I love me a good Idle RPG. For those of you not in the know, Idle games are games that more or less play themselves with minimal intervention from the player. Progress Quest, pictured above, is a silly fantasy RPG that, once you have made your character, plays more like an operating system installation than a game. All you do is check in every so often and see all the progress your character has made without you. Another of my favorites, Logging Quest 2 allows you to form a party, equip them, tweak their battle strategies, and send them off on adventures. The adventures however are completely out of your control. They just do their own thing without any input from you, record everything in a log (hence the name) and come back successful or not. Both of these games are available in the Google Play store for free, in case that sounds appealing. Progress quest can be found online for PCs. Presumably they, or other similar offerings are available on other platforms, but that’s beside the point of this article.
So I hear some of you saying in my head “Why the hell would I want a game that plays itself for me?” I can hear it both because I know not all of you are bent in quite the same way I am and because I’ve heard it in real life every single time I’ve said to someone “Check out my awesome Progress Quest character!”* The appeal is twofold. First they make great games to “play” when you’re supposed to be doing something productive. Kicking one off and checking on it periodically scratches the itch for play and goofing off but takes little to no actual time when you should be… let’s say writing an article for Gnome Stew. Second, despite having put little to no actual work into the results, checking in and seeing that progress has been made actually fires off the whole brain chemistry mechanism for accomplishment so they’re a good bang for your buck free time wise. Go figure.
So how can we bring this idle style play into our tabletop game? It’s fairly straightforward. Assume that between sessions player characters are “doing stuff” That was mostly the assumption anyway. In older editions of DnD for example most spell research or item creation took place between sessions just because of the simple fact that no one wanted to deal with it at the table. There’s no reason that players can’t give you a prioritized laundry list of items at the end of a session for them to accomplish during their down time and a handful of die rolls to go with them. Crafting, carousing, information gathering, and scouting are all simple tasks that could be handled away from the table allowing you to start the next session handing out new tidbits of information, loot, or gear. For the particularly bold, exploring dangerous areas and dungeon clearing could be handled the same way with much more risks involved. This is actually similar to the way the recently featured Winter’s Edge campaign handles quest by minor characters (skip down to the section titled “Questing”). It’s also simple enough to send out notifications between sessions with progress updates as appropriate. This can help feed the excitement for the next session or start players planning ahead if new information becomes available.
A step too far? In fact it seems conceivable that with less effort than a normal game plus some organization tools you could run an entire game that’s nothing BUT idle downtime play with no actual sessions. It would certainly be non traditional, but it has the potential to be a lot of fun in a completely different sort of way, more akin to the play by mail of yesteryear than the at the table sessions we’re more used to.
I suspect this is actually not terribly groundbreaking and that some of you have been doing this for years. If so, let me know how you do it and how it works out for you below.
*In fact, years ago I sat down with my daughter and made the progress quest character Po the Panda-man Mu-Fu monk and put kicking off Progress Quest with his file loaded in the startup folder of my computer. Every so often I would inform her of his progress. This has never ceased to infuriate her. In fact it’s probably been several years since I’ve loaded him up or given her an update…
I’ve played a bit of Armored Core, and had fun with a bit of automation. In Verdict Day, they let you build and program ‘UNACs’ and, with a bit of DLC, could form a whole team of them. They had some games on the PSP that emphasized designing ACs and letting an AI handle them. It was a niche market of a niche market, but I guess they had some success, since there was more than one of them.
It’s interesting how these scratch an itch for gaming when you’re not really actually DOING anything. There’s a great YouTube channel called ‘Extra Credits’ that did a bit on these a while back. 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-LziX2HynI
A couple years ago I wanted to find a way to easily allow players to miss a game if they needed to, but have it make sense in the game world. One of the design principles for the campaign (which I’ve tried to incorporate into all my games since) is that at any time a character can be “summoned” by a powerful being (can you say Magic: The Gathering…) and thus wouldn’t be there to help the party.
I didn’t want this to be a “free” day for the player though, so I set up a system to generate the “quest” that their character was summoned for. The quests generated are fairly taxing, but I can scale the difficulty to make it easier or harder based on the situation (basically giving positive modifiers to make it easier and negative ones to make it harder). When a player’s son was in the hospital, his character was summoned to escort an minor NPC across a border (making an alliance which I wove into the story). When a player was too hung over from an all-weekend party to play, his character was summoned to track down and destroy a demon that had escaped from Hell. He found the demon, but was unable to defeat it and barely escaped with his life (adding a cool new monster to the game that I wove into the story…).
It has worked really well for my players because they don’t like missing games knowing that something really bad may happen to their character if they’re not there to control it.
I think the coolest thing about it though is finding a way to incorporate the results of the Idle Quest (which is what I will call it from this point forward… thanks for the term lol) into the story.
And – GUILTY – sometimes I just play around with the system to run a quest and “play” a quick game.
My fave “idle” games are the original Avalon Hill Civilization and a rather more involved thing called Outreach from SPI. Both involve players making Big Picture decisions which cause lots of activity on the board. This gives the “non-phasing” players plenty of time to gossip and catch up with each other’s life milestones.
Ironically, idle is what my laptop does when I try and load the Stew these days. The new design’s heavy graphics load canes my portable hotspot’s lame download bandwidth so I can wait forever for the home page to render. Any chance the graphics could be organized to load after the text so I can start reading?