Mixed Success is a "seasonal TTRPG magazine that aims to bridge the various microcosms of designers, hobbyists, and writers across the internet" (from their website).
For this issue, I wrote last days of the mushroom war, a ttrpg about the implications of chance on disease.
(CW: disease, COVID)
The thing that any trrpg person will tell you is that critical successes and critical failures will occur more often than you would think. Crits have a 1/20 chance of activating – which sounds small! 5% of all rolls! But 5% across a long enough game means the emergence of a crit inevitably. You will roll a 20. You will roll a 1.
COVID has a 2% fatality rate. The likelihood of infection increases, by around 10%, every few minutes as someone lingers in an infected space. From the game:
whenever you take action in space with other people, roll 1d100. you must roll below 100 or you become infected. as a scene progresses, your gm may decrease the threshold by 10 (100 → 90 → 80, et cetera) and ask you to roll again.
COVID is this disabling, destructive, lethal force. Notably, my game is not about nobles – a medieval approximation of the modern bougerois who expose themselves willingly – but about workers. People have to expose themselves to disease in order to procure a living for themselves and their loved ones. The failure to protect workers, to protect disabled people in the public sphere, and to protect people generally is a failure of the state. To further quote the game:
The body politic is dying, and you are trapped inside
You can check out the rest of my games at: https://ahcoffeebeans.itch.io/