Our team consists of: Louis Albanez, Emily Ghang, and Jacob Wilson.
We’ve been meeting daily since Sunday to polish this gem.
On Sunday, we had our first in-person meeting to start brainstorming ideas for our tabletop roleplaying game. Given that much of our team had limited experience with tabletop RPGs, we decided it’d be good to start by playing one together. Initially, the group was thinking of playing A Quiet Year, but in the interest of making a comedic game, silly Jacob thought it’d be neat to look at Fiasco. We then came to the realization that it’s a bit too long and complicated to try and play within the limited time we had – so we went back to A Quiet Year.
We enjoyed the game’s loosely defined and customizable narrative – you can build a settlement of whatever kind you like, but you can also fill it with jokes. A dragon in the corner that does absolutely nothing? A population that fetishizes apples to the point that they send children to pick them as if their moral compass was 200 years old? Or even… a broken-down McDonald’s that was ruined by its decision to stop serving all-day breakfast? It was all fair game, and from that arose comedy, but not quite enough.
Louis had the idea of making a game revolving around the age-old occurrence of hamsters dying in the most bizarre ways, and we got pretty far with this idea and took some elements of Fiasco and A Quiet Year to design the mechanics, which would involve human players trying to set up conditions for one hamster player to die. We focused too much on the customization and gameplay instead of the narrative though, and we were unable to make it seem completely cohesive. We thus had to throw out the concept. What we retained, though, is our inclination towards comedy and also towards devious player-to-player interactions.
After much deliberation afterwards, we drew inspiration from our exquisite corpse drawings. Absurd concepts were common among them as well as animated corpses, which led us to think of outlandish ideas involving the undead. Emily came up with the concept of using monsters instead of hamsters or cockroaches, as it would make more narrative sense. We settled on the idea of using monsters and trying to make something a little more traditional in terms of mechanics before reconvening on Monday. Previously, our sensibilities were still heavily influenced by our experience of making regular board games that have more mechanics than story, and we realized we had to tip the scales. It was on Monday that we came up with the concept of our game, which didn’t yet have a name. On Sunday, Jacob jokingly came up with the goofy concept of monsters running a fast food restaurant because he likes food, but after some fleshing out, we decided it could actually work. Except it’s not just fast food now.
Borrowing some ideas from Dungeons & Dragons, a LOT of concepts from Blades in the Dark, and also some ideas from The Witch is Dead, we decided to make a game about monsters that are trying to integrate themselves into human society. Inspired by a great monster chef that made people re-examine their beliefs about monsters, they decide to start a restaurant themselves to gain further acceptance in society… for some reason. But it’s hard, y’know. They’re also still probably a little evil. “Maybe they won’t like us, but maybe they’ll like our food!” Emily came up with the name Monsters and Munches. We had a few other ideas for names, but after sending out a strawpoll link to our friends, we decided on this one because it won by a LANDSLIDE.
We came up with character sheets, different monster classes to define abilities (e.g. the vampire has high rizz, and the ancient mummy has a lot of knowledge), and a two-phase gameplay system. In the first, players can interact with each other and do their silly Italian accents or whatever, and they can also procure food however they can without the use of money. (hint hint: stealing) In the second, they COOK. Mechanics for cooking still need some polishing, but we were able to have a small roleplay session at the end of our meeting and enjoyed it. Some of the elements of said cooking system would be order cards, event cards, dice rolls, and resource management. It’s a lot to work through, but I think we’re onto something good.
For character-building and for the restaurant, we thought of systems such as character creation, stats, and roles. With her UI/UX design background, Emily designed the character sheet and the restaurant sheet using Canva. As our game’s narrative is based on a restaurant, Emily wanted to design the sheets to look similar to the menu of a restaurant. She put in the opening hours as well as the location for little details as well. For the character sheet, it included character names, vice/motivation, a box for drawing the character, stats including rizz, spookiness, strength, knowledge, skill and perception. For the restaurant sheet, it included the name of the restaurant, specialty/food types, location, days, upgrades, and inventory. Overall, the design is expected to be an interesting addition to the affect of the game.
As we continued writing details and discussing mechanics, we tried to playtest at least one time per meeting. Our playtests were usually enjoyable with some moments that made us laugh and an overall sense of cohesion. We were often able to notice a few mechanics that needed fleshing out, revamping, or that we didn’t need at all through these playtests, and we also got a more concrete sense of what our game is by playing it even while it was very incomplete, so the playtests were overall helpful. For example, we scrapped basically all cards to reduce printing costs and also to streamline gameplay – we were able to playtest perfectly well without cards and figured much of their uses could be replaced by an oracle mechanic, or rolling dice to look up values in tables.
That being said, we as its developers feel that these playtests felt even more subject to our bias than the board game playtests due to the amount of decisions that are left up to the player. We found it enjoyable, but maybe that’s just because we already know the premise and tone of the game we want. We separated each in-game day to relatively short scenes, but maybe that’s just because we know this was our intended vision. In particular, we are concerned about issues of balance and complexity. Nevertheless, we look forward to the playtests to see if everyone else’s experiences with the game are similar to ours. Thank you for reading!
Special thanks to Emily for taking notes!!!
Post-playtest update
Our playtest feedback mainly revolved around the game needing more structure. This included suggestions to include a GM, to add more rules to determine the outcome of a customer interaction, and a general uncertainty in deciding when to end a prep phase scene.
We started by addressing the customer system. We had some difficulties adding more structure while still keeping the opportunity to roleplay for players, but we settled on a scoring system primarily based on dice rolls. The sum of the dice rolls from cooking and serving the customer would be used to determine how satisfied the customer was.
Our main concern with this is that it may limit the importance of players’ improvisational skills in determining how much the customer liked the restaurant. There is some narrative influence on outcome because rolls are given bonuses based on the players’ stats or narrative reasons that the player should get a bonus on this roll. Still, the balance between player input and uncertainty in a customer’s satisfaction is an area we would playtest more if we had more time.
Part of why our prep phase felt unstructured might have been that the actions your characters can reasonably take were not very well defined. To more clearly define what kind of conflicts players can expect, we were encouraged by Ash to think about our world-building a bit more.
Upon talking about it, we realized that the world we had set up posed many questions that set a tone that was more serious than what we were initially aiming for. We set the world in the mostly modern-day real world where monsters have only just become known to the human population. It may be our pessimism, but we couldn’t see many ways where this would turn out in a cheerful monsters and humans mostly get along in any kind of way. Although Emily had a very unique idea for it, as in “But what if they did just get along?,” though we didn’t explore this idea too much because of our lack of time. We do think the idea is very interesting since it’s surprisingly unique. What would monster and human integration look like without the fear or hatred we immediately assume they’d have for each other?
It was easier for us to go with a world that was more common in stories, where humans and monsters live mostly divided. This works a bit like the world in the first Shrek movie, where fantasy creatures mostly live separately from humans, both out of fear and because of different lifestyles. The main change to our backstory we made was that monsters and humans have always known each other exist, so you’re not living during a time of great social and political turmoil. However, you are living in a time where food is bringing people together just a bit, and questions of whether greater peace between humans and monsters can exist are starting to pop up in people’s heads.
We also slightly fleshed out the lifestyles of monsters. The most important distinction between humans is their lack of cooking. Human-style cooking is a hobby that only a few weird monsters, such as your characters, are excited to partake in.
With this world in mind, the prep phase changes were a bit easier to settle on. We wanted certain actions such as going to the store in comically bad disguises or interacting with both monster and human NPCs while searching for ingredients to be common. We have also made changes to the stats as well based on our storytelling. Now we have more specified stats such as deception and communication to add onto that.
Our inclusion of a GM also helped with this phase a lot. Before, we were unsure of how to make players introduce conflict, but with a GM, some ideas for conflict can be settled on before the players even start a scene.
These two factors helped us structure the prep phase in a way where the events that occur are still very much up to the GM and the player’s actions, but we are able to restrict them in a way that prevents them from continuing a scene for too long.
We would be excited to iterate through some other details of our game, such as how monster’s different physical limitations affect their abilities in the kitchen, but for now we are overall glad with how our game turned out.
