Your long and arduous journey has led you to this, the final confrontation. You thought you knew what to expect, but just as you struck the final blow, your ultimate foe’s eyes gleamed with unnatural light as they proclaimed…
THIS ISN’T EVEN MY FINAL FORM
A game for 4–6 players
You’ve talked before about designing a game around a stupid dice trick, but I’ve never seen the principle illustrated so clearly!
I noticed that the game is strictly GM-less, even though there’s an obvious way to run it with a GM. Is that to make each form feel distinct, since mechanically they’re all identical?
Your games usually spend more time identifying who has the right and responsibility for describing the outcomes of events - is that absent here because it’s a first draft, or because the game is strictly mechanical, and therefore it doesn’t matter who describes why (for example) a particular strike failed?
I feel like a few words should be devoted to discussing how to close out the game - what happens when you *do* reach the final form?
If you Buff your own Poison, does it still make you Critical/Down?
In order:
- The game’s whole structure is built around making the rotating-GM conceit as seamless as possible; there are better ways to handle most of this stuff when that’s not a requirement. The absence of any mechanically significant choices to make when handing off the Final Boss role is part of that strict prioritisation of seamless transitions – any means of mechanically distinguishing one form from another would need to respect that.
- The text actually does explicitly identify who has narrative authority over the outcomes of particular actions – there’s a little blurb to that effect at the end of each section.
- The fact that the not-even-my-final-forms could notionally go on forever is also part of the central gag. I couldn’t think of a good way to incorporate a true Final Form phase without undermining the bit; I’m sure one exists, but eh… it’s a first draft.
- No, it does not – I’ll edit the original post to clarify that presently.
If you’re cursed and roll triples but they’re your highest number, does the phase still end or do you have to discard the triple?
As written, you’d discard the triple before resolving the effects of the Strike action.