I’m not really one for tabletop roleplaying games–the one time I played Dungeons & Dragons I got in trouble with our DM when they caught me refusing to level up my character because I didn’t want to think about math. So I’m a fan of games that eschew stats and dice rolls in favor of encouraging you to bullshit with your friends. Going For Broke, an improvisational game where players narrate a sitcom, does away with a lot of what turns me off about tabletop games, while presenting its own challenges.
Going For Broke is created by The Quiet Year designer Avery Alder, and is currently crowdfunding. Players portray a roommate in a collective house, each of whom has a unique identity and quirks. I chose Bruce, a homebrewing and horror movie fan with a tendency to “incorrectly explain something you don’t really understand” and “accidentally solve a completely unrelated problem.” Each character also has a secret–mine was “you’ve been covering one of your roommates’ rent for months” (fun fact: an actual problem I once had in a punk house!)--and a sort of defining tension, called their “Classic Question;” Bruce’s is “are you a maverick or a wallflower?”
The characters are all roommates in a house that’s faced with a financial crisis; my group chose a roommate bailing shortly before the rent is due. Going For Broke asks you to structure the story like an episode of a sitcom, narrating short scenes between two competing plots to resolve the crisis but ultimately bring everything back to the status quo. We hit upon two separate strategies for dealing with our missing roommate: one was to go find them and demand money, led by flirtatious roommate Liam and roommate Ben, whose big secret was that he’d been “running a counterfeit action figure ring out of the house.” The other plot, led by me, involved stumbling upon the action figures and deciding to sell them to make up the rent money, which would also, unbeknownst to my character, helpfully clear out the missing roommate’s room for Tyler, who had secretly promised their mom that she could move into the house.
Players all know each other’s secrets, which might seem odd, but gets at the game’s vibe of writing a sitcom together rather than roleplaying a game. I personally appreciated this remove–I tend to be one of those “my character does X” people in such games, instead of fully embodying the role. And it also helped us craft an engaging plot; since we all knew about the action figures, we were able to introduce them as a solution, and then play out our characters’ unintentional race against the clock, where Liam and Ben needed to find our missing roommate before we accidentally ruined Ben’s business, and where Tyler had a unique motivation to hurry up and get the action figures sold. The game moved between one plot and the other, upping the tension with each new scene.
Plots are resolved through a coin flip mechanic related to each character’s Classic Question. Once you decide which side of your character’s Classic Question is going to come out in the episode, you unlock a coin. Later, you can flip that coin to resolve one of the plots; if one plot succeeds, the other fails. If the coin flip resolves things too quickly (which happened in our game), you can also add additional rules to make the game go longer.
My group struggled a bit with this mechanic; given several of my friends’ backgrounds in other TTRPGs, there was a tendency to want to use the coin more like a skill check than a plot-resolving device. Without a lot of mechanical guardrails or a single person steering the story, we sometimes found ourselves a bit adrift in the improv of it all. As a person who hates stats and dice, and also as someone with a background in dramatic writing, I didn’t mind this so much–I love the idea of just telling stories together, and I enjoyed the opportunity to play with plot and narrative–but I struggled not to feel too shy to fully participate, even with my friends. Despite myself, a skill check or more clear structures might have given me something to build off and helped me feel more confident participating.
All of us really loved the world of Going For Broke; I especially loved my friends’ reactions as we passed the character cards around. I loved getting to play a game that felt like it mimicked my real life (maybe too much; I have had a lot of shit roommates) and that got its structure from story structure rather than a player manual full of game rules. And after we played, we had an interesting conversation about how sitcoms have changed over the years and what defines them in the streaming age. (I briefly dominated the conversation with a rant about how dirty I think Kevin Can F**k Himself got done.)
I can see Going For Broke being especially fun in a group full of writers or improvisers, or just a group who comes prepared to bring the right energy to its looseness. Alder told Rascal that the game “only takes about an hour to play. There's no fancy dice or equipment needed. And the themes are relatable to people who aren't weird nerds,” which makes it feel more approachable than a game full of character sheets and rules. I would be excited to watch some really good storytellers play it, which I say as someone who doesn't fully get the appeal of actual plays. Plus, it was just fun to imagine annoying situations befalling my own worst roommates, several of whom still owe me money.
