical exercise (which no game is, but bear with me), Mario is solely about running and jumping and moving through the environments to the end without being impeded and forced to start over.
Mario games wrap that in a cartoony-surrealist package, where a plumber from Brooklyn has to defeat turtle people and walking brown mushrooms and can throw fireballs and become a giant.
So “the fiction” I’m talking about is the second part. Of course these two things can’t be completely separated; they are not truly discrete categories. But they are discrete enough that I think it’s useful to talk about them as two separate things. In that light, when I think about playing a Mario TRPG, I think more about the second part, the fiction, as the more important thing to draw inspiration from. I can imagine having some fun game-mechanical nods to running and jumping, but I think if you want to make a Mario game about running and jumping then a card game or a board game is a more suitable medium for that goal (cf. Joe Mcdaldno’s Jumpland).
My tone here has been pretty clinical. That’s not how I’m intending to express myself. I think this is a rad idea and I’m having fun talking about it! Thanks Dylan Green.
I think you’ve said something very accurate here. Mario itself is not a series of moves, it is a particular fiction. And I am less interested in replicating that fiction specifically than I am interested in creating a framework that captures the sense of how these types of games play. I’m more interested in creating a skeleton onto which a particular “play-set” could be applied, be that Mega Man, Mario, Gargoyle’s Quest, or whatever.
Mario is a perfect metaphor for capturing the working parts of a game about running though a fictional obstacle course and competing for glory because is is such a universal touchstone. It established many of the working parts of this type of game.
So, I guess I’m interested in trying to get the game to play like Mario plays, on some level, rather than tell stories like Mario does. I think, once one had a good game, one that felt appropriately like the subject matter, that one could apply the appropriate moves to make it Mario-y.
Rebuttal?
No rebuttal from me. Like I said, I think a (tabletop) game about running through a fictional obstacle course and competing for glory would be better served by a board or card game design, but that’s just what I think.
Prove me wrong. Please!