In the next couple of days up until the release of „The Dream Date“ I’ll have a short series of some of the Behind The Scenes for this small TTRPG.
During the Pandemic, my friend circle had multiple zoom meetings throughout the week. It began with a virtual version of our weekly Pub Quiz which was then complemented by a D&D campaign and a virtual board game week. During that time, we worked through lots of different storytelling-based games. Eventually, when we went back to in-person board game nights, we also played games like Fog of Love, Fiasco or The Quiet Year. All of these games were rules-light role-playing games and have had much influence into the design of the game.
Actually, a first prototype was created in early 2024, when I sat down on a boring Sunday and wrote down the character creation and the four basic random tables for activities, highlights, complication and conclusion. It lied dormant for quite some time and it took some time to ripe and it just had some things missing. It was a fun way to create a small romantic short story, but it was what it was. Then, throughout the later third of the year, I’ve taken part in several courses of the Storytelling Collective, writing short stories and flash fiction and eventually after a long streak there was this announcement for the Pocket Quest on DriveThruRPG. This annual challenge is a game jam for small indie creators to create a short TTRPG of up to 25 pages max within the span of roughly 6 weeks with the given keyword „Dream or Nightmare“.
This was the final kicker to bring back my original manuscript for something that I had in my notes archived as „The Dating RPG“ or „The Dating Game“. Inspired by the Hope & Fear mechanic in the upcoming Daggerheart RPG, I included a simplified Dream & Nightmare mechanic that would bring more chaos into a date. The next few weeks I spent on refining the texts, examples and the overall design. Then, two weeks ago, I had a first gold master ready and had a first test run with my friends. The session was a blast, however, several things came up. For example, I had a fixed table for all three dates and it looked like this quite static and stale. And they wanted it in German. Because there was one thing that I didn’t anticipate. When rolling the dice pool, they already had a look at the last column for the date conclusions for the third date. They looked at it and basically tried to save one die throughout the entire game just to have their wishful ending. Of course that thing was „Third Date Sex“. But that’s not the point of dating, right?
The next few days, I’ve expanded the tables, so that this exploit should be minimized. Furthermore, I’ve also translated it to German (since it’s my native language) and also included a printer friendly version.
Now, the end of the Pocket Quest challenge is only a few days away and I hope you’ll have lots of fun, playing it with friends or use it for journaling a small dating-based romantic short story. Maybe you’re a famous movie screenwriter and use it as a Rom-Com generator. Regardless what you’ll do, I wish you lots of of fun with this game.