What if I want to play *as* a rat?
I have multiple answers to this!
The simple answer is that the game supports it and is still very fun, but the immersion isn’t as intense.
When I started writing the game I actually assumed you’d play the rats. People like playing rats and mice, I think, probably because of stuff like … Redwall and Reepicheep and whatever? I know he wasn’t actually a rat, but I heart Reepicheep forever. ^_^;;
… but the longer I worked on the game, the less sense defaulting to playing rats seemed to make!
Humans going up on the roofs, you see, get to experience the whole shebang as something wonderful and terrifying and new. They get the full impact of the game.
The rats … are more used to it. They do definitely have intense feelings about the far roofs and on the far roofs, but it’s just not the same!
… plus, like, this didn’t turn out to be the right game to make players read an extensive brief on rat culture and physiology before they could make good character concepts. It’s a game that tries to make sure you can have a good time even if you know very little about the game or world when you sit down to play. You probably do want at least someone at the table have read the book first, and to have everyone else at least flip through it a bit, but … keeping the barriers to entry minimal was a major goal!
As a side note, there is one storyline (not tied to a specific character; it’s one of the optional ones) where you turn into a rat along the way. So if you like that kind of thing, there’s that; though I think most PCs who play through that will probably eventually turn back.
I feel like …
I feel like a lot of groups will just tweak the basic characters, or make their own, and play rats, and they’ll have fun. I ran a playtest in a completely unrelated setting with absolutely nothing to do with any of this (post-show Revolutionary Girl Utena) and it worked great! It just won’t be as MUCH fun, all else being equal, as the baseline game.
Last updated: April 01, 2024 18:38
Do I need anything special in terms of cards or letter tiles?
You do not!
“The Far Roofs” uses regular playing cards. You should be able to find them at your local grocery store or corner store or pharmacy, but if not, random.org has a great card shuffler that is honestly what I used most of the time in playtest. They also have a pretty dice roller.
For right now, for the letter tiles, I’m assuming you’ll either want to use an online service like the random letter server at https://kevan.org/games/randomletter or you’ll own a Scrabble set. I have always found Scrabble sets to be sort of ambient, like, here where I live one came with the house? But, to be clear, online tools are fine!
You can also write letters on index cards or cut-up index cards according to the Scrabble distribution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions ) if you like. It’s fine if you cut them a little unevenly and over time players start recognizing them by shape when drawing them from a bag or pile; it’s sort of thematic, even, as long as they don’t know for sure.
I’d love to do a game box that has the rules and the dice and the cards and the letter tiles and a bag but it’s outside my current skill set; I have a reasonable amount of experience fulfilling digital and physical and print-on-demand books these days, but adding three or four extra points of failure for miscellaneous physical objects won’t make sense for me for quite some time unless we succeed so wildly I have to add more stretch goals. ^_^
I believe that the hardest gameplay tool to get your hands on is honestly probably the d10s, but the game uses those so rarely that you can probably skip them and resort to the web or randomized finger adding if they ever should come up.
Last updated: April 01, 2024 18:39
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