Design of Runehack: University's Pillars

Ahoy! Did you notice the school year is starting again? And so is the university? Or maybe it did already. I don't know, it seems to happen at different times all around the world. Anyways, while working on the next Runehack city article, I got distracted, wrote, and published a one-page RPG for One Page RPG Jam 2021. Runehack: Univerity's Pillars is a game taking place in the Avurai University and it's all about balancing your life by choosing and stacking dice representing the opportunities you've got over your time spent studying. While I could describe all of the rules, or add yet more rules to the mix, I figured I should try to talk for once about how I've designed them. The game is freely available on itch.io through the link above, so if you want to, feel free to check it out and download it as a PDF. Let's hope this won't be too chaotic.

I've wanted to write a dice-stacking RPG for a long time. Making towers out of the dice was something that I always found neat since it's something of a meme in the D&D community for players to do while bored. I also wanted to make a school game, where the player has to make decisions about their personal life, and how they invest the time they spend there. One day, I had a bright idea of combining the two.

The lore article regarding Avurai University was entirely written before I conceived of this game, but there were some cool things to latch onto. For example, three semesters (trimesters?), each of which lasts three months, for a total of four years of study. After a lot of time spent deliberating, I figured I'll make the player earn one extra die for every month that passes. And, coincidentally, that was a very good choice.

How many pillars? I wrote down some ideas, combined some, and ended up with three core pillars that sounded good enough to me:

• Self, which stands for improving yourself by exercising, working on your passions, and caring for yourself,
• Contacts, which stands for your friends, family, and potential romantic partner as well,
• and School, which stands for your performance on the exams, lectures, lessons, and extra-curricular but school-related activities.

There was a small problem though. I didn't have enough dice to test it out. So, I went to a local gaming place, where I stacked dice for about an hour or two. Fun fact: To play this game optimally while being sure you'll never run out of dice, you would need 4d4 (or more if you somehow manage to balance d4's on top of d4's), 38d6, 36d8, 36d10, and 36d12. The highest towers I made were 11 dice tall each, most of them below that but usually above 6 dice.

I thought about whether that's a problem or not, did some maths to see what the final numbers should be. There are 4 years of 9 months, for a total of 36 dice to distribute into three pillars. This means... at least one would have to have 12 dice.

But wait! I did include a way for a player to remove a die. While that is true, it's also extremely rare - this chance is 1 in 36. In other words, it would happen on average once per four years of study. By the way, getting a d4 has the same chance, and that die serves as a nice way of preventing a player from progressing further in one pillar due to some critical problem. Anyways, even with one die removed on average, that's 34 dice.

This was a hard problem to overcome, but in the end, it turned out to be only a matter of mindset. It's fine because I'm emulating here a flying university that expects the impossible out of their students. Only fifty students finish the fourth year from each of the faculties, and that's assuming their test results were good enough. Who knows, maybe with enough training, there could be players who can reliably stack 12 dice. If I did 11 with little to no training, others can surely do better with training.

Believe it or not, in the beginning, the rolling worked very differently. The player rolled once to see which die they get, and each die could go into one, two, or three pillars. I originally wanted to make separate tables for every group of events, but... that turned out to take up too much space on the precious single page I could use. I know I could have technically used two since One Page RPG expects you to print the paper from both sides (at least I think?), but I liked the challenge better this way. After reworking how the core dice rolls work though, everything became much more clear - instead of making a lot of events based on choices players could make, I could just... randomly generate the options that a player has to choose from. Another quirk that turned out to be a good thing for reworking was the rolling of "scores" for the summaries of study years. Originally, you had to roll these at the end of your school year. Which meant... you had to take apart your beautiful tower, roll the dice, add them up, find out you have no romantic partner nor social life, and then put the tower back together. Using the rolls from the events instead turned out to be a much better idea, plus impactful for the player.

Alright, there's that! It took me surprisingly long to actually get back to this article, because... well, I've revived an old project of mine. You might even get to see a preview of it sooner than you'd expect.

Thank you for reading my rambling, and have a nice day!