Cabinets and Controllers (title may be WIP) is a tabletop roleplaying game loosely inspired by my own childhood and a variety of video games.

It's built to capitalize on the whimsy and nostalgia of old arcades, and is Powered by Charge. This system uses six-sided dice to represent a character's abilities, and uses playbooks to give characters definitions, though I'm not sure if I'm going to keep that as-is.

Using a video-game multiverse as a setting means that characters will have a generic universal framework, and Charge is a light and flexible enough system to let me draw in characters from across different things and give them special abilities. The overarching setting is a Wreck-It Ralph style arcade, though I'm still in the brainstorming phase there.

Anticipated Challenges

I've been working on two major game projects, and Cabinets and Controllers is a break from how dark some of them have gotten. As a result, I'm hoping to use it to get a little respite and wrap it up over the weekend.

If things go wrong on that timeframe, then I'm going to have issues.

One thing that I'm not certain about is how I want to do the graphic design for the game. It'll be short enough that layout and visual stuff should be easy (I anticipate a maximum length of 32 pages), but I don't know exactly how I'm going to handle fonts, visuals, etc. I might need to do some investigation, since I'm not interested in using anyone else's characters and I need to figure out a way to get a coherent design without too much time investment (because, again, I'm hoping to basically finish this in seventy-two hours).

It should be more colorful than a lot of other stuff I do, so it might not hurt to look through some old video game manuals for ideas about how they do things.

Goals

One thing that should permeate every inch of this game is whimsy. I'm rewriting the rules for simplicity and clarity, since this is aimed at a younger audience than most tabletop roleplaying games.

One thing that I had originally considered was sticking to a very simple focus of character platformers (e.g. classics like Mario and Sonic, and more modern equivalents like A Hat in Time). This gives lots of room for whimsy, but I decided that making it that way wouldn't have necessarily let the mechanics develop.

Opening up to other genres means that there's a little less focus on that whimsy, and I'll need to focus on that. I haven't written any of the setting yet, so I might take a page from Toy Story and have all the characters be from one child's video game collection and set it in the Console, instead of the Arcade. That would require a name change, since Cabinets is obviously tied to the arcade pastiche.

By defining the Console's games, I can tune the setting and make sure that it keeps the saccharine whimsy I want.

Modifiers

I didn't wind up using any modifiers. I was considering scrapping the multiverse idea and doing a generic legally-distinct Mario in Renaissance Italy setup using old portraits from the public domain, but I decided against it because it wouldn't have fit the goal of having a lighter thing to work on for a while.