Quill: Stories and Games

I did some research into single-player tabletop RPGs as part of my planning for my Fall game design class. I would not have taken the time to do so had I not recently been blown away by Tim Hutching's Thousand Year Old Vampire. I backed that project on Kickstarter on the recommendation of some game design guru that I follow on social media, although now I could not tell you who. The experience of playing TYOV was amazing, much richer narrative than I expected, and it made me change my assumptions about single-player RPGs.

I decided against requiring my students to buy TYOV: although I think it is worth $15, I know that my value per dollar is not the same as my students, so I've left TYOV as a recommendation. When I looked around to see what other single-player RPGs were recommended, a few titles came up regularly. One was Ironsworn, but this was clearly too heavy-weight to use in class. Mythic comes up as the premier “oracle” or simulated dungeon master, but this also was too heavy and didn't hit the point I wanted to make about constrained storytelling.

The third that I saw recommended in a few places was Quill: A Letter-Writing Roleplaying Game for a Single Player. Right off the bat, this hit strong notes for me, taking the unique form of letter-writing and, since it is pay-what-you-want, it is essentially free for my students. Indeed, I wrote this game into my course plans before having played it, based on recommendations and my reading the rules.

Yesterday, I tried it out with my wife and two older sons. Yes, it's a single-player game, but there's no reason you cannot play next to each other and share your tales.

Caution: Spoilers about the scenarios below.

Although I had read the rules and saw that there were multiple scenarios, I did not really read the scenarios themselves. I was surprised then when the first one in the book was to write a letter of condolence to the archduke on the death of his sister. I did not expect the letter to be poignant, and this certainly gave some gravitas to the letter-writing experience. My younger son had trouble getting started, struggling with structure and form, but he did fine once we encouraged him to let loose and let it be silly, if he wanted it to be. And, indeed, it was very silly, though the rest of ours were serious.

I was surprised when cleaning up to see that another of the four scenarios is also about death. This actually made me a little angry, like the author was playing too much on our heartstrings rather than relying on solid design—like the strings in a movie soundtrack, I felt that he was toying with our emotions rather than allowing us to grow them ourselves.

It was pretty clear in our post-writing discussion that the “game” is really about getting points for rolling dice. The letter-writing is almost a separate experience from the game of rolling dice. I like the ink pot system, which requires the player to have a particular listed word in each paragraph provided some constraint to the creativity; yet, one could just write a word, roll the dice, get points, and “finish” without engaging in the story at all.

This brings me to my point, which is the reason for taking time to write this second blog post today. I hope that my students enjoy the game, and I hope that they bring up the point I made above, that the dice “game” seems separate from the ”story.” My question, then, is what makes Quill any different from a game like Final Fantasy? In Final Fantasy, you play a game about making numbers go up by maximizing skills, finding items, and exploiting combinations. Meanwhile, there's a movie going on about spiky-haired teenagers saving the world. There is, from a systems design point of view, no connection between them except that you get rewarded with story for doing well in your game.

Hopefully, writing this down here will help me remember to bring this up when we get to Week 4 of the course plan.