Fighting the Unbeatable, A TTRPG Competitive Analysis
Prequel Devlog
Preface
The following is a competitive analysis I performed for Prequel, a TTRPG I am co-developing with Ethan Yen. You can catch up on what the project is in Ethan’s Devlog series but in short:
Prequel is a game about fantasy heroes facing an unbeatable final boss, the journey that got them there, and the legacy they leave behind.
As a start to the project, I wanted to look at all related products in the space. Why? I wrote up the reasons why I believe competitive analyses are important in a different article.
I hope you find the analysis informative both in it’s content, findings, format and as inspiration for your own development pursuits. If you enjoy the article, let me know by liking or sharing with a friend.
Focus
Purpose Statement
We are developing a game focused on fantasy heroes fighting against an unbeatable enemy. The purpose of this competitive analysis is to identify trends among products that share a market space and create recommendations for our product’s development.
Methods
For this competitive analysis we will be evaluating our competitors against 3 main criteria: World Building, Attrition and Morale, and Death and Concluding Gameplay.
World Building focuses on how each competitor helps build a larger world around the core gameplay, inspirations provided to the players, and how well the game provides guidance for the narrative.
Attrition and Morale focus on how each competitor handles the concepts of hope, despair, and how those change over the course of gameplay.
Death and Concluding Gameplay focuses on how each competitor handles character death, ends gameplay, and provides a framework creating an epilogue.
Competition
The analysis will focus on two tiers of competitors. Tier 1 represents our product’s primary competitors, fantasy games about fighting an unbeatable enemy. Each of the competitors in tier 1 will be analyzed for each of the following aspects. Tier 2 represents our product’s indirect competitors, games about fighting an unbeatable enemy. These games feature related content to our product but have a different design purpose. Competitors within tier 2 may be featured by the previously stated aspects as an honorable mention. Disqualified Competitors were games initially surveyed for having related themes to our product but failed our qualifications as a competitor or could not be validated.
Tier 1 Competitors: Tabletop Fantasy Games about fighting an unbeatable enemy
Tier 2 Competitors: Tabletop Games about fighting an unbeatable enemy
The Creature Comes for Us by OrionQK
Disqualified Competitors
Competitor Profiles
Tier 1 Competitors: Tabletop Fantasy Games about fighting an unbeatable enemy
A Good Death
“A Good Death is a solo role-playing game and storytelling engine wherein you fight a hopeless battle to save your people.” In A Good Death, the player takes the role of a hero trying to defend a helpless populace from unending waves of enemies. Gameplay focuses around pulling cards to determine how the defense unfolds, ultimately wearing the hero down until the city is overrun. The hero’s efforts are then evaluated to see how their legacy continues, how much of the populace survived, and how much of the defense remains after the assault.
Hunt
Hunt is a game about desperate knights embarking on a perilous journey to enter the forest and defeat the beast that decimated their order. In Hunt, players select their knights and cursed weapons are slowly whittled down by the wilderness until they meet the beast in a final confrontation. Gameplay focuses on overcoming trials of a hostile forest and defeating the beast in a tactical combat while managing resources and the cursed desires of the knight’s weapons.
Lordsworn
Lordsworn is a GM-less game about a company of soldiers desperately traveling home after their sworn deity has been killed. In Lordsworn, each player takes control over a number of soldiers within the company and play out scenes of the journey as they become more apocalyptic. Gameplay focuses on rolling for random encounters, deciding their outcome, and determining which suffer consequences.
Tier 2 Competitors: Tabletop Games about fighting an unbeatable enemy
Arc
Arc is a game about a group of heroes attempting to defeat an inevitable apocalypse. In Arc, players attempt to resolve the apocalypse before a period of real world time passes. Gameplay focuses on identifying the apocalypse, resolving related omens, and using in world time to mark the passage till the end.
Drowns the Sky
Drowns the Sky is a map-making game about a group of colonists making memories on an alien world that is about to be wiped out. In Drowns the Sky, players take turns drawing memories on the map related to their colonists experiences on the planet and then erasing all unprotected markers once the game ends. Gameplay focuses on conversations between two players and choosing which memories to attempt to preserve against the end.
Dusk to Midnight
Dusk to Midnight is a GM-less game about mech pilots fighting in an unwinnable war. In Dusk to Midnight, players tell the story of their mech pilots' slow disillusionment or resolve with the conflict before their desertion or death and the impact their actions have on the other pilots. Gameplay focuses on telling scenes about the conflict, rolling for outcomes against the players’ stats, and slowly increasing each player’s tracks towards defeat.
Nihiliation
Nihlation is a solo map-making game about wandering a decaying world while attempting to recover your memories. In Nihlation, players navigate a desperate and decaying landscape, combating foes, and attempt to recover memories of their past life. Gameplay focuses on building a map with a number of premade regions, searching for keepsakes to exchange for player advancements (memories), and moving foes that hasten the world’s death.
Roll to Death
Roll To Death is a GM-less storytelling game where players will create a family, build complex relationships between them, and then kill them all.” In Roll to Death, players follow along the misfortune lives of a family (in some form) as they slowly run into more misfortunes and die off one-by-one. Gameplay focuses around adding more characters into the family, expanding their relationships through scenes, and narrating the inevitable death of each.
The Creature Comes for Us
“The Creature Comes for Us is about a group of people preparing to fight a currently unknown threat.” In The Creature Comes for Us, players answer questions about their characters, the world they live in, the resources they have to combat the threat, and the threat’s nature before a final confrontation. Gameplay focuses on pulling cards from a deck of cards, answering the question related to each card, and at the end rolling to see if the player is able to defeat the creature.
Competitor Comparison
World Building
All competitors had some initial world building but most stopped there. Every competitor had some minor prompts related to the player character’s general identity. In Hunt, players define their knights and order through a set of broad prompts but world building does not extend from there or offer any opportunities for players to further define the nature and relationship to the beast. Hunt’s weapons do help emphasize the themes of desperation within the game by demanding a “sacrifice” from each player that adds to the game’s background.
Lordsworn provides both the most comprehensive references for world building but also is the least open ended. The game has a strong implicit setting and has defined options for the gods the company may follow, each of the “lordsworn” in the company, and all of the encounters with they will come across. The makes has no open discussion prompts but it does provide multiple options for every choice within the game. For example, the “Grizzled Veteran” Lordsworn has 4 options for his aesthetic, keepsake, and equipment to choose from. The game provides enough content for players to easily launch into discussions.
Many competitors, although leaving ample room for player world building, put too much work on the player(s). The Creature Comes from Beyond and Dusk to Midnight are lean heavily on open discussion and an assumption of a larger world but do not provide strong premade references or guidance to easily flush out the larger context for the game to evaluate in. Dusk to Midnight has fantastic mechanisms for fulfilling its narrative fantasy but puts the work of manufacturing the conflict the game is set in on the players with no in-product support. Hunt similarly fails in this areas when adjudicating events within its wilderness. Although the game provides a series of broad trails the players encounter, resolving these encounters is made more difficult without additional pre-written guidance.
A few competitors strike a nice balance between open-discussion world building. Nihalism succeeds by remaining specific where it needs to be specific but giving broad inspirations when it asks broad questions. Arc asks the players to define a large amount of the world upfront to build out its’ 'doom” and “omens. Although the game provides clear examples and resources, it still relies on the GM’s ability as a storyteller to translate its pre-session discussions into the game’s narrative language. A Good Death does the best at world building out of all tier 1 competitors. The game provides digestible prompts for all of its events and provides clear examples of how the player “could” handle things when they are asked an open question.
Attrition and Morale
All competitors had some form of attrition or mounting despair, different gains approached the concept in different ways. Both Hunt and Lordsworn focused on an attrition of resources while also using the progressive framing of their encounters to build a sense of despair. Hunt requires you spend your stats instead of rolling, leading to a feeling of being whittled down over time while Lordsworn decides each encounter with a straight dice roll that whittles down the morale of the company and health of each lordsworn. Each game has players progress through a series of more disturbing scenes that help build the narrative tension until the end.
Some competitors use the semi-random factor to leave the threat of end always uncertain. A Good Death and The Creature Comes for Us both use a set of cards to allow for unpredictability. As players pull cards each term, they have an implicit and mounting fear of pulling the one that will cause the game’s end. A Good Death builds on this by allowing different cards to end the game in different ways and using stat attrition as a separate game ending mechanism, keeping the players always on their toes.
How mechanics are named can add to the player’s feeling of fear. Nihalism names its dice outcomes of success, mixed success, and failure as hope, gloom, and despair implicitly tying the character’s emotion to the dice roll. Dusk to Midnight two parallel tracks of resolve and disillusionment that both could end a character's life. This allows for players to inhabit a character whose emotions are twisting throughout the ebb and flow of the conflict. The mechanic leads to effectively the similar outcome but with different narrative tones.
Creating unique and inventive separate mechanics give some games a unique feeling of doom. Arc famously uses real world time combined with random decay to make every passing of the session literally take players closer to their end. Nihalism uses a tactful set of premade foes and environment hazards to slowly decay the map around the player leading to a straight forward end to the world. Roll to Death fills a clock with each dice roll and kills a character every time the clock is full. The clock’s maximum decreases each time leading to characters dying faster as the game goes longer.
Death and Concluding the Game
In some games, players must accomplish a task before a game is decided won or lost. In Hunt, players have to defeat the beast. Death is simple and happens when a player has no HP. If you die, you do not formally have any impact on the rest of the game. Hunt’s ending is binary and provides little context or guidance outside of a few questions. None of the player’s actions outside of killing the beast have any influence on the epilogue and dead characters are not treated any differently than those who live. In Arc, players must prevent an apocalyptic event (for their characters, not necessarily the world) from occurring. Although there is no set condition for ending the player’s doom, the game is structured well enough that the GM should have a fair idea on what to do. Players in Arc are also difficult to kill, requiring them to effectively “die” 6 times before it is permanent. Arc additionally provides players the opportunity to rewind time (at a cost) or confront an escalated doom if they fail, effectively giving players avenues to continue playing but not necessarily win.
Some competitors treat defeat as a matter of luck and perseverance. In Lordsworn, players effectively roll dice until they hopefully make it home. Since players have no way to modify dice rolls in Lordsworn, the outcome is effectively left up to chance. The Creature Comes for Us has a win condition but has such a high threshold to fulfill it, it's effectively not there. Players must succeed on 5 hard skill checks they can barely influence, any less and they lose.
Some competitors accept defeat as a fact. Dusk to Midnight is a game where everybody “dies” but since the game is framed in a larger on-going conflict the defeat of the players is not necessarily a defeat of their team. Each player is given great freedom to describe how they are defeated (either abandoning the conflict or dying in a blaze of glory) and are able to join scenes as an NPC for the rest of the session afterwards. Map making and journaling games focus on creating an artifact that outlives the characters of the story. In A Good Death, the player creates a chronicle of events that tells of the hero’s defense . The chronicle continues to include eye-witness and historical accounts after the hero’s death. Drowns in the Sky has players collaborate to draw a map relating to their colonist’s experiences. After the game ends, everything not preserved is erased as time leaps. Producing a physical artifact that persists after the player(s) are defeated can be a powerful way to preserve a sense of victory even in defeat.
Findings
Having a strong combination of both pre written references and open ended questions can help produce a balanced storytelling experience
Adding a small level of randomness to events can help produce a sense of uncertainty and dread
How mechanics are named can influence how the players perceive them and add to the tone
“Winning” should either be achievable for players who do not exist.
Giving opportunities for epilogues to change based on the player’s choice and actions can help add interesting re-playability
Creating physical artifacts, whether it be journals or maps, can help add a sense of victory even when “winning” is impossible