Starting in about one month’s time, I’ll be firing up the latest chapter in the Badass forum games. If you’ve played in one before, you sort of almost know what to expect. If you haven’t played in one before, that’s even better because these things change from game to game.
The fundamental foundation is improvisational storytelling with a light dusting of maths and an underpinning of game mechanics that I like to describe as a combination of a Choose Your Own Adventure book with a stripped down set of homebrew RPG rules.
This iteration has been inspired by the theme of the 1986 movie Highlander - each player is an immortal that can only be slain if decapitated by another immortal in a sword fight. The immortals fight until only one remains, and that immortal wins “The Prize”. The following ingredients are currently in the stewpot:
- Very PvP oriented: at least half of the players will be eliminated without having eliminated a single opponent. At heart, the game is a single elimination tournament.
- Short(ish) duration: turn deadlines will be once a week and the total game duration is not expected to be more than nine weeks.
- Small(ish) time commitment: players will be able to submit orders with no more than a 20 minute time commitment per week, but the embellishment via role playing can absorb as much time as you wish.
- No experience necessary: players from previous games will not have any sort of advantage over new players. Starting conditions are the same across the board and everyone is as much in the dark as everyone else.
- Automated, secret order submission: players will submit their orders via PM to a bot and the bot will reply and indicate which orders are okay and which are not. This is the biggest change from previous iterations.
Previous iterations include Badass Space Dragons (circa 2013), Badass Dragons of the Wasteland (circa 2014), Badass Space Dragons 2 (circa 2015), and Badass Dragon Scavengers of the Void (circa 2017). I’ve found that the games feel much more coherent as a player and much more incoherent when trying to read through them after the fact. Reading the history of these games is absolutely not required, but may or may not give you some idea what to expect.
Registration is expected to open sometime in mid September.
ETA: Registration is LIVE!
