DOVIC is a TTRPG where each player is a doctor in a hospital working together to create a vaccine while managing patients during an ongoing pandemic. This game is quite obviously heavily inspired by the ongoing COVID pandemic, but also just comes from the idea of doctors having to work collaboratively to help people and essentially run a hospital, which has been seen in medical shows like Grey’s Anatomy. We also gained inspiration from the game “A Quiet Year.”
The GM will play as a patient. There are different patient archetypes; guardian of a child, another doctor, college student, elderly parent, depressed person, and a famous and/or important person. These archetypes are used to guide the GM in their roleplay to get players emotional about each patient they interact with. They also help determine different payouts for doctors who choose to take them on. Patients can have different types of illnesses that doctors may specialize in.
Players will be able to create a doctor character of their own. Doctors can specialize in fields such as cardiology, neurology, or pulmonology. They also have a health status, which will start off as healthy, but can change as the game progresses. They can give themselves personality traits to help lean into their character further. Finally, players can keep track of the money they earned, the equipment they have, and the vaccination progress.
The game plays in rounds where each doctor takes a turn. The GM will draw a patient card, and act as this patient when talking to the given doctor’s turn. The doctor can choose to accept the patient, reject the patient, or refer the patient to another doctor. If a doctor accepts a patient, the player must roll a d20 to determine how long treatment will take. If a doctor rejects a patient, they will talk to the next doctor (clockwise). If rejected by all, this patient will roll a d6, and if it lands on their risk factor, they will die and the doctors that rejected them will receive a death token. If a patient is referred to another doctor and the doctor successfully treats them, both doctors will receive payment. If this patient dies, however, then both doctors will receive a death token. At the end of each doctor’s turn, they may roll a d6 to determine how much progress has been made on each of their current patients that round. When the treatment plan equals 0, the patient is cured and allowed to leave the hospital. At the end of the round, the game master will roll dice for patients who are outside the hospital to see if they live or die. Then, the doctors can pool their money and decide to invest on equipment or vaccine development.
There are only two ways for the game to end: for the doctors to successfully develop the vaccine, or for there to be no more patients and the infection took over before you could create a vaccine.
Post Playtest Update
After playtesting, we agreed that the game felt too much like a board game and not enough like a TTRPG. We read through three new games: BubbleGumShoe, Monster of the Week, and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. We wrote out the rules of the games and each shared what we liked from them. After deliberating and reviewing the games, we went on to rework our game.
With the Sherlock game, we found the idea of reporting back to someone interesting, but wanted an iteration of that which involved a Game Master. This sparked the idea of making players be medical interns instead of fully-fledged doctors, and having them report back to an attending for guidance. We also realized that we needed our NPCs to be more dynamic so that the GM is more necessary, as we saw that our NPCs worked similarly to the ones in Sherlock. With MOTW, we really appreciated the format, and felt it would lend to this idea greatly. We felt like there was a decent balance between structure and openness, yet felt like there was a disconnect between the GM and the rest of the game (explained further in my game review). We also weren’t looking to kill any monsters or have combat; we’re doctors trying to save lives. We still wanted to implement some sort of risk, and implemented a more narratively sound fail state for our game.
With that, I bring forth our game: Fantasy Residency. This medical investigation TTRPG takes place in a hospital, where a group of interns start working. The Interns work together on cases with guidance from their Attending as they start their residency journey. As they are just starting out, they don’t get to operate surgeries, perform procedures, or create treatment plans for patients. Their goal is to relieve each of the patient’s symptoms individually and research a diagnosis. The ability to do this quickly is vital as a doctor, which is why interns start with a focus on those goals. Patients will arrive with 3 symptoms, and if they ever have more than 5 symptoms at a time, they die. If the Interns cure all symptoms, they will figure out the diagnosis.
The Attending is the GM for our game. Their job is to create new patients and stories for the Interns to help. They will be the ones guiding the Interns through each case, portraying doctors, the patient, and other NPCs. They will determine what information you receive and how the story progresses. We provided some structure by limiting the setting to be only the hospital mechanically. We allow room for locations to be brought up narratively. The Attending will create a patient with a background and at least 3 symptoms, with plenty of room for additional details and potential treatments.
The Interns will be the ones trying to relieve symptoms and discover a diagnosis. They each will fulfill one archetype, that determines their personality, quality modifications, and special ability. Interns have 6 general actions they can do by performing quality checks. Their special abilities also use quality checks, but have a bit more power and can only be used once per patient. Quality checks are performed by rolling two D6, and adding those along with the Intern’s modifier for that quality.
There is also a 7th general ability that operates differently from the rest. The Code Blue action can only be used when a patient has more than three symptoms, and could either kill the patient or help them recover greatly. We wanted to incorporate luck and pure chance into this ability to drive the suspense of potentially losing a patient. For this action, you will simply roll a D10 that determines the fate. There is no modification or reaction ability possible with this move, whatever number you roll is final.
We hope you enjoy our newly renovated game <3
