Student Protectors of Malaysia - Designer Commentary 01

This started out as a thread on Twitter, but I thought it would be useful to also have it documented here.

Student Protectors of Malaysia, was designed specifically for the Game On Lah! event back in February 2020 and I've also submitted it to the #beyondsuperjam. It's a game about being student superheroes balancing superheroics with preparing for the SPM exams.

The SPM (Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia) is the final exam for secondary school/high school students in Malaysia. I wanted to design something that was very local and specific to school since Game On Lah! was an event focused on local games, and the theme was "Back to School".

A lot of school stories are focused on either the start of specific schooling periods, or the end of them, so focusing on the SPM made sense. Once I figured out I wanted to design something about SPM students, I came up with the backronym and concept.

I'm very happy with the title, not only because of the SPM backronym, but it very obviously states the theme of the game: You're students, you're protectors, and you're in Malaysia. I also named the key phases Student, Protector and Marking to keep the SPM acronym going.

Deciding how to name the phases also guided the design of the game. I initially only had the Student and Protector phases, to explore the theme of juggling the two. Adding the Marking phase gave me the idea for how the stats were set up, modelling FitD's downtime, and resources. I wanted to have the concept of tests or exams since it was based on the SPM, so I decided to base the core stats on the core compulsory subjects of the SPM exams.

Two of the core subjects being languages was tricky, but I decided to make them be about different types of communication/connection. Malay gave you Locale which is related to knowledge of the local place and people, while English gave you Network which let you reach beyond your immediate community.

The basic info gathering move worked off either Locale or Network, depending on the fiction. However, I wanted each of them to also have their own thing, so I let Locale ( fuel your ability to protect your hometown and Network would help you connect to others when you de-stress (I'm still figuring this one out, and hope to see how it feels in playtests).

Moral/Religious Studies and History mapped pretty easily to Insight and Memory and were easy to port to convincing people and recalling information, but Math and Science were trickier.

I originally had them as Abstract and Logic and would swap which one was which back and forth. I finally switched Math to be about "quick thinking" which isn't really a great match and again could be convinced to make that a Science stat, but I needed something to fill that role. I knew I wanted to port over some FitD elements, stress and "indulging+overindulging" being the main one, and also ended up bringing in resistance rolls with Quick.

Logic ended up being the stat that helped set up the Engagement Roll equivalent and also frame addressing threats as a problem to solve rather than an enemy to beat up. This also tied into the Preparation economy I wanted to set up. Btw I wouldn't recommend designing a stat system this way as it's super self-indulgent, but hey self-indulgent fits me -_-;

I was going to demo this at an event where demo slots were going to be around 1 hour max, so I wanted the structure of the game to be super clear and straightforward.

• Step 1 introduce a threat and investigate it
  
• Step 2 address the threat
  
• Step 3 see how it affected your studies.
  

I adopted BitD's freeplay/gather information - score - downtime structure, but wanted something a bit more concrete to carry the results of their "gather information" phase into the "score" phase, since I was guessing most attendees wouldn't be familiar with RPGs. I cribbed the idea of "preparation" from Dungeon World (and a whole slew of other PbtA games, I guess) so that the mechanical goals would be:

• Step 1 collect Preparation
  
• Step 2 spend Preparation to deal with a threat
  
• Step 3 leftover Preparation goes to improving test scores.

Since subject scores also increase your stats, this made Preparation a sort of XP in addition to being a resource to deal with threats. I still wanted to award XP for failed rolls, so ended up making XP the way you leveled up superpowers, and also another way to use Memory.

I like how Masks handles superpowers as not the main core of the game. I called the superpowers "Electives" which was amusing, and also made sure they had Quirks that made them tricky to use, which I really like from My Hero Academia.

One thing that came up in the demos was that people waaaaant to use their powers in any situation, and they want to get something from using them. I basically adapted Push Yourself from FitD games to let you apply your powers at the cost of stress, which fits the theme.

A new thing I'm trying out in the latest version of the game is the Attention level die. I wanted to really focus on the tension of trying to keep their activities from the rest of their friends and family, but I'm a bit worried that all it's added is bloat. We'll see!

Finally, I also added more customisation options in the form of special moves, which I ended up calling "Extracurricular Moves' to keep with the theming.

Sooo yeah that's a bunch of words on how I went about designing Student Protectors of Malaysia. I hope you found it interesting, and I hope you'll check it out and let me know what you think!