RPG-Ball

Like most nerds, I just don't get sports. Do the thing. Win the points.

Like most Americans, I watched the Superbowl. I'm from Washington State, so it kinda came to me.

Recipe for disaster. Nerdy kid watches the big game... and likes it? Someone, somewhere, just made a lucky die roll.

~

As I watched it, I analyzed the match for the gameplay in it. I thought of it as an RPG.

First up, the stupid approach. All players spend all rounds making Skill: Football checks on this table:

1: Injury
2: Wildly ineffective, lose points to other team
3: Fail
4-8: Marginal success
9-12: Average success
13-18: Good success
19-20: Critical

Just do that for 2 hours. Whee. Fun.

~

The less crappy approach would be to look at the common traits, used by (theoretically) everyone.

• Throwing
• Catching
• Running
• Tackling
• Blocking
• Dodging
• Showing Off

Any football fan can point out there's more, but hey- I'm new here. Different players in the party have different skill distributions: QB is mostly throwing, Linebacker is mostly Blocking, wide received is running/catching, etc. Fighter, rogue, and ranger analogs all around, with the cheer team as clerics.

The analogies reinforce the idea of adventurers doing the same thing, in different ways. He hits people. He runs really fast. She yells and waves pompoms. Everyone draws from the same pool of skills, but in different aspects. How boring would it be, if everyone was good at everything?

"Hey, can you be QB? I want to go hit people with my titanesque man-shoulders."

To me, personally, this just goes even further on the theme of character size/weight. I really wish I could D&D the thing and have everyone be whatever neutrally, but this is good. A character's representation actually affects what they can do, and defines them further as a character. The scrawny guy actually does scrawny-guy things, instead of taking bullets like a champ.