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

[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).