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

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.