I've been thinking about coming up with my own d20 game. . .
Remember that one cartoon in one of the 1st edition guides (maybe the DMG), where the adventurers are gaming with a system where they're all pretending to be lawyers and accountants in an post-industrilized society.
Sounds like fun.
My game is called "Bureaucracy," and you have to negotiate your way through a number of very tricky hazards, requiring every ounce of your wit, tenacity, and patience. For instance, traversing the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to get transportation, filling out applications for health insurance whenever you take damage, and so on . . . all of which must be done without falling below a certain credit rating.
The credit rating is your alignment, and it's the basis for all your moral decisions during the campaign. Your weapons are various spending tools, like credit cards, checkbooks, hard cash, PayPal, etc. Your advesaries are monsters that sit behind thick plastic and tell you to fill things out in triplicate.
C'mon. . .why play D&D when you can have Bureaucracy!
The cartoon was in the AD&D DMG 1st edition. The adventuring party was playing "Papers & Paychecks."
"The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers" William Shakespeare
"Let's not forget the bureaucrats"
A very apt thread title.
My game is called "Bureaucracy," and you have to negotiate your way through a number of very tricky hazards, requiring every ounce of your wit, tenacity, and patience. For instance, traversing the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to get transportation, filling out applications for health insurance whenever you take damage, and so on . . . all of which must be done without falling below a certain credit rating.
Are you Australian? I only ask, because we're renowned for our layers upon layers of red-tape.
Heh heh. . . I'm a U.S. citizen, and red tape is King here. . .
I was also thinking about giving every NPC and PC in the game an Extraodinary ability, much like a Barbarian's rage. . . of course, using it gets you arrested, and deepens the pull of the beauocratic process.
We Americans are good at rage. . . especially on the freeway. :)
Chief Technical Officer
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My game is called "Bureaucracy," and you have to negotiate your way through a number of very tricky hazards, requiring every ounce of your wit, tenacity, and patience.
Douglas Adams, best known for creating The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy designed a text-based computer game called Bureaucracy in 1987. The object of the game - based on the author's real-life experiences - is to get your bank to acknowledge a change-of-address card.
-Vic.
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Oh for Pete's sake! Will I EVER have an original thought? I had never heard of that. I've played the Hitchhiker's Guide game (was it Infocom?), but I'd not heard of Beauocracy the text-based game.
Okay, new game, even more boring than Beaurocracy... it's called Corpse.
In Corpse, you play a recently deceased person, in a lead-lined coffin. You roll a number of checks to see how you decay over the years. The game ends when you are dust.
The GM takes breaks in the action to describe the setting. "Yep - you're body's STILL in the coffin, roll another decay check." You can also attempt to charm worms and other bugs to speed along the process, but you get a minus infinity on your check because you're dead.
Oh yeah, thought of a module for the game, where the excitement really speeds up. "Graverobbers: an adventure for 2nd level corpses."
*sigh* if I hear one thing about a game called "Corpse" released by Hasbro in the 1920's or something, I will offically give up thinking all together.
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Oh for Pete's sake! Will I EVER have an original thought? I had never heard of that. I've played the Hitchhiker's Guide game (was it Infocom?), but I'd not heard of Beauocracy the text-based game.
Okay, new game, even more boring than Beaurocracy... it's called Corpse.
You are correct. The Hitchiker's Guide game was Infocom, and so was Beaurocracy. You can find them online for download or playable in java windows from a number of sites (Abandonia (a great, great site!) or Google 'Infogram text-based games). There is also a spiffy update of the Hitchhiker's (H2G2) game. The graphics are acceptably similar to the Guide animations from the old BBC series. Just remember to put the fish in your ear when you finally get one away from the cleaning bots!
Now about this 'new' Corpse game of yours...sit down for a moment. (just kidding)
Page 111 of the AD&D DMG (bottom of the now yellowing page):
an apparent Fighter, speaking to a Cleric (?), in the presence of a Monk (?) and a 6-sided dice roling Magic-User says,
"It's a great new fantasy role-playing game. We pretend we're workers and students in an industrialized and technological society."
Who rolls two 6-sided dice for abilities any way?
-LG
D&D Characters play Futuristic RPG about Cowboys and Indians
D&D characters play similar style game called "Caves and Carnivores"