A Road Trip RPG for 30 Sickos - Interstate Dev Log 1
I recently started work on Interstate, my first role-playing system of my own creation. This is the first of what will hopefully be a few posts about my work on the game and my process developing a TTRPG system for the first time.
Why make a game?
One of the most wonderful things about being a naive beginner new to exploring TTRPG systems is that you have absolutely zero self-awareness or knowledge about what systems exist that can help you accomplish a specific storytelling goal. I've always enjoyed road trips--as a child, I spent months on the road in an RV with my family every year, traveling along the American West Coast and Southwest. I have an affinity for camping and a softness for suburban and rural stories set in small towns like Twin Peaks.
For a good bit I've had an interest in developing road trip roleplaying stories. To my knowledge and through my brief research, this seems to be fairly niche and unexplored territory in roleplaying. The closest I've found is systems that are designed for travel or "road" journeys in fantasy systems reliant on lots of hex-crawl maps and survival mechanics. This is great and wonderful for a fantasy campaign where the journey needs to feel like an essential part of the adventure, but when I say I wanted to make a road trip RPG, I meant a road trip RPG. This means cars, radio channels, mundane hours on the road, stopping in identical and despondent small town after small town for gas, food, and rest. The key word I would use to describe the narrative I was aiming to design is melancholy. Ultimately, melancholy is something that you can incorporate into pretty much any RPG setting or system, but I was interested in developing something where the melancholy was an inherent structural aspect of the system.
I was also very inspired by prose-based storytelling in text-based video games like Twine adventures as well as the adventure game Norco and the CRPG Disco Elysium---vivid descriptions of geography; liminal, quiet, deserted communities; poetic melancholy left as the residue of failed attempts at civilization. Isolation is a critical part of these narratives, and I wanted to design a game that was built around a single player with a single DM.
What is Interstate?
Mechanically, Interstate adventures start with a point crawl map with a starting point and a destination point. Between these two points can be any number of locations linked together by unidirectional edges that push you from the starting point to the destination point.
Players have three resources---Time, Gas, and Mood. Traveling from location to location progresses Time and reduces the Gas in your tank, as well as attaining a Mood penalty. Once it gets late or you run out of Gas, you must stop in your current location to sleep for the night.
At each location the player stops at, they can refill their Gas (which they can do at most once a day), eat food (which they must do at least once a day or they will procure a Mood penalty), and explore the location. Exploring the location is the core "roleplaying" meat of the game--it's where the player can meet NPCs & town citizens; visit core locations like local businesses, churches, or town events like farmer's markets or festivals; or otherwise engage with the location in any way agreed upon between the DM and the player. Doing this activities is how the player replenishes their Mood. The range of Mood scores varies depending on the player's goals, but the base range is between -5 and 5. There is no game penalty to having a negative Mood, but it will affect how NPCs engage and talk with the player, and also acts as a modifier for some of the DM's rolls on random tables.
And...that's it! There are no other rules. It's up to the DM or whoever's writing the adventure to determine how much content there is at each location, but the goal of locations isn't really to be there to be explored deeply--this is a road trip game, after all, and players should stop in locations only temporarily before moving onto the next location.
Character creation
Note that, with the exception of the three resources above, player characters do not have any stats. They also do not have any inventory. They also do not roll dice. This may sound atypical, but I consider this akin to journaling RPGs or solo roleplaying systems. Generally, dice are used in TTRPGs to resolve situations where the DM and the player may disagree on the resolution. In Interstate, the dynamic between the DM and the player is a core pillar of the experience for both parties. Since there are no dice rolls, checks, or saves to determine outcome of player actions, it's up to the DM to decide what makes sense and what the player can rationally do. Part is this is relying on those "yes/no, but"-type statements, e.g., if the player wants to do something that seems like it would excessively impact their experience (like threatening an NPC), you could say "yes, but they will stop talking to you and leave" to dissuade them from taking an action that will only negatively impact their fun, or you could say "no, but you could attempt to intimidate them to get them to listen to you or share more" to encourage them to change your tactics.
One of the goals of this system is to give the DM freedom in guiding the story, but also to produce conversational, back-and-forth roleplaying between player and DM. I see this game being a great exercise for players or DMs who are less comfortable with roleplaying as a specific kind of character by letting them ground their character in real-world circumstances and environments that may be more intimate and personal to them.
In addition to the rules for the game, I've come up with a lot of random tables capable of generating NPCs or locations on-the-fly, in addition to tables for random events such as hitchhikers and car crashes on the road, flavorful bits of town life for nighttime, and a table of dreams that the player can experience throughout the night.
Conclusion and Future
There's probably a decent audience out there that's read or would read this post and think, "what the fuck is she smoking, this shit sounds boring as fuck." To nab this tweet from Colin Broadmoor, my goal in this system is not to make something that appeals to a mass audience but rather will interest the 30 random sickos out there that have been looking for something like this. I should be playtesting the game and the first adventure I've written for it for the first time in the next few weeks, so expect an updated post in the near future detailing how it goes.