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TTRPG Tuesday: Let's Do That Hockey

Yo uh is it another TTRPG Tuesday? I think it is!

I said I’d bring something to Playtest Zero on Thursday, and you know what’s been rattling around my head? Well, Channelers still, and Cold Iron Company, but today in particular: this post on mechanics inspired by Blue Lock.  But I don’t want to make the Blue Lock fan game - I want to take an already insane feeling system and map it on a world I care more about - Tartans Hockey Live!

THL is, as everyone knows, the narrative fiction podcast series that exists entirely in my head and various Google docs, following a ragtag team of players in the fictional Hockey Elite League, which includes games played atop a moving train, trapped in a time loop, or in the shadow of Goshzilla, the Great Lakes Kaiju.  While THL follows a specific cast, I think for this game (which I might call Outside Edges or WHEEL BABY WHEEL or the Top Shelf system) we’ll play a lot looser, somewhere in the middle of the “This Is An Insane Approach To A Real Sport” of Blue Lock and the “This Is Pure Fantasy That Happens To Be Hockey” of THL.

So let’s start with the basics:

  • The gameplay covers the Training Camp for an HEL team, with hopefuls looking to earn a contract and a roster spot, with some NPC coaches and existing players
    • Or is this a brand new team and they’re competing to be the starters?
    • All players share control of NPCs
  • There are pvp challenges, semi-coop challenges, and solo challenges
    • One of these is a scrimmage where you personally get 3 points if you score a goal, and -1 point if you get an assist
    • The solo challenges should be journaling or some other genuine solo system, heads down
    • Solo challenges include drills both sane (fastest lap, hardest shot) and otherwise (blindfolded sniping, skating with something other than the puck)
  • A la Nightwitches, there is the pervasive challenge of being undermined by sexism outside your job, and while you’re trying to do it
    • You do not have the time or money to do what you were born to do, and getting a roster spot will be a huge accomplishment and also make that balance even harder
  • I do want to do all that stuff from the last post, about weapons as skill cards.  Part of me thinks it’s weird to put such crunchy technical details in a setting that flirts with being too unrealistic, but that’s the fun of the challenge I guess
    • Relatedly, perhaps some of the skills should be related to doing impossible or non-hockey things: A skill card for being resistant to magic, or Being a Nepo Baby
    • Perhaps what will make this marriage of real and unreal work is a deadpan commitment to taking the unserious deadly seriously: Even if the players laugh, the characters never are
  • Does… everybody win? In the sense that all the player characters ultimately achieve their goal of making it as roster players, whatever the pecking order may be, and the only actual eliminations are explicitly or implicitly NPCs? Or is it dramatically interesting to tell the story of someone who cannot overcome the odds (which is the perpetual tale of the THL characters?)

Alright, now for an MVP to bring to Playtest Zero, I think I need two basic starting challenges, and the beginnings of a skill tree, tack on a conflict resolution mechanic or two, and the bones of a character sheet.  Can I do that by Thursday night, on top of my other commitments (including literally playing hockey twice tomorrow)? We’ll see!

Til next time.

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