Saturday, 30 December 2023

POKEMON ANALOGUE SANDBOX FOR A 5-YEAR OLD KID

 My 5yo child caught sight of this in my feed (on some platform or other): 

ANIMON STORY

...and of course they were immediately curious! They're just getting to that age where they're moving on from Paw Patrol and taking an interest in more varied worlds with higher stakes for the characters: Pokémon and Star Wars being the two franchises most appealing to them at the moment.

The game Animon Story was crowdfunded to great success last year and was recently nominated for  Dicebreaker's Best Roleplaying Game' category (the winner was Women are Werewolves, in case you were desperate to know who won). It is currently available at this link, but I would recommend taking a look at the free playtest available on itch.io before committing the tanks. 

Having looked at the playtest, I was impressed by the bold artwork and simple, double-spread layout (example page below). I printed out the entire playtest on photographic paper and they immediately felt to be of "retail quality", if that makes sense. My kid was suitably impressed.

Animon Story Playtest page, text available from the linked free playtest

However, I felt for the purpose of (gently) introducing my young child to RPGs it was a little too crunchy. To be clear, this is not a critique, just a statement of how my personal preferences didn't align with the game's design intent, and also the fact that "five year old kid" is probably not the game's target audience. I'm also aware that your child might enjoy this level of crunch: in which case, you consider ordering the full version of the game. 

I wanted to try something different: as it happens, Animon Story was an excellent catalyst for a few ideas that my child and I are going to explore further.

Before we continue it's 100% necessary for me to reference Max Cantor's blog Weird and Wonderful Worlds, as Pokémon has been referenced multiple times on his blog as a springboard into all kinds of  interesting game concepts, perhaps most significantly the 3rd edition of Maximum Recursion Depth and—hold the phone, this is the first time I realised Max has managed to get his name into his own game how have I missed this for so long!—so I'm going to do you all a favour and link you to this list of posts mentioning Pokémon, ordered by relevance:

https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/search?q=pokemon&max-results=20&by-date=false
 

Sandbox

For me, the most interesting thing about Pokémon (and similar games) is exploration: the player is pushed into new environments int their ongoing quest to collect more monster allies. We can play chicken/egg with the collection/discovery pairing but the fact remains that the game makes new environments exciting to explore due to the creatures that populate them. A new territory represents the promise of novel creatures to catalogue.

[Sidebar: Max mentions the ethics of collecting and battling wild animals or nature spirits in this post, and introduces an interesting justification for it. If we consider that Pokémon are indeed supernatural creatures, then might not the collecting and battling be a form of reverence or worship? The less charitable view would be to view the Pokémon collector as a Victorian colonialist, invading exotic locations and abducting native specimens to add to their collection. This then of course raises the question of how a similar gameplay loop could be deployed without any of the ethical issues. In the monster hunting genre creators typically circumvent this issue by having the protagonists shoot the local fauna with cameras instead of hunting rifles, and an interesting extension of this would be the exploration of an alien world where something like a powerful magnetic field prevents the use of robotic probes, and instead its down to a team of scientist to catalogue the flora and fauna of a biodiverse environment. I suppose they would also need to use film cameras to accomplish this, dirigibles and mechanical transport... hmmm... sidebar over!]

My ideal Pokémon inspired TTRPG would consist of an ever-expanding map of diverse biomes (featuring diverse, random encounters with  Pokémon) interspersed with towns (with more predictable, static encounters), much like the original Pokémon red and blue games... but also much like an old school hexcrawl. The map is also something that my child and I can create together, with the "wandering monster" element ensuring that the experience still contains plenty of surprises.

Roll to Move

I recently read a post about redundant board game mechanisms and chuckled to see Roll to Move/Roll and Move on the list. I'm not a big board gamer but I'd actually dropped a randomised movement mechanic into my entry for the 200 word RPG competition in 2020. Applied in the same way it's used in Snakes and Ladders or Monopoly and yeah, sure, it compromises player agency... but there's more than one way to skin a cat.

Consider this scenario: in a hexcrawl, we can determine if a random encounter occurs by rolling D6 each time the player enters a hex, with an encounter occurring if a "1" is rolled. This means that on average there will be an encounter once every six hexes, though of course the distributed randomly in pockets and clumps as is the want of the die gods.

We can flip that around, because kids like rolling dice and moving counters around a board. You've probably worked it out already but...

...what if the player rolls a die, and the result is how many hexes they move until an encounter occurs?

I get that this will increase the number of encounters to 2 in 7 (unless I have completely misunderstood how probability works) but this could be circumvented by using a D12, assuming you wanted to keep almost the same probability. 

As for issues of player agency, there is no restriction on the direction, and players are free to "finish" their move early if they're aiming for a particular location (a town, for example).

Please let me know if this has been done before because I feel weirdly proud of this one! It also strikes me as a means by which I could trick my non-RPGing friends into hexcrawling: by making them think they're playing a board game!


Wandering Monster Tableau

While assembling materials to help populate our Pokémon hexcrawl, I came up with another (possibly original) idea. It started with the book Where's Pikachu, yuletide gift my child received this year in a similar vein to Where's Waldo/Wally. Here's an image of a typical spread:

Double page spread from Where's Pikachu?

What's nice about this book is that it takes the reader on their own journey through the various territories of the Pokémon world, and while doing so showcases the different Pokémon to be found there. The brainwave occurred when I realised this could save me a lot of time populating wandering monster tables... for example...

Underwater scene from the Spanish language version of Where is Pikachu?

If you look closely you will see that I have numbered six of the Pokémon on display. With more time I could pick out all of the Pokémon with numbers or number ranges, and thus turn the picture into a random generator by finding a dice suitable for the number of Pokémon highlighted. In the above example, I can roll a a D6 every time an encounter is generated underwater. The visual display allows the player to see an image of the encounter in context, as well as giving an impression of the environment they are traversing.

The "encounter tableau" can be weighted by annotating with dice ranges or bonuses, and then being selective about how those annotating are made. Probably about as much work as making a table, but the output is possibly more satisfying.

Conclusions

I'll come back at some point with how the game actually goes down, and how it develops through play but wanted to share these two simple ideas right now as I think they're fun and easily applied to all sorts of other games.
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6 comments:

  1. Sean F. Smith30 December 2023 at 14:04

    I've long intended to use Where's Wally books as NPC generators, dropping a dice on the page and the person it lands on is the NPC involved, with the value on the dice determining *something* (ie. power level, disposition, ect.)

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    Replies
    1. Sofinho - Alone in the Labyrinth3 January 2024 at 16:32

      We did in fact end up using it as a dice-drop table!

      In the Where's Wally example disposition would be great- odd for hostile, even for friendly, with the higher value denoting intensity.

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    2. maxcan73 January 2024 at 16:34

      Just seeing this comment now, we all went to die drop table ;).

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  2. maxcan730 December 2023 at 15:55

    I like the idea of movement on a hex crawl as like a JRPG-style random encounter, and using those big pokemon pictures to create roll tables. You could maybe even use it as a die drop table, although that might lead to inverse expectations (larger, less common pokemon having larger placement on the drop board).

    Thanks for all the references! Like I say in those posts, the idea of Pokemon I think is fine as a simple videogame, or if you don't think about the implications too much, but once you do start to dig into it more deeply, you have to address the anthropocentrism and industrial violence of it all.

    > "Maximum Recursion Depth and—hold the phone, this is the first time I realised Max has managed to get his name into his own game how have I missed this for so long!"

    It always surprises me that more people don't make fun of me about that lol.

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