Like a Brother...

[mcroft]

Best Friends is an RPG that started as a 24 hour 24 page challenge, and has been expanded to a honest-to-Bob product for money (the 24-hour edition is still out there and shows the concepts he's working with.

The characters are all best girlfriends who hate each other because of petty jealousy. "I hate _____ because she is richer than me." The stats for your PC are based on the number of other PCs who hate you because of that stat. If two people hate me for being richer, I have "rich: 2" as my stat. Example scenarios: "someone crashed the car".

robin_d_laws is re-purposing the mechanic for a political game he's running. His players are the presidential cabinet of a future totalitarian American Empire. Good idea! He slotted in his own stats.

So, obviously, it's a ruleset for Nine Princes in Amber.
Our stats would be:

Strength (lifting, punching, soaking blows, holding brothers over cliffsides)
Fighting (with armies, with swords, taunting, gunplay)
Pattern (finding magical arms, going places, breaking black roads, slowing down time, etc.)
Spellcasting (trump tricks, teleporting, giving hotfeet to demons)
People Skills (seduction, getting wine and smokes smuggled into the dungeon, being purty)

and the first scenario could be "dad's missing".

I don't know how it plays out if there are more players than stats, that's not in the free version.

Comments

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

I'd give it a shot to play

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

It's also quite possible to use this to play Four Princesses in Amber, which maintains the gender of the original and limits the sisters to the range of players the game has been playtested with and makes the boys the NPCs.

I don't think I'd change the stats for that, but they're tweakable for the game in any case.

[arrefmak.livejournal.com]

Nice idea.

How it would work

[bounty42.livejournal.com]

I don't have the rules, so I'm not sure how this all works, but it looks to me (from the character sheet preview) that you're supposed to vote once for each stat, rather than one stat for each player. If that's the case, then things could go really wrong. worst case is that 5 players end up with 9 stat points, and 4 end up with strait 0s.

A varient might be to let each stat be assigned twice, but then you've got 10 stats and 8 slots, so it doesn't balance.

Still I'd have to read the actual rule book to guess any more than that.

Re: How it would work

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

So, the game started as a 24 hour RPG based on a Forge challenge. The 24 page version is on his website, which lets you read basically a 'might be playable' first draft. It always balances. You have to pick each PC once, with special rules for if there are a different number of PCs than slots (basically, if there's 5 PC, you pick each of the other 4 for one stat and the person to your left for an additional one).

You can read the rules on the link at the top.

I've never played it, though.

[boxninja.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the hatreds work perfectly in their allocation. The rules ensure an even distribution of hatreds from and to all the characters, don't worry about that. (In fact,if you end up with Hatred's that don't total 5 it's a checksum to highlight where someone has made an error.)

I can't think that character creation changed much, if at all, from the 24-hr version. The full version has rules and advice on how to play out conflicts (important point: conflicts are not with external adveristy as much as with each other, that's the key) and how a game would play.

But for stealing character creation, I think it's all there already.

The big secrets "under the hood" are as follows:
(1) you don't need to have the 5 named Hatreds listed, they can be anything that is a source of conflict. So Robin's drift to changing the Hatreds to something that fits is key.
(2) you don't have to have just 5 of them. You could have less or more depending on the number of players and areas of potential conflict/resolution. I guess the 5 works well for 4-6 players. For more players, say 9, you might want more. Of course the number of Hatreds that you give out and can receive sets the maximum limit any one Hatred can have.

Thanks for the interest! There some Actual Play threads on its homepage (http://gregorhutton.com/boxninja/bestfriends/index.html).