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chuckroMany years ago, Brian Clevinger wrote what was probably the best sprite comic that graced the internet, 8-Bit Theater. Loosely following the plot of the first Final Fantasy game, it featured the Light Warriors as generally-useless and amoral bunglers who caused pretty much every problem in the world and only occasionally managed to fix it. This is a game about recreating that vibe.
To be more specific, it’s about four players taking on the roles of Fighter, Thief, Red Mage, and Black Mage and appearing in a different world than the one they started in, and proceeding to fuck that one up, too. As written it’s GM-less; the duties of a GM are split up among the four players, so one runs the enemies during encounters, one rolls for random worldbuilding, one roleplays as NPCs, and one is the recordkeeper. This dispenses with any notion that there’s a person telling a story to the others; this is freeform improv with a bunch of crunchy rules to make it function better.
The combat system is extremely bare-bones, because accurately, the comic Light Warriors spent very little time actually fighting and a lot of time managing shenanigans to beat their enemies. You don’t roll dice for success at actions: Actions always succeed (the “Yes, and” school of improv), but virtually all of them have additional consequences and collateral damage. The health system runs on TOON logic, where if you’re knocked out you can spend a turn getting back up, and if everyone is knocked out you get captured and the story continues.
There’s also a fairly robust system for randomly generating the world, enemies, and NPCs; assuming you want a world built with jrpg abstraction where various factions are vying to awaken the Fiends and/or bring Chaos into it. Because the standard gameplay loop is: The characters appear and establish a “home base”, they interact with various factions and acquire resources to improve that base (and their available powers/items), they cause compounding levels of havoc, they either defeat the Fiends or fail to, and then Chaos appears and hopefully they squeak out saving the world but maybe not.
The original Kickstarter advertised this as a ttrpg that is “technically playable,” but I suspect with the right crew is it entirely playable and likely to be very entertaining. (Though I’ve successfully played several joke ttrpgs that probably weren’t supposed to be playable, so what do I know?) The real trick here is that you need four active players who’ve read enough to the comic to get the vibe and who don’t care about “winning”, because while it’s possible for the Light Warriors to succeed, there’s absolutely no way for them to win.
Overall: I REALLY want to play this with the Rag-Nerd-Rok crew.
To be more specific, it’s about four players taking on the roles of Fighter, Thief, Red Mage, and Black Mage and appearing in a different world than the one they started in, and proceeding to fuck that one up, too. As written it’s GM-less; the duties of a GM are split up among the four players, so one runs the enemies during encounters, one rolls for random worldbuilding, one roleplays as NPCs, and one is the recordkeeper. This dispenses with any notion that there’s a person telling a story to the others; this is freeform improv with a bunch of crunchy rules to make it function better.
The combat system is extremely bare-bones, because accurately, the comic Light Warriors spent very little time actually fighting and a lot of time managing shenanigans to beat their enemies. You don’t roll dice for success at actions: Actions always succeed (the “Yes, and” school of improv), but virtually all of them have additional consequences and collateral damage. The health system runs on TOON logic, where if you’re knocked out you can spend a turn getting back up, and if everyone is knocked out you get captured and the story continues.
There’s also a fairly robust system for randomly generating the world, enemies, and NPCs; assuming you want a world built with jrpg abstraction where various factions are vying to awaken the Fiends and/or bring Chaos into it. Because the standard gameplay loop is: The characters appear and establish a “home base”, they interact with various factions and acquire resources to improve that base (and their available powers/items), they cause compounding levels of havoc, they either defeat the Fiends or fail to, and then Chaos appears and hopefully they squeak out saving the world but maybe not.
The original Kickstarter advertised this as a ttrpg that is “technically playable,” but I suspect with the right crew is it entirely playable and likely to be very entertaining. (Though I’ve successfully played several joke ttrpgs that probably weren’t supposed to be playable, so what do I know?) The real trick here is that you need four active players who’ve read enough to the comic to get the vibe and who don’t care about “winning”, because while it’s possible for the Light Warriors to succeed, there’s absolutely no way for them to win.
Overall: I REALLY want to play this with the Rag-Nerd-Rok crew.
