Apocalypse Girl

Tabletop roleplaying began as an imaginative leap from miniatures gaming, and yet in many ways, particularly in its modern indie RPG form, it's closer in heart and ethos to theatrical improv. Improv is, of course, a form of finger exercise for actors, a way to hone their chops but not (usually) viewed as an end in itself; and similarly, there's a class of tabletop RPGs which can best be viewed not as full games in themselves, but as finger-exercises for gamemasters and/or players. To me, at least, the classic example is The Files Mr. Freitag, which perhaps I'll try to dig up the rules for at some point -- but Apocalypse Girl also falls into this category.

It was written by Sydney Freeberg for the 2005 1KM1KT 24-hour RPG design contest. It's best played by three players: one plays The Girl, who is wholly human and without mystical powers, but is in fact the representation of the divine on Earth; one plays The Dragon, who is not wholly human and has almost unlimited power, and is the representation of darkness on Earth; and one plays The World, the forces of everyday humanity and the friction of the mundane. Only one can win. The end of the game can mean the Apocalypse, the final struggle betwen good and evil; the arrival of the Messiah and the apotheosis of the divine; the establishment of Hell on Earth; or (perhaps most desirably) the banishment of the mystical, freeing humanity to find its own fate.

The rules involve writing things down on index cards, assigning each a Power and Loyalty rating, along with a meaning, then rolling dice of entities you control (power = number of dice), pitting them against others, and bringing new entities into play or removing them from play. I could go into more detail, but I'm not sure it's germane; the point here really is that the "meaning" of each card provides a hook for improvisational story-telling, the dice are a mechanism for resolving disputes among the players while introducing a strong element of uncertainty to the proceedings, but the heart of the game is actually a form of collaborative and interactive storytelling based on the game's apocalyptic theme. There's an element of the Ching here too; cryptic texts evoked by a random element and interpreted by the players.

You can play this game (and even by Salen & Zimmerman's definition, it is such, since there is undeniably a quantifiable ending) in an hour or two, and perhaps should -- with others who are willing to overcome personal reticence and fling themselves into story and character.

Flaws? Yes, too much system, and perhaps not enough context, though the introductory fiction is strong, and the conceit of the game powerful. And of course it is inherently limited in duration and scope; but that is not so much a criticism as a definition.