I’ve been playing Heroica and Talisman with the kids lately, and combining that fun experience with prior desires to create a simple paper-based game, I’ve come up with a new idea that I think both I and the kids will like.
The game I’m thinking of consists of a single book that provides all of the background materials necessary to play in short sessions while waiting for dinner to come at a restaurant, using only a pencil and a blank placemat.
It’s not precisely a role-playing game. It’s more like a board game with a dynamic, drawn board, and a story. The players choose characters with specific abilities that they can use during the game to achieve success. The game has the additional primary characteristic of being aimed squarely at kids my kids’ ages. As such, the actions are varied enough, but simple to remember. The consequences are finite – unlike a true RPG, where you can do anything, this game is limited to a specific set of actions with specific potential results.
I’ve been doing some “market research” with the kids, asking them to look at the character classes in the D&D Players Handbook and tell me not just which classes they like, but what they like about them. The results are interesting. For example, they like that the Cleric is good, and that he can wear armor and use weapons. Basically, they see him as a good Fighter. But they didn’t like the Fighter class at all. Also, they were in love with the Druid, especially the possibility of having an animal companion. These insights are very helpful for focusing the game on a limited number of potential classes that the kids will love, as opposed to leaving the game open to endless expansion.
I’ve been doing a little bit of work on the game each evening. It could be anything from doodling icons that might appear in the book, to sketching out mechanics for playing the game, to creating some background for the world the game takes place in. The game story will be pretty rich, or at least rich enough for the kids to enjoy playing, and possibly even enough for a light game that adults could play. Something like this game would have gone well as a “play anywhere” game in groups I’ve been a part of.
In addition to the game itself, I’ve also been looking at pricing for producing the game as a product. There aren’t many good games for kids in this genre. The few I’ve found are so simple that they’re not fun to play with the kids, or they’re so dry that even the kids don’t care to play. Seeing them light up while playing Heroica (this is a great Lego set, by the way) recently merely convinces me that the market is set up for a game that parents could introduce to their kids, then let them take it from there.
Producing a book is actually not too pricey. For about 120 pages, you can have a full-color on-demand book printed for under $10. Add a bit to that for the retail price and there’s potential for at least a meager profit.
The problems I have right now with producing the game are time (obviously) and illustration. I really don’t want to produce another “Word doc with clip art RPG for kids”, the likes of which I’ve scoffed at myself many times. I originally thought that maybe I could get some color art in there, and have the book be full-color, but I think I might be able to handle line art drawings better. There might not be a custom illustration on every page, but I think there would be enough variety and decent layout that it wouldn’t look like it came off of the dusty dot matrix printer in someone’s basement.
For now, I’m taking many notes, and I’ve started a production notebook with some random supplies from Staples. I loaded an A5 notebook with graph paper and such, so that I can sketch out ideas for the various sections of the book. If I get a reasonable distance with the game bits (gameplay, background, testing), maybe I’ll throw the project on Kickstarter, and get some initial funding for a real artist to supply art for the project. That would be pretty neat.
