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A very simple cipher, as is required for realtime play. Not much meat to the game, but it inspires me.

I kinda wanna use this as a base for something bigger. Maybe shift modes into being a boardgame, make a simple board consisting of connected & named nodes, and involve a third player. The commander and the third player, the antagonist, can see the board, while the spy cannot.

The antagonist's goal is to capture the spy by correctly predicting where they will move to, (can't predict the same place twice), the commander + spy want to get the spy in the enemy base without being detected. The antagonist also has a number of units, each of which can move between distinct sets of three nodes, which they are obliged to move every turn. If the spy moves into a unit, they also lose the game, but they're fine if a unit moves onto them.

When the commander gives the sheet to the spy, he also gives a copy, without the polynomial, to the antagonist. The antagonist must put down the paper when the spy declares they're ready, and then declare their move right after the spy passes in their move, recording in plain on paper.

The spy then has the chance, which may be turned down, to send a code back to the commander. Similarly, they pass the key to the commander but not to the antagonist, but both get a copy of the ciphertext. And the antagonist must put down the paper when the commander announces they are done reading.

Of course, the cipher can swapped for other ciphers, either for challenge, tripping up the antagonist, or simply to teach more ciphers.

Hello! I am said friend :p I actually didn't know I had been mentioned and was here to check if there were any updates since the last copy I had.

I'm actually running it again, with some thought given as to replayability and basic fun. I thought you might be interested in the changes I'm making for this second run:

During the first part, I'm going to tie each skill roll to some kind of lore-building. Ex: If the player wants to use their knife skills, they need to create some NPC who will suffer unless this Beast is correctly killed, cooked and served. If they want to use Instinct, they have to establish some way this world is dangerous, possibly relating to the current Divine Beast hunt. I found that players focused too much on the dice rolls and TV's, (that it was at a pub and they were drunk was a contributing factor), to the point where they were eventually just ticking off steps on the recipe, so I wanted something mechanical to bring focus back onto the worldbuilding. At least for running at a pub!

For the second part, I'll be rejigging it fairly entirely. I might be missing something, but it seems fairly straightforward to just . .. start step 1, finish step 1, start step 2, finish step 2 . . . with no need for juggling plates. And if I take command, then the very small time windows fucked over the players. So I'm going to make it up as a restaurant service. They know they'll be feeding [x] hungry people, probably 40-50, I'll have to think about amount of time spent. Depending on their success in part one, they'll have enough ingredients to make [x]+5 or [x]+10 portions. They'll have a [y] minute lead time, I'm think 5 minutes per 'action' during this phase, so probably 30 minutes, and then the chits start coming in, determined by a d10 rolled every 15 min, with intentional "big tables" at an hour in, 2 hours in, etc.

They'll only have a certain number of kitchen implements to cook so many things at a time, chits need to be served in full by a certain period of time, dishes can only sit at each stage, including finished but unserved, for so long before being ruined, some amount of prepwork can be pre-done, kitchen implements and serving dishes need to be cleaned before re-use, there should be a lengthy blessing step somewhere in there, some "orders" will have modifications which need to be kept straight, and each stage of prep can do a certain number of dishes as one action. The blessing step will likely be "unlimited", but "cooking on the stovetop" might be 6 at a time, "as you only have 6 burners". The idea is a lot of little steps that are individually easy to accomplish, since the idea is juggling plates.

I'm going to keep the second part organized by writing each chit and each batch on index cards, and moving the batches of cooking dishes forward on a prep-track.

Since it'll be much longer, I need to reduce dice-rolling for the second part, so most of it will be done by pre-reqs, (ex: "2 or more bombast", "Exactly 1 Sharp"), rather than  by dice-rolling. I'm thinking you can challenge a pre-req you don't meet by rolling dice. I might also demand that each dish is "above par" by 1 or 2, meaning that the pre-req is exceeded in at least 1 or 2 steps, or if challenged, that either 1 critical success or 2  successes were made.

If you're interested in the changes I'm making, I'll let you know how it goes, and send you a copy of the write-up after my next game of it on tuesday. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to change right now, but I imagine it'll evolve more as I actually finish the write-up.