A Nice Hobby is not perfect. 

That doesn’t bother me yet. 

I had the idea for this game for a while, without any clue as to mechanics. The touchstones I highlighted in the doc, especially Girl Gun Lady, had been swirling in my brain. I wanted to make something that replicated the feeling of choosing something because you hope that it will give you joy and an opportunity for self-improvement, only to realize that its more complicated inner world was unfathomable and dangerous. That’s still the primary goal of the game: to help players capture the feeling of discovering that they’re good at something and made friends in it and are so close to being happy, and then wham. Suddenly it’s not so fun any more, and you don’t know what to do about that. 

Obviously, a challenge in that kind of work is how to replicate the hobby itself. How does a mechanic feel like playing a trading card game, for instance? The feelings attached to the kind of split-second adaptation and serendipitous top-decking that occurs in your favourite TCG anime or in a replay of a Magic: The Gathering stream is hard to copy with simply “Are you a little bit Technical or a little bit Creative?”, I reckon. 

The alternative, of course, is one that I imagine a lot of other GM-led RPGs rely on as a narrative rule: that the GM is a kind of oracle, whose duty is to interpret the positions of dice in such a way as to best convey whether their mixed successes put them in a holding pattern or their Outdoing Themselves emerges as a wildly improbable play. There’s also the matter of “what’s in your deck, anyway?” that, if left up to chance, can feel like a bad episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! where suddenly your hero has just what he needs in his deck for this match he couldn’t possibly have prepared for, and you have no idea when he swapped it in. 

I may have to think about that replication a bit more deeply, but I’m not ashamed of how PCs engage mechanically with the game at the moment. I just wish that immersion came to me more easily so that the level of commitment grew with that experience. 

If you do read or play A Nice Hobby, I’d love to hear your comments!