200 Word RPGs

200 Word RPGs is a yearly challenge to write a complete, playable RPG in 200 words or less.¹

Milliways

Each player plays the character they found most sexually attractive from the piece of media they most recently consumed.² Nonfiction counts if it features people who are public figures or dead. Each player chooses a TTRPG which best models their character’s home setting.

Characters open an ordinary door and walk into Milliways, an interdimensional bar. While a character is in Milliways with the front door closed, time stops in their homeworld. The GM plays Bar. Bar communicates through writing on napkins and sells any object available in the multiverse. Bar accepts any currency from any dimension. The first drink is free. Security forbids violence in the bar. Milliways's other features are at GM discretion.

If a character is out of the game for a lengthy period, create a new character using your next most recently consumed piece of media.

If a character opens Milliways’s front door, it opens to where they left from. Characters may visit worlds other than their own. If the door closes from the homeworld side, it becomes an ordinary door again. A new door may open to Milliways at a dramatically appropriate moment.

When inside a homeworld, play according to the rules of the chosen TTRPG.³

Superhero Dance Party

You need: music, a d6, some tokens, space for dancing. Costumes if you want.

Roll for a setting for your dance party:

1. Celebration of saving the world.

2. Last night before the apocalypse.

3. Secret metahuman nightclub.

4. Superhero family having a wholesome family night.

5. Awkward superhero team Mandatory Fun.

6. Make up your own.

Each player creates a superhero and chooses one to three superpowers. Turn on setting-appropriate music low enough that conversation is possible.

Dance as your character would dance. When you use your superpower as part of your dancing, describe how you use it. Other players close their eyes. They raise two fingers if they think the use of the superpower was cool and one finger if they think the use of the superpower was lame. If the majority of players think the use of the superpower was cool, gain one token. If players unanimously believe the use of the superpower was lame, gain two tokens. Otherwise, lose one token.

The person with the most tokens wins.

Anguished 200-Word RPG Creator

Each player is a writer who came up with a brilliant idea for a 200 word RPG while half-asleep and then forgot it.⁴

Each player SECRETLY rolls on this table for the quality of their 200-word RPG:

1. Your masterpiece.

2. A seed of an idea that could be something with work.

3. More-or-less a writing prompt, and not one of the more specific ones.

4. Something that would be your masterpiece, except that someone else already wrote it.

5. Just plain stupid.

6. Completely incoherent dreamlogic nonsense.

On your turn, describe the brilliance of your 200-word RPG, its contributions to the discourse, the small scraps you can remember of it, your utter despair, your desire to quit the high-paying and fast-paced world of 200-word RPG writing entirely, etc. Ham it up.

Other players guess which you rolled. Any player who guesses correctly wins. If any player guesses correctly, you win. Once all players have gone, the player(s) who won most often wins the game.

I give permission for these games to be archived off-site.

1. Footnotes are authorial commentary and not counted in the final word count.

2. The fact that this raises questions like “what is the most sexually attractive [Bluey character]/[Pac-Man sprite]/[participant in the 1917 Russian Revolution]” is a feature, not a bug.

3. I chose to outdo the guy who incorporated by reference the entire rule-set of Catan through incorporating by reference the entire rule-set of all RPGs ever written.

4. Based on a true story (me, the morning I wrote this).