Hello, WG! I’m here to start some discussion on an idea I had a while back that I am 100% certain is awful!
As a preface, this is intended to just be a little bit of an extra “mechanic” to pure text-based RP, not a whole character system. So I will say that some of the full-on TTRPGs that would otherwise be a great basis for something like this won’t quite work as substitutes.
So let’s get to what I have. I came up with two incredibly rough sets of dice mechanics for an eating/feeding contest roleplay. I’ve tested one of them, and since it was both a while back and just kind of short, I don’t know if I learned much from it.
Here are the two initial “rulesets” I cooked up, lifted almost verbatim from the Discord server I first proposed them in…
Initial DC of contest is 10, goes up by one each round because of both character fullness and more food per round.
Four failures will send a contestant unconscious, taking them out of the contest.
Rolls will be on a d20
(tentative and optional) Roll bonuses assigned based on fun description of that character’s round, or bribing the judge.
And set two:
alt proposal: everyone rolls 1d20 per round. (maybe a d12, instead?)
This creates modifiers for the next round, based on round DC
(Round 1 DC10. Roll over 10, get whatever you rolled over by in the next round. This can carry over.)
Round DCs increase by 1, each round.
Maximum penalty of -3 for rolling under.
Lowest scoring participant gets a strike.
Four strikes and you drop out of the competition.
Retain bonuses for creative/engaging RP posts, maybe?
So, the things I want to fix and improve…
- I want the “mini-game” to be able to run in large or small group RPs.
- Bonuses are fun, but the rules in either case don’t really account for “fairness” in bonuses, since it’s based on something really opiniony.
- The DCs and dice to be rolled feel like they should naturally change, somehow, to reflect the characters getting full, and a growing DC doesn’t really give that in a way that satisfies me.
- Should I make a random table for bonuses, or contest events that rolls every round? Or every player rolls a d100 to get their dice to roll, and bonus?
And I’m sure several of you can come up with even more problems (and maybe solve them). Keep in mind that it ultimately should remain stat-free, since there’s not a character sheet, but any other additions or options are pretty much open.
You may begin destroying my design and rebuilding it, now.