Nobody Poops on Television is..... let's be completely honest, an utterly, utterly unmarketable name for a TTRPG.
But it really does sum up what my game is about, and that's the difficult thing!
The first, the pooping, should be obvious from my Is The Sims an RPG? series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
In a TTRPG inspired by the life sim genre, taking care of your character's physical and emotional needs needs to be present. You need to eat. You need to sleep. You need social interaction. You need play. You need environmental enrichment.
In The Sims, this was initially based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a concept proposed in 1943 by the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow (hence the name).
In psychological terms, it looks something like this:
The basic structure of the pyramid puts physiological needs at the bottom (but in the top of priority; it's like a food pyramid, the more important stuff takes up more surface area). These are your food, your water, your warmth, your rest. Security and safety, followed by intimate relationships, followed by prestige and a feeling of accomplishment, and so on.
So, in The Sims, you have a set of "Needs Bars", which place the most important needs as a resource that you need to continuously manage throughout the day. Don't eat, and you starve to death. Don't sleep, and you collapse on the ground. Don't use the bathroom, and you soil yourself. Don't shower, and you reek. Don't socialise, and you break down crying.
The UI in Sims 2, Sims 3, and Sims 4, showing the Needs Bars on the right.
Some needs in The Sims are obviously more important than others; you need to eat or you'll die. If you don't socialise, the worst that'll happen is you'll be utterly miserable.
I think this is something they accounted for in The Sims 3 and 4; the "Environment" and "Comfort" needs from earlier games aren't in the Needs UI anymore, but rather accounted for by "Moodlets"; these are the square icons you can see next to the Sim's face (the little guy with the knife and fork with 11 minutes remaining next to my alien, Norman Humanowitz, and the painting and house icons next to Homer Simpson).
The need to have comfort or a nicely-decorated home isn't quite as pressing as the need to eat and sleep, they're really more of what Maslow would call "safety needs" and "esteem needs". You want to feel safe and secure in your home (i.e. comfortable), and you want to look around at all the nice things you own in your environment. You're not gonna die if you don't achieve these, but you might become depressed or distressed, certainly. You still need them, they're just not life-or-death needs. Socialisation is the same, in that regard. It's one of the "belongingness and love needs".
So, there's some fat I can trim. Socialisation is kind of expected in an RPG--you're roleplaying with other people, after all--so I think I'd mostly want to focus on the core, physiological needs.
This is all to say that I want a Needs system in Nobody Poops on TV.
The feeling of playing a real-life, flesh-and-blood human, requires having human needs. Tracking hit points, spell slots, arrows, bardic inspirations, rages... none of that matters to a real person. But tracking hunger absolutely matters.
The "On Television" Part
Which brings us to the next part, why I'm talking about TV.
I've floated the idea of a life sim TTRPG to people before, and the general feeling I get from folks is that they don't think it would be fun to pay your taxes and go to work. And.... yeah. Fair. Valid. I agree.
But there are forms of entertainment where everyday, domestic life is actually entertaining, and that's something I could replicate in an RPG!
RPGs can cover the feeling of just about any TV or film genre you can imagine.
So......... what about sitcoms?
Do you want to set a story in a bar where everybody knows your name? What if you're a pair of newlyweds trying to keep up with the Joneses, and you've just discovered your spouse is a witch? Did your father commit a little light treason and now you've got no choice but to keep your family together? Did you get caught using a phony bachelor's degree from Columbia Colombia and now you're in a Spanish 101 study group-slash-found family?
Pictured: my literal, actual, D&D group (and probably yours, too).
Gameifying the Mundane
To accomplish a game that replicates the feeling of a sitcom, I think we need to lean into some sitcom tropes. We need a live studio audience.
I've thought about this a little, and I like the idea of having some fantastical ideas on the periphery. Eldritch, unknowable entities that exist "beyond the fourth wall" (yes, this is inspired by the eldritch horror audience from Ducktales), and whose approval can empower everyday people.
By which I, of course, mean applause.
In Nobody Poops on Television, a "success" will be determined, like in Pendragon, by rolling equal to or under your target number. Your target number is determined by your Personality score. Neatness 15 or Messiness 5, for example, would mean a target of 15 or 5, depending on the situation. I'll go into this in more detail later.
Difficulty will be determined by requiring a certain number of successes. Let's say, something that's a cakewalk requires 1 success. Something easy, but with a reasonable chance of failure, requires 2 successes. So, for instance, cooking a meal while distracted. We'll call this a target number, rather than difficulty, because lower Attributes would mean harder rolls as well, and it might get confusing.
Now, you're really good at cooking, so you have a 5 in your Cooking Skill, which gives you extra dice to add to your dice pool. So, you not only succeed on this skill check, but you achieve successes in excess of the difficulty number, getting 3 successes!
In this situation, that "success in excess" is converted to an Applause Die. This is a bonus die you can add to a future dice pool, meaning that you're more likely to succeed in the future. Gaining momentum as you do so, with each subsequent success improving your chances at future successes.
Think of it like popularity with the audience. Your character does something the audience really likes, and so they're placed into more and more favourable situations by the writers.
That feels very sitcommy to me.
Think of Fonzie from Happy Days. He started as a supporting cast member, but became more and more popular as time went on, eventually becoming the show's primary character. Or Frasier, in Cheers. He joined the cast in season 3, and ended up getting his own spinoff! And just this year, he got another show.
Marrying the Two Concepts
I think this mix of being thrown into farcical, sitcom plots while also being a flesh-and-blood human being with real, human needs is an interesting one, and it's rife for humour.
Nobody ever poops on TV, after all, so wouldn't it be interesting if you (and your fellow players) had to? Imagine, waiting in line at the Chinese restaurant from Seinfeld.
RPGs require a bit of buy-in from the players. If you set up a quest and a location, for example, waiting to be seated for dinner, very few of them are going to give up on that. They're gonna be invested in the story you've prepared as the GM, and they're gonna wait to be seated, maybe taking initiative and trying to find seats and being rebuffed by the wait staff or angry diners whose seats your players stole.
There's a quest here, needing to find a table. It gives the story a reason to exist, but it's gonna be solved by simply waiting.
So, that's where Needs management comes into it. They're hungry. They're tired. They need to pee. But if they get up to use the bathroom (for paying customers only, necessitating they use the petrol station across the street instead), then when their name's called, they might not be around to get a seat.
Stakes!
Now, some players might give up and just grab a sandwich from Subway on the way home, but I feel that players who don't invest in a story presented to them aren't being given something they want from a story.
Now, waiting at a Chinese restaurant isn't for everyone. Some players might find that boring. So, you need to know your group and the kinds of plot they'd be interested in. Maybe they're buying concert tickets (or tickets to a Critical Role live show). Find something real that your players would be invested in, and pit their own bodies against them!
I dunno, I think that's neat.
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