Making a game live on Twitch

At 12:30a CST on May 14, 2021 I started a twitch stream with the goal of making a two-page tabletop RPG. The idea was that I would take an idea I had been tossing around in my head (What would a The World Ends With You TTRPG look like?) and then make it into a playable thing by the end of that stream. I was totally successful in doing that!

You Have 7 Days started as a list of things I think are important to me about The World Ends With You. When I made my previous two fan RPGs, Sparking! and Odd Powers, I started from a similar place, so it was a pretty easy thing to write out. I love the nonsense worldbuilding, I love that character growth is the way you beat the Reaper's Game, and I love that it's about being in a place that you know well but is slightly off.

From there, I moved onto character creation. What should a character look like? Should it be a stat block of sorts, something you fill out with numbers and short descriptions? Should there be any stats, and if so what should they be? At first I thought that Sync and Soul would be two stats, and that quickly changed once I started figuring out how I wanted players to interact in the world.

At first we thought about dice rolls, but quickly we ended up liking the idea of no dice rolls at all and focusing on the interaction being centered around questions and answers. At this point, the core mechanic is Setups and Questions: Setups set the stage or explain a scene and the Question is posed to the players and they answer as honestly as they can for the character they're playing. There are no rolls, whatever you say goes (as long as everyone at the table is okay with it), and the idea is that you get a better sense of the characters that way. Especially because the Setup and Question pairs we wrote are quite confrontational and direct (ex. It is the end of Day 1. Did you survive Day 1?), I think they serve to interrogate the characters and why they want a second chance at life. It helps drive in the idea from the source material that to win the Reaper's Game you have to have personal growth on some level.

Something else that was fun to deal with was the mildly meta aspects of the game. For example, the person playing the Game Master, the person in charge of the Reaper's Game, is also the game master of You Have 7 Days. They're playing a character that is inherently a version of themselves in the real world, same with the players who play the Contestants, and it felt like it tied to the ideas in The World Ends With You very well. Other complexity came from the naming from the source material. We thought having the Game Master continue to be called the Game Master worked well, but calling the in-fiction players of the Reaper's Game "Players" made it hard to tell when I was talking to the person reading the rules of You Have 7 Days and when I was talking about the in-fiction group of people playing the Reaper's Game. Eventually we settled on Contestants of the Reaper's Game, and I think that worked out really well.

And then we were just about done! The flow seemed solid, and we came up with great Setups and Questions, and really hammered home that you should make this game yours by making up your own Setups and Questions. Three and a half hours after I started the stream I had a full, two page TTRPG and I couldn't be happier. Later in the day, after the stream, I made some small changes that a sleepy Josh couldn't see, like rewording some paragraphs to make the whole game's mechanics more apparent, or making sure I labeled the two pages correctly.

And that's it! You Have 7 Days is finished, and unless any more errors jump out at me, YouHave7Days_2021_05_14_C.pdf is the last update to the game! After 3.5 hours on stream, we have a complete tabletop roleplaying game that anyone can pick up right this second! It felt great to create something like this, and I'm really thinking about making more games like this live on Twitch in the future.

Thanks for reading this and checking out the game! I hope you enjoyed this!