The Unnamed Three - II
A study of what we learned from The Unnamed Three
OUR GAMESRPG
Ali Kutlu Durşen
6/1/20263 min read
Focus, or Lack Thereof
One-page RPGs are, admittedly, a medium I'm not very familiar with. I approached the game with design sensibilities I carried over from traditional games. I even strived to make it a generic game, which I normally wouldn't with bigger projects, thinking setting a tone is good for helping players orient themselves. However, with a sense of "one-page is too little", I tried to cheat by having GMs provide the setting and story themselves.
Turns out, my initial hunch on benefits of establishing the game's tone is even more prevalent in one-pagers. This is one consistent feedback I got from people more familiar with these games, that my game seemed directionless and was just a basically a skill resolution system. I guess one-page RPGs are also low-prep games and should try to lessen the work of GMing, not demand it.
Lesson learned! Not that I'm unhappy with my skill resolution system, but my next one-pager (if there will be one) will try to lean harder on a specific tone and setting.
Pacing Issues
As said earlier, I'm not very familiar with one-pagers and operate mostly within a trad game mindset. Therefore, my default approach to pacing for convention games is around 4 hours, with around half that time spent on 3 combat encounters. Of course, it gets harder to stick to this plan when your game doesn't have a combat system and no scene, no matter how detailed, can be stretched to 40 minutes.
In the end, scenario I had in mind took around 3 hours, which is on the shorter side. First question is whether this is a problem or not. After all, players had fun and that is our primary goal. However, when I put my designer hat on, I don't think it's okay that the game let me down on my goal of 4 hour session. Second question, then, is if this is a problem of the game or the game master. I think it's a mix of both: as a game master, I could have prepared a bigger set of events to throw at players. On the other hand, as a designer, I could have put some inspiration seeds in the game like many other one-pagers and solo games do. Lack of those is another consequence of being a generic game.
Embracing the Random
In The Unnamed Three, we expect
"low" stat to be between 6 and 10 (58%), average 8
"medium" stat to be between 7 and 11 (50%), average 9
and "high" stat to be between 8 and 12 (47%), average 10
This, combined with expected check result of 9, implies meaningful rolls where characters are likely but not very likely to succeed. So what happens when a player rolls exceptional stats? In our game, one player had no stat below 10 and if my memory serves didn't roll a single failure.
Honestly, this may seem like a problem but if it is, then it's one of mindset, not game design. I believe my design concentrates the stats within the given boundaries while leaving some space to chance. I wanted random results and if a player gets lucky, that is also part of the process. Same goes for unlucky results. Also we should keep in mind that we're working within the scope of a one-shot game and even the most extreme cases have limited shelf life.
Format Constraints
Truth be told, this was a little exercise project for us: we wanted to explore how the itch.io ecosystem worked, put out a game with our name on it, and also flex our graphical design muscles in preparation for other, bigger projects. However, turns out we fell into a trap of our own making.
First, I didn't imagine I'd need much beyond character creation and action resolution. Second, we approached readability, margins, layout and so on like a regular document. That's not the way! I now see that it is not unusual to cram as much material you need on a single page, despite layout best practices. So our approach failed on two accounts: I could be more ambitious with what I put on the page and Eda could then sacrifice some readability to account for that material.
Up Next
Here we dismissed the "problem" of one player being too lucky with character generation, but what if it were a problem for you? On our next post, I'll study the reasons behind this state and offer alternative designs.