You are two ninja masters.
Your clans have sworn to destroy each other
It’s a caltrop battle!
Requires: 2 players, 8d4, 20-60 minutes
[Official 200-Word RPG Challenge 2017 Submission]
You each have three ninja teams under your command:
- Sword Ninjas: Strong; +1d4 vs. Shuriken Ninjas
- Shuriken Ninjas: Ranged; +1d4 vs. Lotus Ninjas
- Lotus Ninjas: Poisonous; +1d4 vs. Sword Ninjas
Secretly choose a team to attack your enemy. Both masters reveal their teams at the same time and determine how many caltrops to throw:
- Standard Team: 1d4
- Roleplay the clan war before revealing: +1d4
- Advantage over enemy team: +1d4
Throw your caltrops to start the battle! Whoever rolled highest is the victor, and may describe the battle. The loser may narrate the death of one of their ninjas. The sole ninja in that team now rolls 2d4 as a base, according to the law of conservation of ninjutsu. Reroll any ties.
Any team that loses twice is destroyed. Battle until one master has no more ninjas. The defeated ninja master attacks the enemy’s stronghold alone! Ninja masters roll 3d4 as a base, +1d4 for roleplay. They may reroll 1d4 for each ninja team still under their command. The winner of this battle is the ultimate ninja master!
This game is protected under the Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License. As long as you give appropriate credit to Eli Kurtz, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made, you may share and adapt this game for any purpose, even commercially.
Design Notes
Notoriously, d4 are called caltrops for being especially painful underfoot. I took a look at previous entries to the 200-word RPG challenge and couldn’t find any invocation of this trope. I was shocked! I also realized what had to be done.
According to Roman military records, caltrops were used as early as 331 BCE by Darius III against Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gaugamela in Persia. Caltrops were also used in feudal Japan, especially by ninja in the popular imagination. I knew I wanted to use the ninja theme for my game, and I knew I wanted to use dice pool mechanics to evoke the image of scattering a bunch of caltrops on the battlefield. At this point, I needed to figure out how players would determine the number of d4 to roll.
Early drafts of the game pitted solitary ninja against each other in what was described as a tip-toe stealth fight around a battleground littered with their own caltrops. Thematically this was a good fit, but it didn’t bring me any closer to coming up with variable numbers of dice per roll. Desperate, I threw in a quick mechanic: if you roleplay before the battle, add 1d4 to your roll.
In the course of solo playtesting, I learned that roleplaying a single ninja wasn’t very fulfilling. The ninja, being stealthy, never had anyone to talk to, so I was pretty much just narrating the actions. That’s when I realized each d4 could symbolize one ninja in a squad, so I hit upon the idea that the players are actually ninja masters in control of a whole clan. Suddenly, our ninja protagonists had people to talk to! The roleplay was improved immediately, and stories really started to take shape during the game.
I had plenty of word space leftover in my draft for another mechanic. Games like Fire Emblem managed to get a lot of mechanical depth out of something as simple as a Rock-Paper-Scissors circular hierarchy, so I decided to try the same thing. Now I had three classes of ninja, each with an advantage over one of the other classes. I toyed around with each ninja class having a disadvantage too, but I wanted to keep the game relatively simple.
At this point, the game was almost complete. I had just a little more space, so I threw in a joke about the Conservation of Ninjutsu trope and called it a day.
My first legit playtest was with my fiancée. We played with minimal roleplay for about 20 minutes in total. My second playtest was with two friends, Drew and Cameron, who are both big story gamers. Over the course of an hour, they waged the final battles of the 1,000-year Demon Wars. There were tragedies, triumphs, lone samurai and giant kaiju. They took the rules and ran with them, showing what could be done with the application of a lot of imagination and buy-in. It took much longer than I thought the game could support, but they had fun playing and I was lapping it up as a spectator.
All in all, I’d say I’m perfectly pleased with my first entry to the Challenge! Did any of you make a game as well? Link it in the comments or–if you didn’t make a game–tell me about any ideas that come to mind!