Real 8: Bioforge and Willpower Month

After hiking through a snow swept winterscape of pine and birch trees our beleaguered, lazy college physique sporting party of extra dimensional wanderers spies a plume of smoke rising from the forest to the west. Keane is ready to spring into action, always eager to save those in danger in real life as well as in his teleported alter-self. Sam, his girlfriend, is not having it. He can’t go risk himself like that he could die. Keane runs off anyway, accompanied by Billy, Scott, and Ashley. Will, Sam, Liz, Jacob, and Annika stay on the path because Will got saddled with a severe penalty to long distance travel. And short distance travel. And all travel. Asthma’s a bitch.

The party of four comes upon a woodcutter’s house ablaze! Coughing from inside reveals a man trapped beneath a fallen support beam. Keane’s not supposed to do anything dangerous. Billy either. Scott is sensible. Ashley is there for moral support. So what do they do?

Of course Billy and Keane run into the building. Where did you think this was going? Keane hefts the beam up with an incredible Strength roll. Billy hauls the trapped woodcutter, Carver, out into the snow while Keane catches up. They cough up huge lungfuls of smoke and watch the small cabin smolder and turn to ash. Keane’s gonna be in so much trouble when Sam finds out …

This is all inside a game, remember that. The real life player was upset at her real life boyfriend for risking his in game self to rescue a woodcutter. Some people would mock a person for doing that. I wanted to reward it.

The thing that made us all really interested in devoting portions of our time and lives to this Real 8 experiment was the idea of playing ourselves and getting to explore a unique fantasy world while our actual, real life skills would guide us and give us the tools needed to continue ever onward.

I gotta tell you, folks, people got into it. People forgot that they were playing a game as soon as their lives were on the line. Not on the line for reals. On the line for fakes.

In the entire six month span of playing Real 8 we got into exactly 1 fight. We avoided fights, we provoked armored guards into taking a fight for us, and we intimidated bandits through clever use of archery and in-world lore that we had picked up. We did not want to fight. We did not want to die.

This all ties into the rule system that my friend and player Keane helped devise for the Real 8 setting. He called it Bioforge. Basically, we would analyze our abilities out of game and use them to generate the statistics we would need to figure things out.

Let me explain the system a bit further.

There are 8 Ability scores in Real 8:

Strength (how hard I hit and how much I can carry)

Dexterity (how skilled I am with my hands and with small scale tasks)

Agility (how skilled I am with my body *wink* and large scale tasks)

Constitution (how much physical energy I have and how much can I resist attacks)

Intelligence (how much I know and how easy it is for me to process new information)

Wisdom (how much I perceive and can infer from prior knowledge and my surroundings)

Charisma (how strong my personality is and how it affects others)

Willpower (how much mental energy I have and how much can I resist mental attacks)

These scores are on a range from 1-20. If your score is 1 you are the least possibly skilled in this ability. You aren’t dead but you’re not going to ever win any awards or impress anyone. If your score is 5 you are an average human being. It is expected that most people would have this score. If your score is 10 you are an exceptional human being that must put a lot of time and effort into this ability, to the point that you are at a peak in regards to this ability.

The range of 11-20 was reserved for monsters, mutated creatures, and any creature that had been altered by alchemy or magic. No person was ever supposed to be able to reach those scores without help from magical means. Let me give you a real life example:

A bodybuilder that does everything right, eats the correct mixture of macros to get their protein intake perfect, exercises daily and does a beautiful job targeting muscle groups, should have a 10 in Strength. A bodybuilder that does Steroids should be able to get higher than this. A bodybuilder that has a wizard work on their muscles daily to cause safe growth should get pretty dang close to a 20.

But we’re regular humans that don’t take steroids and, before entering the world of Real 8, didn’t have magic. Most of us were pretty sedentary. So we all knew our ability scores would be somewhere in the range of 3-8. We just needed a way to test this.

So we devised a series of tests. I’m going to go in-depth on 1 of the tests but I’ll explain them all.

Strength: We wanted to figure out how much weight a person could lift and carry for a period of time but we never had a chance to test this so we all just did Maximum numbers of the following exercises and Keane did some math for us to get good numbers: Squats, Sit-ups, Push-ups, Pull-ups. We did our best to estimate numbers. We weren’t perfect. Stop judging us!

Dexterity: I was really pleased with the test I designed for this one. I was going to fill a bowl with various sized beads, around 50, and your task was to use a pair of pliers to move the 50 beads to a nearby bowl. Then, once the beads had been transferred, you would switch hands and move them back. Both of these would be timed, giving you a clear indication of how dextrous your two hands were. We never got to do it! But I totally still want to do it.

Agility: Timed obstacle course. Never happened. We did visit one of those Trampoline centers where you can bounce around and they had a trampoline obstacle course that we all ran. We mostly learned that we all get tired really easily and are out of shape. We also learned that foam pits suck.

Constitution: We actually did this test! But we got bad data from it. We played the same track of Mario Kart sober, slightly tipsy, and drunk and recorded our times and how much alcohol we consumed to see how the alcohol affected our systems. We all got better at Mario Kart the drunker we got. So … bad data. Should have gone with the tear gas option one of my military buddies suggested. Would have worked so much better.

Intelligence: I was going to write a multiple choice test based on a 20 page packet of world information the party would have gotten while spending time at the big magical University we wound up at. The players would have had a week to prepare for the test. I never wrote the packet. Nobody bugged me about it. It just fell apart. We all agreed to take the average score for intelligence because we didn’t want to fight about it anymore.

Wisdom: I’m very proud of this test. My co-writer on this blog used to work at the local game store so we had access to it overnight. I chose 8 large landmark type items in the store and told everyone to memorize their locations. Then, one at a time, a person would be blindfolded, spun around in the middle of the store, and told to touch one of those items. The idea was to test our ability to perceive our environment and remember the locations of objects. It worked pretty good! We got good data!

Charisma: Our group had the largest fight over this score. I wanted everyone to make a prepared speech that would be judged by three other party members and then make up an impromptu speech on the spot after being given a topic. Everyone was … on board but not enthusiastic. Never got scheduled. Never got done. Life happened.

Willpower: This test not only happened but gave us the best data, in my humble opinion. We decided to really test our Willpower by doing it over the course of a month. Last August, every member of the group agreed to give up Recreational Internet use and Videogames. This means no streaming services, no Tumblr or Reddit, no Facebook, nothing that required an internet connection and was fun. We could still check email and if our work required it we could use the internet but for one month we had to record every infraction. It worked amazingly! A lot of us kicked some addictive habits, some of us got crazy productive with projects, some of us even got healthier. It was nuts. We definitely hated it a bit but it was good for us in the long run. Some notable things that happened:

Scott: Scott’s fiance wasn’t involved in our Willpower month so he broke constantly to play video games with her. We didn’t judge him for that. He just got a low Willpower score.

Keane: Didn’t break at all. Zero infractions. Amazing.

Billy: Most major infraction was that Google Chrome dinosaur game where your internet isn’t working and you jump over cactuses. He forgot it was Willpower month and played for a full minute.

At the end of all of our science and dedication we really only had good data on 2 scores, bad data on a couple scores, and 0 data on most scores. We self-assessed and ran with it to get the game moving and that turned out to be for the best. We just needed to play and get out of our heads about how much science should be involved in making a game fun.

So if you are reading this and are interested in game design and game creation then I hope you take this lesson to heart. If you have dedicated friends that are willing to help you, cut them some slack after they willingly give up internet and video games for an entire month to help your tabletop gaming experiment.

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