One, Two, Kickout!
Overview
Genre: Action
Production length: ~13 Weeks (Total)
One, Two, Kickout! is a tabletop RPG where players are professional wrestlers in a world where pro-wrestling is real. It was designed to be a fast paced, not so serious game that appeals to fans of pro-wrestling while still being engaging and accessible to players who have little to no knowledge of the hobby.
The main system that powers interactions in One, Two, Kickout! is a system called Step-up Modifier Dice. In this system, when a player attempts a challenge, they roll a twenty-sided die, much like many other TTRPGs, but instead of adding static boosts from their stats, they roll additional dice and add it to the twenty-sided die. At low levels, this boost could be no dice or just 1d4, but as players level up, the dice can go as high as 4d12.
As a solo project, I am the sole designer and writer for this game. Though, I was given great help and feedback from the instructor, teaching assistants, and my classmates.
One, Two, Kickout! was made as an academic project at DigiPen Institute of Technology for the DES 335 class (Role Playing Game Design). Bringing it from concept stage to second edition took approximately 8 weeks. The third edition revision was done after this class had concluded and took approximately 4 and a half weeks.
View a pdf of the game by clicking one of these buttons. Scroll down to learn more about the process that went into each addition.
Process
Concepting and Prototyping
Summary: I developed the initial concepts about system and setting to make a game that was fast paced and entertaining for multiple kinds of players.
For concepting, I wrote out several ideas for game settings and core mechanics. I wanted to make something that was fast paced and over the top, this lead to me choosing the specific setting and mechanic combination. I felt that my idea for a ‘Step Up Modifier Dice’ system would lend itself well to making a game with this tone. I chose the setting of the game because I felt that a world where professional wrestling is 100% real would be appropriately silly, also it would allow me to add my love of professional wrestling into the game.
The mechanics of the game, of course, changed quite a bit through prototyping and testing. Most of what I detailed in the brainstorming was focused on making something really fast paced and a bit goofy. My idea for how the modifier dice would work is pretty close to the final product, but I pretty quickly removed the d20 as it would be too large a range, also it could get confusing when you were rolling two d20s as you might have to know which one is the modifier. I later removed the d10 as I wanted to simplify the system a bit, and wanted the value jump to the max die to be bigger than two.
One of the few cases where I actually added more absurdity to the mechanics was that instead of rolling just one extra die, you would be able to roll multiple. I made this change pretty early on mostly as a way to make character advancement more interesting, since doing this allowed you to upgrade your dice and how many you were rolling. However another reason for the change is that I am a firm believer that just rolling dice is fun, and getting to roll a bunch of dice really helps set the over the top tone of the game.
My idea for criticals was that being able to cancel out a critical failure would be a great moment at the game table. However, this system had issues such as being less useful as a character got upgraded and being generally unintuitive, so, I swapped it out for a simpler version where getting a critical was entirely based on the d20 roll and could not be canceled.
My brainstorming work for the system.
An excerpt of a playtest write up I did after my first play test.
The page of the book that describes the archetypes.
Some of the wrestling moves that characters can learn and use.
First Edition
Summary: I worked to expand every aspect of the game, especially combat. Though I ran into issues balancing the tone and appeal of the game and making combat feel right.
At this point, I had my core mechanics and advancement pretty well figured out, and I had a good start to world building. Much of my work during this period was expanding these aspects.
One of the first things I fleshed out in this phase was character creation and advancement. I knew that this had to be really good since I felt that a lot of the appeal of the game would be creating your own wrestler and roleplaying as them. To encourage this I designed a fluid class system. Each time a character levels up they can choose one of four archetypes to level up into, gaining different bonuses and wrestling moves from each. These archetypes were based around the four major TTRPG class types of fighter, rogue, bard, and wizard. For this game, these were Brawler, Highflyer, The Mic, and Technician.
Combat was a major focus for this game. The combat system I went with was a pretty simple one. A player chooses a ‘move’ (attack) from a list of moves that their character knows, they roll to hit, and then damage is dealt. To help keep it simple, there aren’t that many status effects, and things like damage types don’t exist. A problem arose as this, combined with the fact that it was impossible to include every real wrestling move, meant that there was a poor variety of moves and effects, especially within one archetype. Combat was just not that interesting as players were doing essentially the same thing as eachother every turn. Also, having to chose from a list of several different yet similar moves slowed down combat.
A semi-related issue that I ran into during production was that I was struggling to find a balance between a fast and loose game, and a game that was very faithful to professional wrestling. The game ended up leaning a bit more into the wrestling side, though since it’s most likely to be played and enjoyed by wrestling fans, I don’t think that it’s too much of an issue.
Some of the main positives about this edition (in my opinion) was that the core mechanic was well fleshed out and I was quite happy with several of the miscellaneous rules, the glossary I added, parts of combat, and especially with the extensive world building that I wrote.
Second Edition
Summary: I focused much of my working time on making the book look and read nicer, changing how character progression worked, and improving combat.
Producing the second edition was mainly about continuing to flesh out the game and to add polish. Nothing was drastically changed in this edition but just about everything was edited or touched up. One of the most noticeable changes was the addition of many more images throughout the book including a page background, I did this to make it look much more professional and polished.
One of my system focuses for this edition dealt with character creation and improvement. The first major change was to raise the level cap from five to seven, with five acting as a soft cap. This was to give players more freedom in improvement and to encourage multiclassing as, expect for the Technician archetype, the archetype levels were still capped at five.
How stat points work was also changed quite a lot. The point requirements to upgrade dice were increased, the amount of points players receive were decreased, and a limit was put on how many points could go into 1 stat. This was to make reaching the max of a modifier dice more difficult and more rewarding. This was also done to curb player improvement that previously increased too fast.
Improving to level six and seven grants players bonus stat points as well as a new ability. This boost gives a reward for breaking out of the level five soft cap, and is intended to make players feel like their character has worked hard to be the best in their field. However, even with this boost, a single stat at max still remains lower than it could previously get, though the total amount of stat points a player can get becomes greater.
Another major focus of mine for this edition was improving combat. I did this primarily by expanding the move list, especially focusing on The Mic and the Technician archetypes.
Besides these changes, I spent a good amount of time making the book easier to read. I did this in many ways including adding more space in between sections, transferring certain info into tables, changing when terms were bolded, and including explanation boxes to provide an example, reminder, or page of a term definition.
First edition: Points needed to improve dice and points distributed per level. Note that across all editions, archetypes restrict point distribution. (“20 total CP” is a error that was later corrected, it should say “25”)
Second edition: Players gain 12 total AP less in this version and 1 CP fewer per level. 12 points are now needed to reach the max dice boosts, and the cost increases to 4 after the first boost. Additionally, point distribution is more limited.
Graph made with: rapidtables.com/tools/line-graph.html
The page that describes the new ‘Move Categories’ system.
Some of the new ‘Perks’ that player characters can take.
Third Edition
Summary: I made many changes in order to improve and simplify the game. The biggest was overhauling combat to make it faster and more engaging for different player types.
Third edition was a project I undertook that was not a part of the class that I made the previous editions in. I found that second edition was still much slower and more complicated than I had initially wanted, this led me to producing a third edition that was subtitled as ‘Simplified’. I set out to make the game easier to understand and to be overall more inviting to people with varying experience levels with RPGs and with pro wrestling, from those who are newer to die hard fans.
Throughout my time making this edition, I kept track of the changes that I made in a video game update style change log. I posted this change log as a blog post here. There were many small changes made, as well as a few big ones. Some of the more minor changes included removing the level five cap from archetypes, removing inventory limits, adding an advantage and disadvantage system, and tweaking some status effects.
The most significant change I made was overhauling the combat system. Now instead of players picking a specific move from a list that they would have to read and keep track of, a player wishing to attack just picks one of five ‘move categories’ to use. Players still improve their character’s combat performance by leveling up into different archetypes. However, in third edition, archetypes no longer gate off specific moves, they instead grant a choice of different ‘Perks’ that a player can choose from. These perks mostly upgrade how damage is dealt but some are more specific and specialized.
One of the primary intentions behind this new combat system was that it allows players to better roleplay combat as they see fit. One player might choose to go into great detail about what specifically their character does in order to build up their character’s story and personality, while another might go into very little detail and just let everyone else imagine what they did as they are more interested in playing their character outside of combat. These changes also give more mechanical depth to character improvement as it allows a greater variety of different builds, even within the same archetype. Another benefit is that combat is faster, which was very important for the gameplay to achieve the intended tone.