Super Smash Quest: BRAWL

Tabletop Roleplaying Game Adaptation

Spring 2009
Role: Game Designer
Pen-and-Paper RPG for IRC chatroom environment

Super Smash Quest Brawl is, as its name suggests, a tabletop role-playing game adaptation of the Smash Bros. fighting game series by Nintendo. It's based on rules backwards-engineered from the Smash Bros. games themselves and interpreted through White Wolf's "EXALTED" game system, whose style of play, dynamic turn order, and d10 dice pool system I felt best reflected the series' style of combat.

It also employs elements borrowed from other Nintendo games for a sense of flavor, most particularly Pokemon's collection mechanic (players are able to collect and trade special moves as they play) and the "badge" system from the Paper Mario games.

Storyline

In this game, Bowser and Ganondorf--being the sore losers that they are--left the stadium where the Smash Bros. tournaments take place and joined forces in order to destroy it. Since Nintendo's heroes are each too busy guarding their own realms, the Stadium is forced to seek out volunteers among its fans in order to protect it. My friends and I have found that these elements combined with Nintendo's social mechanics prove highly successful when combined with a storytelling format patterned after a procedural television show. Specific influences on the way we run sessions included X-Men and Star Trek; players would be sent through warp pipes to various realms in the Nintendo universe and do away missions, responding to threats from the two principle villains.

Table of Contents

Below are the sections detailing the game rules.

Notable Issues

What you see here is the resurrected version of Super Smash Quest: Brawl, entitled SKIRMISH. I re-wrote it for this portfolio as the materials for Brawl were in the alpha stage and as such never reached either full completion or full consistency between the documents; IE verson Alpha 1.00 would have slightly different ability scores or skills than Alpha 1.05, and then 1.1 would TOTALLY overhaul the ability scores and attacks. It was such a mess I had to re-write it. This version is more condensed and polished, though not without balancing issues between the numbers. Below I will address some of the remaining issues:

Movement

As Smash Quest was built from the ground up for a specific audience in an IRC chatroom there's very little visual apparatus to deal with things like navigation. We tried a lot of different systems in the past for understanding where things are in relation to one another, including a grid that I had people update via MS Paint, but the only thing that remotely worked without slowing things down was a system of relative positioning that I tended to use. I'd essentially describe a location with a series of landmarks and say things like, "the Goomba by the tree attacks Dragoshi," and "he knocks you over by the waterfall." Other GMs would generalize further by saying a move attacks either single enemies or all of them, adopting a sort of pseudo-Final Fantasy battle system.

This version of Smash Quest adds in the "movement unit" system, where relatively large areas of a battlefield are described as fitting in a square unit. Hyrule Temple's cave area would be described as two movement units below the surface, which is five units wide. I found that this works better than trying to describe Smash Bros. type gameplay in meters or feet, but at present it's still a little nebulous and a lot of movement-related additions haven't yet been added. At the very least this system allows players to draw and interact with a map fairly coherently as it's written.

Advancement

Any time a traditional advancement system was incorporated into the old Smash Quests, which were based on d20 rather than d10 dice pools, it threw the game out of balance quickly. It was a rather odd game in that it ran really long, was projected to run indefinitely, ran extremely frequently, with the GM running sessions almost daily at the time I'd made this system, and frequently acquired new players and dropped old ones. Everybody always started by the same standards, and those standards were usually "level 1," which by the time I made Smash Quest Brawl was about a hundred levels behind the regular, die-hard players that never missed sessions. They tended to make up the first 50 quickly, but this seemed like a model that just did not fit well and tended to go beyond the GM's control, making it nearly impossible to draft up good obstacles or monsters without making serious on-the-spot alterations in the middle of a game.

Smash Quest Brawl's advancement system was scaled back for those reasons and now depends on players acquiring a greater variety and specialization in their abilities and items more than on sheer power. The primary rewards for beating enemies aren't EXP but coins, and each "mission," as this game does run on a mission-based format rather than a campaign-based format, was rewarded with a sum of coins as well as a new move. Most factors outside of the moves that players collected and their own stats were equipmentized for that reason. While players' stats aren't completely static they advance very slowly in increments of 1 per major plot point. Since 1 point in any stat meant one extra dice in any number of rolls or one extra increment of damage in any number of attacks this was a significant reward without being out-of-control or difficult to predict. It also meant that beginning players wouldn't be so far behind veterans that they couldn't participate in particular sessions or wouldn't have any significant impact on a fight. What this also means, though, is that enemies advance just as slowly as the players do and have to be thought of not at particular, arbitrarily set power levels to correspond with a group's current advancement over a spectrum of possible levels but rather in terms of relative power to a single player, role in a group of enemies, and overall versatility.

Non-Combat

So what do players do when they aren't fighting things? Boy if that isn't the million dollar question. Although I always tried to incorporate some sort of skill system into this game to make what's happening outside of combat part of things I never quite seemed to nail it. One of the reasons for this is that it's just patently absurd to come up with a list of skills for characters in a Nintendo-themed universe centered especially around the Super Mario Bros. franchise. First, how do you make skills for the Mario games? What are Mario's skills, for that matter? Second, although some games like Metroid and Zelda have clear-cut room to base skills in, what happens when players are faced with a long string of sessions in settings where neither set of skills are remotely used?

Frankly the Questers just never had a need to do any hacking, intimidating, translating foreign languages, or forgery; things like item creation just didn't have any place in this game; and it was more interesting to see them try and work up creative solutions to puzzles and traps with the items they had on hand than with a series of numbers on a sheet. So, simply put, beyond the combat statistics there are no more stats because there just don't have to be any. The combat is the game and it could just as easily be played for a quick Friday night session between several players who have all the Smash Bros. characters divided up between them and want a more strategically flavored game without the hassle of knowing how to wave-dash. After many years studying game design I realized that not everything has to fall in the realm of RPG tradition in order to call itself a good tabletop game and that role-playing is a matter of imagination and storytelling more than a matter of what ingredients you throw into the game design pot.