SIFT: A Free One-Page Role-Playing Game

So, I’ve been pounding my face against the keyboard for the last little bit trying to put together a role-playing game based on Avatar the Last Airbender. There’s a 4E hack for the series, but I don’t think that the D&D treatment really hits on what Avatar was about, so I’ve been trying to mash together a version that hails to some of the better narrative-centric role-playing games of the past little bit.

But, I’ve got writers block, mostly in the sense of “I don’t want to work on this project right now.” And partially because my work doesn’t exist until I show it to you.That’s part of why I started a blog in the first place, was to get writing for an audience instead of just putzing around on a project, not finishing it, and not caring because fuck it, no one was ever going to read it anyway.

So rather than languish in my feelings of “Writing conflict resolution chapters suuuuuuuuuuuuucks,” I decided to write a new game in the meantime. It’s just one of my little one-page role-playing games, and it’s here for your enjoyment. It’s a military-mystery game based on an alternate reality game.

The ARG itself was sort of poorly put together and didn’t make a ton of logical sense, but the people who were invested in it were invested to the hilt. I have some pretty hefty criticisms of it, and those criticisms were eventually responsible for my leaving the game, but this isn’t really the place to air those. In the role-playing game, a United States military operation has recruited civilian help to crack codes and gather intelligence on an important mission. This more-or-less mirrors the ARG (where the role the civilians played was much less clear). There is something crazy going on somewhere in the world, and it’s up to one agent, one strike team and a group of asshats from the internet to stop it.

If you’d like to take a look at the game, you can find it here.

If you’d like to take a look at the source material, you can find most of it here.

If you’d like to take a look at the source material for the source material, you can find it here.

The Simplest D&D I Could Make

I made a one-page fantasy role-playing game.

Today I tried to do the impossible and got it mostly okay. I wanted to boil down Dungeons & Dragons to its most absolute basic. I wanted to design a version of the game that could be printed on a single page in a standard-sized novel, or 250 words. I think I did an okay job of it. I haven’t play-tested it, I haven’t even bothered to edit it, really. I just wanted to answer, for myself, what the essence of Dungeons & Dragons is. This is obviously super-simplified, and it would take at least a half-dozen pages of equal size to really sum up what Dungeons & Dragons should be, but this has helped me find my focus for what I think the game really is somewhat.

For instance, the game below doesn’t have any races in it. No elves, dwarves, halfings. Just the four core classes from the Basic Boxed Set. It also doesn’t have any feats, skills, backgrounds, themes, or other extraneous bits of crunch that make the game take up more space than it absolutely needs to. Are these things important to playing Dungeons & Dragons? I don’t think so, not really.

Still, I’ll let the game speak for itself some.

D&D in One Page (250 Words):

 

Roll 3d6 for each of: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Constitution. These are your attributes, or attribute scores.

 

Beside each write: (3-5) -2; (6-8) -1; (9-12) 0; (13-15) +1; (16-18) +2. These are your attribute modifier numbers. They are important.

 

Choose a Class: Fighter, Mage, Rogue, or Cleric.

 

Fighters have 1d10 plus their Constitution score hit points. They get to add half their level (and at least 1) to their rolls to hit enemies and their armor class.

 

Mages have 1d4 plus their constitution score hit points. Choose a number of spells (you or your DM decide their names and effects) equal to your intelligence modifier plus half your level.

 

Rogues have 1d6 plus their constitution score hit points. They get to roll a die to find traps or secret doors, or disarm traps. They add half their level to this roll.

 

Clerics have 1d8 plus their Constitution score hit points. They can heal an ally for 1d6 + half their level a number of times per day equal to their Wisdom modifier.

 

You have 100 gold with which to buy gear. The DM determines prices for gear, and what that gear does.

 

Rolling Dice: Determine which attribute makes most sense (DM chooses) and roll a d20 and add that attribute modifier. If the result is equal to or greater than ten (or in the case of combat, their AC), you succeed. If lower, you fail.

 

At 0 hit points, you die.

I don't own Dungeons & Dragons, and I’m making no claim to their rights, here. Obviously the game written above is only my interpretation of the simplest, most incredibly basic version of the game that can be distilled from thousands of pages of work by people far smarter and cooler than I am.

But if I were to build a modular game, it would be from a skeleton like this. It’s basically compatible with First Edition D&D, it has no mechanics that conflict with Third or Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons (with some tweaking for difficulty class and hit point total  stuff), and it’s about as elegant as a system can get. Give me a few days and I’ll pound out a 6-page version of the same game, as modular and simple as I can.