Hi everyone!

Well this is exciting, isn’t it? I should probably cover a little bit about what this is, and how this happened.

To give the short summary - this was originally designed as a one-shot system for a charity stream done by Warwick Tabletop Games and Roleplaying Society back in 2020. It was far more successful than expected, so came back as a five-part campaign in 2021! This also featured more art, a soundtrack (?!) and far more emotion than I ever expected anything that I would run to have. You can see this campaign on YouTube.

It also stretched the system and revealed a few limitations that would be cool to fix in future versions. That’s what this post is about! Amazing.

So, without further ado, here are the overarching design goals for future versions of Monsters on a Cruise Ship.

Reducing GM workload. So far, Monsters on a Cruise Ship has had the premise of players attempting to seduce bachelors all played by the GM - four players and three bachelors. In every playtest so far, this has been subverted, with some players dating each other. Furthermore, this leads to the GM playing three characters who need to be well-thought out and deep alongside the rest of the cruise ship crew and the environment as a whole. This is, to put it politely, challenging.

As such, we are going to rethink that premise by removing the player-bachelor distinction, and not having the GM play three characters. Instead, there will simply be at most five contestants, with one played by the GM. (For smaller player counts you can have fewer of course, but the main aim is to have an odd number of contestants.) As such, the GM will have a chance to really enjoy playing one character, rather than enjoying but having the challenge of juggling more, particularly when it comes to giving everyone enough time in the spotlight.

This may require more talking to the players as to facilitate the chaos that the bachelors can cause as GM-controlled entities, but in a system about relationship you should probably be talking to your players anyway.

Reducing the number of modifiers. Currently, you can have up to six modifiers on a flirt roll - being shaken, a bonus from a previous flirt, your stat, hobbies/weaknesses, ROM and type. Gotta be real, I forgot most of these while running the game, and I don’t believe that took away from its enjoyment - in fact, they mostly add complexity for little benefit. As such, we are going to try and merge some of these modifiers and remove others to make it less number crunchy and more number chewy. (No, I don’t know what I mean by number chewy either. But anyway, less numbers and more roleplaying.)

Changes to make ROM more roleplay focused and interesting. Currently, love is just a number. This is a slight inaccuracy, and while it would be impossible to fully simulate something like this, it would be nice to move towards a model that better supports roleplaying.

There are two problems with ROM as it stands - first, it doesn’t really lend itself to having interactions outside of one relationship. This is a shame from an RPG standpoint, since you’d like everyone interacting with everyone else - whether positively or negatively. As such, we are considering bonuses for getting any ROM with an individual - kind of like learning things from your friends!

Second, you would expect small tokens of affection to not be as effective at higher ROM levels - you would expect bigger gestures to be needed. (Small gestures are still lovely! Just not the only thing.) As such, we’re looking at ways to make ROM more qualitative - talking about how gestures are done rather than the number of them. This is to support the kinds of story arcs we saw on stream - small flirts leading to more dramatic gestures in later episodes.

We’ve already got some cool ideas which we’ll formalise into rules soon!

Anyway, we’ll hopefully have development logs detailing those ideas and other smaller (balance) changes we’re making over the coming weeks and months. (All the people working on this are full-time students...)

Thanks for reading!

- Finnbar, designer and the GM on stream