RPG Review: Tiny Horsies: The Role Playing Game - Part 2: Character Creation

What You Get

Character Design

Tiny Horsies is a straight attribute-based system; there are no skills or classes in the game. Instead, all characters have the following non-magical Attributes, all of which start at a default Attribute Level of 0:

• Strength: Determines the strength of the character
• Flight: Determines how good the character is at flying
• Life: Determines how much damage the character can take
• Evasion: Determines how well the character avoids attacks, obstacles, or other threats
• Empathy: Determines how well others like the character
• Random: Determines the ability of a character to do things out of the ordinary, know a random thing, or break a random law of physics

Attribute Levels reflect the power of the attribute, and determines such things as how much weight a character can lift and carry, the number of target animals a character can befriend, or the number of attempts at affecting Sentient beings the character may make.

Attribute Points are derived from Attribute levels, and are spent to affect dice rolls and make activities more successful. Physical Attribute Points (Strength, Flight, Evasion, Life) can be regained by sleeping and resting. Mental Attribute Points (Empathy-Animals and Empathy-Sentient) are regained by sleeping, resting, and meditation. Random points are regenerated each gaming session.

Some of these attributes have special rules associated with them. Terras and Unicorns, for instance, will always have a Flight Attribute of 0, reflecting the fact that they are unable to fly. Another example, the Empathy Attribute, has two subtypes: one that applies to sentient creatures and one for animals.

Steps for Character Creation

The steps for character creation are not explicitly stated in the text, however, an example that walks the player through the process is included. From this "walkthrough example", I would summarize the process as follows:

The first step is to choose a type of horsie. The type of horsie selected gives a bonus to the non-magical Attribute Levels of the character, and determines if a character has any innate magical abilities. There are four types of horsies from which to choose:

• Terra: A standard horse with strong physical abilities
• Receives a +2 Level bonus in Strength
• Receives a +1 Level bonus in Life
• Unicorn: A one-horned horse with magical ability 
• Receives a +1 Level bonus in the Magic-Telekinesis Attribute
• Receives either:
• A +1 Level bonus in two Magic Attributes, OR
• A +2 Level bonus in 1 Magic Attribute
• Pegasus: A winged horse with the ability to fly and evade attacks
• Receives a +2 Level bonus in Flight
• Receives a +1 Level bonus in Evasion
• Pegacorn: A combination of a pegasus and a unicorn
• Receives a +1 Level bonus in Flight
• Receives a +1 Level bonus in the Magic-Telekinesis Attribute
• Receives a +1 Level bonus in one other Magic Attribut

The second step is to determine the character’s non-magical Attribute Levels for each Attribute and/or buy Magical Attributes. Attributes are determined by a point-buy system, whereby the player starts with 10 points which may be spent to either 1) increase non-magical Attribute Levels beyond those determined by their horsie type or 2) buy magical abilities.

Non-magical Attribute Levels start at a value of 0 plus the bonus determined by the horsie type.

You can also choose to buy one of seven magical abilities for your character. Each one is treated as Magic Attribute, and, like the other non-magical Attributes, has both an Attribute Level and a number of Attribute Points associated with it. Magic Attribute Levels that are purchased start at an Attribute Level of 1.

Whether magical or not, all costs to increase Attribute Levels are the same. To increase an Attribute Level from 0 to 1 costs one point. To increase an Attribute Level from 1 to 2 costs two points, from 2 to 3 costs three points and so forth. When increasing an Attribute Level, you may not skip levels; you must buy all the levels in between. As an example, increasing from 0 to 3 will cost 1+2+3, or 6 points. Points may be spent all at once or saved for later Attribute improvement when a character rises in level.

The third step is to choose a Profession and Hobby for the character. Each of these is treated like an Attribute Level during game play. The Profession starts at a Level of Two while a Hobby starts with a Level of 1. There is a list of common professions and hobbies in the book, but players are encouraged to come up with their own.

The fourth step is to determine Attribute Points. Attribute Points are spent during the course of game play to make things happen (See Part 3: Mechanics for further details). For the most part, they are equal to the Attribute Level for each attribute, except in the case of Life Points, where 5 is added to the Life Attribute Level to get the total.

The fifth and final step is to document character possessions on the character sheet. All characters receive the following:

• 20 gold coins
• A very small, simple house

The description of the character is left up to the player, but the mane and the fur are standard throughout the examples provided and spaces are on the character sheet for these two traits. Additionally, the game provides a 3-page character sheet, complete with large boxes for drawing both a picture of a character as well as the character’s home.

My Take

A Glitch

I am going to give you my take on characters and character creation, but first, let me start with a little story.

The first time I made characters with my three kids, it took us about 45 minutes to make a group of characters. (They did have a total of 3 years of experience making HiBRiD^TM , Gamma World, and Dungeons and Dragons characters, so they were not completely inexperienced.) It would have only taken about 30 minutes by my reckoning if we hadn’t hit a glitch.

The main snag that slowed character creation for my family was the fact that the steps to character creation are not explicitly listed in the book (My two oldest even asked me “Where is the list of steps dad?”). This forced us to read through the entire walkthrough example of character creation multiple times. This slowdown was then amplified by the fact that the Attribute descriptions appear after the character creation chapter. Specifically, the source of our delay stemmed from the description of how Life Points are determined as described in the walkthrough example. The text states that the character starts with “5 Life” and later in the process, the player making the character wants to “spend a point in Life to get 1 Level in it as well”. According to the rules as written in the text, my kids read it to mean that it should cost 6 points to increase Life from 5 (the amount all characters start out with) to 6. While clarified on the character sheet after the walkthrough example and in the section describing Life Points later in the book after the walkthrough example, had there been an explicit set of steps that included the description of how to calculate Life Points somewhere before the example, this might have been prevented.

Speed

With all of this being said, once you understand the relationship between Attribute Levels and Attribute Points, the process of character creation is awesomely quick and easy. In the process of writing an adventure for our next game, I have had to create 9 NPCs. The process is so simple, I now find myself able to pound out a fully designed and developed NPC in less than 3 minutes.  FanTAStic!

The Character Sheet

The game comes with a freely copied 3-page character sheet, that includes a special emphasis on drawing the character AND the character’s little house. This is awesome, but three pages makes a single character sheet into multiple character sheets. While simple, I found myself continuously wanting to create one myself, complete with some formatting changes to help players make their characters. For instance, for each attribute, there are three lines on the sheet. I would create one box for the Attribute Level, one box for the Maximum number of Attribute Points, then a long, skinny one next to these boxes to mark off points as I use them, kind of like hit points in so many other games. I would also add a +5 next to the Life Attribute Levels to really emphasize this part of the mechanic, as it is not quite so explicit in the book.

A Final Note

It seems every book I find has at least one grammatical error that drives me nuts or some nomenclature that I feel the need to comment on. In Tiny Horsies, there are both.

The one grammatical error that sticks in my craw every time I read it reads as follows:

“This is because it’s easier for the Game Master if the character doesn’t gaining new abilities in the middle of an action”

Ugh. I have decided to chalk the existence of this oversight up to proprietary software (whether used or not), as I refuse to believe any Open Source application would miss that!

(Update: I just found out that Neosoft was the app used. Darnit! I think that rather than blaming proprietary applications, I shall just use this as an opportunity to chastise them insteadJ )

On the subject of nomenclature, I want to take a minute to discuss the term “horsies”. Most people would agree that the singular diminutive form for a horse might normally be either “horsey” or “horsy”. In the case of this game, however, I feel spelling it “horsie” really gives it a feel that is congruent with the game, so I will be using it exclusively and specifically when I reference PCs and NPCs in the game going forward both in this review as well as in life.

Conclusion

Despite the "glitch, character creation for this game is a dream.

The lack of multiple types of character stats and the simplicity of the point-buy/horsie type Attribute determination system make character creation so fast it should be considered criminal. The integration of Magic Spells with Attributes enables players to create highly customized characters without sacrificing any of this speed.

The character sheets provided are a bit unwieldy, being three pages in length, though the room for drawing pictures makes them very novel. To help all of you, I will be including a link to a 2-sided character sheet you can use in the near future. The fact that I sat down and built it in Scribus over 3 hours should show how inspired I was by the game to create it after my third game session with my kids.It really is just a matter of taste anyway...

What is HiBRiD^TM about this?

Overall, the simplicity of the game, the de-emphasis on visceral combat, and the emphasis on interactions between PCs and NPCs really shines through when building a Tiny Horsies character.

I don’t want to spend a whole darn game session making characters. I am always working toward the ultimate goal of 5 minute character creation for HiBRiD^TM with this in mind. While the walkthrough example was great for players new to roleplaying games and HiBRiD^TM, it would be more efficient and even more HiBRiD^TM if there was also a list of creation steps that included a short summary of each step to allow more seasoned players to get up and running even more quickly. With its fast and expressive character creation system, Tiny Horsies has not only metaphorically nailed the horseshoes on the metaphorical character creation horsie, it has created streamlined, zero-G, frictionless horseshoes to boot!

The total control over character development with a crisp, unified, and simple mechanic and COMPLETE LACK OF RANDOM DICE ROLLS is totally HiBRiD^TM!  I love the fact that everything is an innate attribute, with no differences in terms of how the game is played. The necessity for such horribly unHiBRiD^TM paradigms as Charisma being an attribute, Perception being a skill, and any systemized feats or stunts is completely eliminated in Tiny Horsies! I have always struggled with this with almost any system I have ever played, seen, or designed, (including HiBRiD^TM). Games like Tiny Horsies (and the Zero roleplaying game by Steve Stone and Lester Smith) are shining examples of elegant character development systems and should be appreciated for the freedom they allow players while still instilling the excitement during action scenes! 

Next up...Mechanics...