Cottage Critters
A downloadable game
Have you ever wanted to be a country mouse baking bread on a cold winter day? That's what this game is all about! Create anthropomorphic animal characters that live within a shared home. Follow your characters through a series of low stakes slice of life style adventures where the key to success is often the power of friendship.
Cover art by Obliesk: https://www.instagram.com/obliesk/
This game was made for the Teamwork is Magic Jam which you should definitely check out!
This work is based on the Buddy System, published by Jessica Marcrum. The Buddy System is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Cottage Critters is a bunch of fun! We did an actual play of two of our sessions and the first one came out last week!
Hi! Just bought the game as a gift for a loved one who’s going through hard times; I hope it will cheer her up.
I have some doubts on the challenge mechanic: it seems much more difficult to succeed at an action than you imply. For example, take the example of getting yourself out of a stream, a “moderate” action that requires two 5+ results. You roll one die. None of the talents in the book seem relevant, no one is helping you, and you’re clearly not in your cottage, so no extra dice. Since theres no way to get two 5+ on one die, success is impossible!
With two dice, you have a 1/9 chance of success at a “moderate” challenge. With more dice … the math gets too hard to do in my head, but my intuition is that success is much less likely than intended. (There are some websites that will do this kind of dice probability analysis for you.)
Have playtesters run into this sort of issue? Any advice on tweaking the system?
Hi, I'm sorry to hear that, hopefully it will provide some good vibes.
For the challenge mechanic we actually had the stream situation come up while play-testing. In that situation we had the cellar master assist the person and use their woodworking skill to quickly fashion a stick as a tool to grab on to. In this scenario they rolled 3 dice and succeeded. Since the game is set-up to encourage that players almost never do actions on their own.
I can understand how the examples are a little confusing here as this seems to be related to the Challenging (Pulling someone from a stream) example and not the Moderate (getting yourself out of a stream) one. However, my intentions with it were whether the character within a stream was conscious (so a failure in the writing to communicate clearly here).
Alternative you could always reduce all the difficulties by one if you'd a game with more successes (i.e. Moderate becomes 1, Challenging 2, Improbable 3).
I hope this clears up some of the differences in play vs intentions and that you still have a good time with the game!