Rules en-Lite-enment

Hero Girl Sprite, or "HGS" when I’m rich and famous, is a Rules-Lite game. But there are rules, so lemme get that outta the way now.

1st Rule: Choose Your Heroine
There are four heroines, and each of you has to pick a different one. Perhaps if you know a little about each one, you can make an informed choice.

P2 - FAIRY GIRL
GAME: SUPER FAIRY GODMOTHERS
INTO: FAIRY TALES & KEYHOLES
ROLE: THE LITTLE SPRITE
LIFE: 💛💛


P3 - PEPPY GIRL
GAME: VYNIL FANTASY
INTO: MUSIC & SPELL-DANCING
ROLE: THE MAGICAL GIRL
LIFE: 🩷🩷🩷


P4 - KICKY GIRL
GAME: FEET OF RAGE
INTO: FASHION & @$$-KICKING
ROLE: THE ACTION HEROINE
LIFE: ❤️❤️❤️❤️


P5 - BARBY GIRL
GAME: BARBARIC COMMANDO
INTO: BODY-SCULPTING & SPAS
ROLE: THE WARRIOR PRINCESS
LIFE: 🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵



2nd Rule: Rolling the Dice
There are two types of rolls, "Hero" and "Sprite."

Roll "Hero" to attack a villain, perform a feat of strength, or do something brazenly heroic.
⬇️ To hit, roll UNDER your Player Number!

Roll "Sprite" to cast magic (but not attack), make a deft, graceful or stealthy move, or do something zestfully fey.
⬆️ To hit, roll OVER your Player Number!

Roll "Anti-Hero" (or "Antihero") when a villain attacks you!
⬇️ If you roll UNDER your Player Number, you get hit!

🎲🎲 Roll 2d6, normally.

🎲🎲🎲 Roll 3d6 (or 1d6) when using a power-up.



3rd Rule: Safety First
Or since it’s Rule #3, I guess that’s Safety Third. Well, better late than never.

My nanobot spies have already vetted you and confirmed you are nice people, so I don’t need to worry about the PCs flipping each other off in front of the Blastroid Horde.

Besides party-infighting, my other pet-peeve is evil campaigns. I don’t mean they shouldn’t exist, but that I shouldn’t play them. I definitely won’t GM an evil campaign. But enough about me…

I want all of you to feel like your characters are heroic. So what level of violence do you prefer?

• Street Fighter (you definitely aren’t killing anyone)
• Double Dragon (you can’t tell whether your enemies are unconscious or dead)
• Secret of Mana (you are definitely killing enemies, but there’s no graphic violence)
• MORTAL COMBAAAAAAT!! (…)
—or—
• Tetris (the level of violence fits whatever game you’re in at the time, like a 4x1 block in a 9x4 heap)



To recap, please do the following.

1. Choose a heroine. (Feel free to discuss with each other, or do like at an arcade and just take your pick before someone else does. But kidding aside, I hope there won’t be any hard feelings.)

2. Optional: do a test roll!
• For the Reason, choose one: Hero 2 / Sprite 3 / Antihero 4 / Anti-sprite 5 …but please use your selected character’s number. The hyphen is optional for the Anti- rolls. (My code only knows "hero" or "sprite" should be followed by a space an a whole number from 2 to 5.)
• For the Roll, it’s 2d6. (It’s ALWAYS 2d6 until you acquire an item/weapon/spell that improves your roll.)

3. Optional: safety stuff
• Choose the level of violence. ("Tetris" means okay with any. @dmbrainiac, this would be the same as Cartoon Peril, where the Mad Max-like scene was less violent than transformation sequence for the Voltron-like creature made of giant birds.)
• Also feel free to mention anything you don’t want to see in a campaign.

I have a preference for Kicky Girl, since I'm more familiar with fighting genre than the others, and I love it. :D
If anyone else wants to play her more, I also wouldn't mind Fairy or Peppy, but I'll probably be bad at roleplaying Barby. Still willing to try though.

I never did run the original incarnation of this game, but I did create artwork for these characters. Here they are, though the player numbers are 1-4.Your characters don’t need to resemble my drawings, but I just thought I’d share.

Woah, you used a very cool art style in these drawings. :0 It reminds me of this specific subset of modern cartoons which use thick black lineart and hyperbolic action poses. Also I especially like how you did the legs! And the palette!

...I'm definitely taking this as a reference for the avatar.

(Magical girl makes me think of Chun-Li. You sure she is a magical girl and not a fighter in disguise? That guitar sure looks like a sturdy weapon... XD)

I am so kicking myself for deleting that palette! I picked 28 colors from a Hanna-Barbera character collage. It was when I just got ProCreate and I thought, oh, I should use the professionals’ color choices.

Yeah… those were fun to draw, and I just let myself go and had fun. My favorite leg image is one with Kicky Girl trying to keep Peppy Girl from falling into a pit.(Hmmm… Chun Li in Sakura’s costume? Could be..!)

Oh… before I continue to say OoC Chat stuff in the thread I intended as Session Zero, here’s something on-topic:

You don’t need to play this game as ****Y GIRL.

Like the 16-bit JRPG, Secret of Mana—which gave you three characters named HERO, GIRL and SPRITE—you get to rename them the moment they become active.

So by all means, when you create your character, rename her. It might be cool if everyone uses this convention:

P2 - Name / P3 - Name / etc.

That way the player number is obvious. Aside from that, what you put in the character sheet is optional. Only the max number of hearts matters at game-start. You can track items and permanent spells/moves as you obtain them.

I was just about to ask if we should rename them. XD

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This right here is some serious feat of acrobatics, yet I can't help but be entranced by the flames instead. Do I ever love lighting effects. :V

..Also I can't look at the spiky walls without thinking of the glass coffin trap from Saw.

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Speaking of which! Regarding the safety stuff, I'd probably prefer Street Fighter level of violence for this game. It's either butterflies or gore for me, and the latter I find is more fitting in horror. Granted, if someone prefers more violence, it's not a big problem (although having a heroic campaign with Mortal Kombat level of violence would be... an experience).

Among other things I'd rather not have in the game, I don't think anything will come up except maybe one: I don't like "charm" magic. The type which makes affected characters switch sides, or be infatuated, or otherwise lose control of themselves with a *positive* connotation. I'm completely fine with fear-inducing effects, just not love-inducing, if it makes sense? They make me uncomfortable.

And since I guess it can come up in the games we visit, can we avoid real world settings? Or at least the political part of them. I can't look at evil Soviets sitting in a bunker or incompetent American spies without rolling my eyes anymore.

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PS:
I knew toothpaste tasted wacky today!

Street Fighter it is, then. My plan was to run with the least violent category. So PCs do not kill, period, and there won’t be any need to make the villains so awful they "deserve" death.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of forced love, and certainly not the even-worse. And no real-world stuff… we escape that here!

Would you be okay with enemies controlling you in a way that doesn’t overtake your will? Example, in Secret of Mana, the Confuse spell literally swapped up with down, left with right. So it just made it hard to walk the right way. How that spell *could* work in L&F is that you’d roll one die less with Sprite, simulating clumsiness. But you wouldn’t attack other players so much as on a low roll (when I need to inflict a complication) you might stumble-step the wrong way.

Sounds fine to me! It's specifically the positive mind stuff that I'm not fond of, physical is alright (or negative mental, like making characters scared or otherwise muddling their thoughts). :D

...And now I'm thinking about spells which would affect how easy it is to roleplay. The "type your character's speech with your eyes closed" variety. XD

Yeah, I prefer to steer clear of the "love" that isn’t really love because magic.

On switching sides type mind-control, your post is a clear No for PCs—and that No will stand. What about NPCs? Are you comfortable confronting NPCs who are under control, and your objective is to reverse that, thus saving your assailants?

And since it’s established that you won’t kill any NPCs, would it be a problem to fight someone who is under a villain’s control—without knowing that’s the case at first? (That’s pretty much the plot in Streets of Rage 4, if you’re familiar with that game.)

I haven’t actually planned a Streets of Rage 4 type plot, but figured I should ask. If you want your No on that to include NPCs, then it will.

Hmm, I don't think I'd mind it as long as the controlled character knows that they are being controlled (as opposed to the controlled character thinking that they're doing it of their own volition). I actually wouldn't mind it on PCs either with this caveat; although PvP in general is messy, and probably needs a separate discussion if it happens

Then I’ll just avoid that kind of plot device entirely.

Definitely no PvP. (it’s a video game world so your hit boxes are unaffected by other players’ attacks.)

Since it's going to be a fun time, let's go with street fighter level. "They are not dead, they are sleeping." Please no real world issues. I just want to get lost in the arcades.

Yup, definitely going with Street Fighter. That means you knock out opponents, there’s no question that you didn’t accidentally kill one.

I absolutely want to avoid real world issues myself! Getting lost in the arcade… well put!

We can take creative liberties with the games our characters are from, right? Like the setting, plot, etc. Asking mostly just to figure out the manner of speech to use and what level of technology/magic my character would consider unusual.

(You bet I'm making Feet of Rage into a weird amalgamation of Tekken, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.)

Sort of, yes. I’m going to start you in a scene with a partial visual and a situation. (Each of you in your own game until you all end up in Hero Girl Sprite.) But you get to take creative control and embellish on what the game is like, as well as some other things.

I was actually planning on a tournament fighter game, so whatever you’re thinking will likely fit what I have planned.

…..I think I will adjust my plan for P4 slightly to make it a little more Tekken-ish, since you said that.

Oh yeah, tournament was exactly what I was thinking! No need to change stuff either, I can easily adjust the backstory into what you cook up once I see it, it's more of a WIP for now either way. General strokes for calling out cool combo names.

Also, I'm more familiar with Mortal Kombat - followed the story, played a lot of 9th (I think), even watched the movies. :'D Tekken had teenage me's attention mostly because it had a Russian character, and that was a usual "ooooh, look, a fellow Russian" moment; though to be fair to myself, Dragunov is hot, I still maintain that. XD

I am interested in including a tournament fighter.

I think for four players, a Smash Bros. type game would work. And it’s not unheard of to have three humans and a fairy as champions.@PhoenixScientist, after seeing your logistics question, I feel like I picked the right artwork to show you. Both depict roughly how a fairy compares to people and hands.

7 inches, as you mentioned in your post (for Tink’s height) would work —even if that means nine-inch mosquitoes!

Here’s a nice palette for this very game.



It even has a golden yellow, pink, vermilion and aqua for the player colors. It’s very similar to the palette you were referring to in that quote (which I made myself, picking 28 colors from a Hanna Barbera poster), but with less yellows.

I’m not sure what arcade games used this as the standard palette, but I got it from a pixel art site with old limited palettes (NES included).