Micro RPG Jam

The Micro RPG Jam provided me with an opportunity to create a tiny self-contained game called HOTSHOTS. I am very mechanically inclined, and so a significant percentage of the 200 words allocated by the Jam are used to describe dice rolling, character creation, and obstacle resolution. I wanted to make a game that would be easy for people to pick up and play, and anchored solidly enough in science fiction tropes to let the Narrator wing their way through long strings of mission obstacles (robots! pirates! aliens! toxic atmosphere! weird technology! asteroids! comets! bureaucratic clerks!) without needing recourse to a bunch of blocked out statistics.

Because of the focus on the mechanical operation of the game, I tried hard to include thematic elements within the rules themselves. For instance, the examples difficulties for obstacles include a few standards (such as Mutants) to let the Narrator ballpark difficulty levels while drawing some inspiration from the table itself. Having Luck be the "life points" of the player characters was another such decision - luck is what separates a successful HOTSHOT from a dead one, and the game text doesn't need to say what the rules make clear on their own!

One important mechanical decision I made about this game was to have a static player dice pool of 5d6. Why? Because 5d6 is scientifically known to be very fun to roll (Hello, Fireball!) and because re-rolling/value substitution generates some very tense moments at the table when a player NEEDS 1 more success and has 2 more re-rolls to spare.