You are one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known, and ready to kick some dragon ass… In your imagination, while playing the tabletop RPG “Dice”. And only if the Game Master allows it.
The Concept
You are a young man in a dead-end job you don’t enjoy. You’ve always been interested in fantasy tabletop role-playing games, but until you recently joined a forum dedicated to the subject you had been unable to convince others to play with you. Now that you do have people to play with, your favorite time of the week is when you gather in your new friend Pete’s sketchy apartment and escape your tiresome reality by immersing in whatever fantasy world Pete thought up.
Tonight, you are ready to start a new campaign in the theater of mind role-playing game Dice. You’ll be playing with Zeek, the guy who first invited you to play, Pete, your cruel omnipotent Game Master, and two mysterious newcomers.
Current Features
Play as not only yourself but also the medieval hero in the magical game of Dice
Foster two new friendships, or work towards becoming more than just friends
Become a kind holy hero or a ruthless dark warrior
16 different items
2 skills
1 magic spell
7 achievements (+1 currently unobtainable one)
Over 20.000 words in total (including code)
Disclaimers
Contains violence and sexual innuendos
Currently a choosable gender for your in-game hero, but a male genderlocked player (sorry ladies)
Only female romance options, and it’s a goal of mine to push the romance to the background as much as possible
The writing is simple but still manages to be awful (non-native speaker)
Switching between what happens in the tabletop game and in real life may make it a confusing read
Not everything is or will be perfectly balanced, some choices work out better than others (I do want most playing styles to be a viable option, though)
I prefer hiding things so there’s only hidden achievements and choices (in the future there may be some grayed-out choices for buying something you can’t afford though)
Feedback
Right now, I’m mostly interested in hearing what you feel like should have been option but wasn’t. Things like “I own this item and felt like I should have been able to use it this situation in this way but couldn’t”.
I guess I’m just really confused on why there’s only female romance options. Even if romance is pushed to the background, it’s better to have more diversity for the people who are not into only females if they want a romance. Or if the romance is not all that needed for the story, don’t have a romance option and make this a battle focused game/story.
Honestly I’m not very comfortable writing romance in general, and writing male on male or romance from a straight female’s perspective would make it even more awkward for me personally. Secretly I also tend to get a little rebellious if I feel something is expected of me. To me inclusivity sounds like a dirty word.
That said, I’m talking about real long-term relationships with persons outside the tabletop RPG game (which there are only four of). I have no problem including several possible roleplayed (always by the male Game Master) “flings” in the game.
I can speculate on the million things I might do with romance, but honestly right now I just don’t know, and it’s not what I want to focus on. I’d rather chase off anyone looking for a male romance now and eventually decide to include something after all, then make promises I probably won’t keep.
Thank you very much, I messaged NeoHeartless (who is hopefully still a moderator for the website, otherwise I did nothing useful at all) for permission but I’ll tell him/her it’s already taken care off.
This sounded really cool to me, but then I saw that there are only female romance options and the MC is gender-locked. Even though I am a male and would only romance females in the game anyways, I will say that both of those things will turn off a lot of potential readers.
I’ve only read a few pages. Looks interesting but imo you’re going way too heavy on the female stereotyping. I’d encourage you to check out ZOE/dead gentleman productions if you want to include girls in a gaming environment. “Weirdly” enough you might get girls like myself trying to read it, but putting though sorts of thoughts into the MC’s head will turn them away. You can have obnoxious male gamers (see the above’s “the gamer’s”) if you handle it right, but if you want a wide readership, the MC shouldn’t be one of them.
If you’re wondering what I mean it’s stuff like
That’s a guy’s name right?
The girl was having trouble getting in the window and needs rescuing as your first impression, I can’t imagine this is going to bode well
You’re surprised to see girls there
You’re even more surprised a pretty girl is there
The girl with messy hair dressed in boys clothes looks more like you’d expect a gamer girl to look.
Kind of stopped there.
Honestly I’m fine with that, I doubt I will sell this, it’s not even close to good enough to be worth buying at any price.
I’m not completely against adding a female player option, there’s pretty much only one scene your gender is mentioned in anyway and pronouns are rarely used for the protagonist. But it would feel a bit cheap to me to do so, and I can’t write from a female perspective.
And as @Phoenix_Wolf mentioned, not including any romance options at all is possible as well. And then people will probably tell me these games should have romance.
I don’t really know how I’ll end up handling stuff like that yet since probably over 80% of the “story” will take place in the fantasy role-playing world, and any “real life” romance element would probably be an afterthought. But I might as well include the disclaimers now, since if I do add other options I’ll add them in afterwards to avoid mistakes as much as possible.
I’ve already changed something about one of the girls earlier today that annoyed me personally. Most things you mention convince me not to include a female perspective, though.
I would like to try to adjust the characters in a way they aren’t an archetype so much, but I don’t want to be politically correct just for the sake of it. Not everything is equal, and in my experience the player base for theater of mind tabletop role-playing is overwhelmingly male. In my eyes it’s fine for the MC to be surprised to see female players since it’s fairly uncommon. If it’s not in yours that’s okay.
If I’ve used pretty girl as a description I’d like to change that, and creating a damsel in distress situation was not my intent with that scene.
Wow. Ok. You don’t have to write from a female perspective not to heavily stereotype, neither is it being PC due the sake of it, but you obviously have your own story to write, and if alienating a good proportion of your potential audience is your goal, keep going as you are.
I made a very minor update since I think at least in certain circumstances you didn’t get certain rewards/options near the end of chapter 3 when you should get them. Chapter 4 is far along but I will only add complete chapters.
Changes:
Changed some code that may or may not have caused issues with temporary variables in the third chapter
Not helping your case dude. If you want to write it as a personal fantasy piece, just do it. Changing a character from a model to a fashion designer isn’t going to cut it. That you thought it was important enough to list as an update says something. It seems you have issues with women, in that you think we’re so different you couldn’t begin to understand us. Besides you’ve already made your thoughts clear with
Never would have bothered to even look at you wip if I had have seen that. Ok last you’ll hear on it from me.
