Travel Sized RPG
Back in 2018 I took a trip with my friends to the Dominican Republic to relax with umbrella drinks by the ocean. During the evenings we found ourselves mostly unoccupied so I designed an ultra lightweight role-playing game system that accommodated the resources we had available to us at the resort; none whatsoever. Below are the rules to the Travel Sized RPG, the design goal was to keep everything simple enough that everyone could understand and remember the rules while inebriated and that we could play it while soaking in a pool or laying on a lounge chair.
Objective
To provide a fun interactive storytelling experience in situations where playing a full-fat RPG is impractical; in the designer’s case that is usually travel. Ideally this game should be quick and easy enough to learn that after only a few minutes of explanation everyone should be off to the races.
Roles
There are two roles in Travel Sized RPG, that of the storyteller and that of the players. The storyteller is responsible for providing the narrative structure that the players operate within and also adjudicating challenges, more on those in the next section. It’s worth noting that with how rules-light Travel Sized RPG is, this is a high-trust game that will not be very enjoyable with bad natured gamers, therefore everyone takes on the role of “fun curator”; just make sure everyone is having a nice time and be good to each other.
Playing the Game
Travel Sized RPG is played through a series of challenges, and the consequences thereof, good or bad. Good consequences accomplishing player goals, and bad leading to another challenge or potentially knocking the player’s character out of the game temporarily or permanently. These challenges are soft, dependent on the character’s mental faculties, or hard, depending on physical prowess.
Character Creation
Pick a name
Assign 5 points split between hard stuff and soft stuff.
Hard stuff: anything that uses your body
Soft stuff: anything that uses your mind
Pick one piece of equipment; it gives +1 to either soft stuff or hard stuff if it’s relevant to what you’re doing
Resolving Challenges
The Storyteller picks a random number within a range, that range is communicated to the players. Difficulty is determined by the spread (e.g. 1-10, 1-20, etc)
The player guesses the number, and if they guess the number +/- their stat they succeed, e.g. a hard stuff stat of 2 would mean that guessing 7 with a target number of 5 would be a success.
Failure means another challenge, or that the character is knocked “out of it”, either temporarily or permanently as appropriate to the situation in the story.
Success means the character remains “in it” and accomplishes their goal.
Other characters can assist and grant a +1, and if their equipment is relevant they also grant another +1. The consequences of failure affect all assisting characters.
Challenge Rewards
The storyteller has a couple options for rewards on challenge success, and they can be moving the narrative in a desired direction, additional pieces of equipment (with their own +1 situational modifier), or in significant enough moments even an additional point added to the character’s hard stuff or soft stuff.
Alternative Randomizers
While the original design of Travel Sized RPG calls for making up a random number and guessing, feel free to use another source of randomization to facilitate this process as long as the random range can be communicated to players ahead of time. Options you can try and are likely to be easily obtained while traveling include:
A marked deck of cards
A random number generator on a smartphone
The page numbers in a magazine or book randomly flipped through; ask players to say “when”
Conclusion
This game was a fun challenge to design given all of the constraints, and goes to show how changing up your space can prompt creativity. My friends and I had a great time playing through a pirate themed adventure while on our vacation and I’d love to hear about your own travel tabletop experiences too!
