We’ve had romance tabletop games. We’ve had action tabletop games. But a new game asks the vital question: “What if we had a tabletop game that did BOTH?” Rom Com Drama Bomb is the latest release from Elliot Davis, co-founderof Many Sided Media and creator of games like Project Ecco and Something Is Wrong With The Chickens. To understand what went into this wild new genre mashup I sat down with Elliot to talk romantic comedies, hyper pop, and creating the pinkest TTRPG ever.
So the place I always start with these games that are really pushing the medium and being playful with it is: Where did this idea come from?
There’s two answers to this question. One answer is that in January, I had recently quit my job and I was having trouble sleeping. The phrase “rom-com drama bomb” popped into my head in one of those weird, “I need to get up and write that down,” sort of moments. And I was like, that’s a really fun thing to say. That should be a game. So it sort of started with the four words.
But the bigger answer is that rom-coms have always been one of my favorite genres of movie. And they were really important to my family growing up, we watched so many. They were one of my mom’s favorite genres. And then my mom’s other favorite genre was over the top action movies like Speed, and Transporter, and The Matrix. So after coming up with this weird name inspiration, I was like, ‘What if we mash these sort of two things together and what if someone was being forced into doing a rom-com?’ What would that look like?
So you had the phrase, you had the idea. How did you go about thinking about the actual mechanics and the system that you were going to use for this?
You mentioned that you talked to Jay Dragon (EN: See our recent chat with Jay here) because I’m a huge fan of the way that Jay and Possum Creek use the elements of the Belonging Outside Belonging/No Dice, No Master system, the way that they make use of token moves. It’s a system I’d been wanting to design in for a while.
I had tossed some ideas around for a game that really tries to go after the structure of a movie. Like originally I was thinking about a game that really leans into the idea of Pixar movie structure and how Pixar has a really strong formula. So what if we played with that? And I always thought that these token systems were the right call. I think it was in a conversation with Brian Flaherty, the other co-founder of Many Sided Media and my co-host on Talk of the Table, I think I called him the day after this idea first felt like it was going to be a real thing and gave him the pitch. I didn’t know how to have people change moods, maybe they’re the stats and maybe we’re using dice, but I didn’t really want to do a rolling dice thing. And then he said “Well, you’ve got four moods and there’s a four sided die. So what if like, that was how you picture mood?” That opened up a really big element of the design, that the only way dice comes into play is for like randomization of how you’re feeling in a mood.
When it comes to romance at the table it could be a difficult thing to do and it can be controversial among some people. So I’m wondering how you handle that romance in tabletop?
I am really fortunate, on a personal level, that when I’ve gotten to run this game I’ve gotten to run it for close friends or people I’ve worked with a lot. But I have run it a couple of times for strangers, and I think that one of the things that I make clear in the text is that you can go as deep on the romance as you’re comfortable with, but ultimately the way the game views romance is the silliest version of it. There’s a note in the safety and tone section to always make the silly choice over the scary choice. Your characters are in a forced romance, but you the player are not in a forced romance. I think that that separation is important. When it comes to romance, I always encourage the use of things like the X card. There’s a system I put in here which was inspired by a game from my friends at Dinoberry Press called Little Wolves. (EN: Check out our interview with Little Wolves co-creator Nevyn Holmes here) They have a tone setting system that comes from the moon: a full moon, a half moon and like a dark moon. And these are three things that change the vibe of the game in the world.
So I thought “We’re in movies, let’s lean on a system people know.” So you have the option of setting your game to PG, PG-13, or R, and that is both controlling the romance aspect, how much do you want this to be an adult sounding romance, and how much do you want it to be a chaste kiss, Disney sort of romance, and then it also applies to the violence and the action. Do you want this to get really violent? Do you want it to involve blood and horror? You can use the rating system kind as a common language for the players.
You picked two of the hardest things, I think, when it comes to tabletop in this game and that’s romance and comedy. How did you work out the sort of the tone and the comedic beats that you were going for as you worked on this game?
Yeah, it’s funny, because I think back on certain games that influenced me like Ten Candles, one of the first like indie games I ever played or read. The thing about reading Ten Candles is that reading that book is almost as scary as it is to play. And I really, really, really wanted Rom Com Drama Bomb to be a funny read. Even if you weren’t taking it to the table, it was important to me that there was humor throughout the rules.
I think is one of the big things that tells you how ridiculous and comedic this game is in the villain design. There were a number of different ideas tossed around for villains, but ultimately it came down what in play testing did people find
funny. Most of them is take something rom-com-y and giving it some villainy that I really like: there’s a body horror villain, a religious horror villain, a mob boss.
I playtested Rom Com Drama Bomb probably the most of any of my games that I’ve written and the playtest was always about what moves did you really wanna use? What moves like did you totally ignore? And then paying attention at the table to what moves always made somebody have a, kind of get giddy and have a giggle and stuff. So play testing was huge, I think, for making comedy come across in the game. In terms of writing, it was just writing everything one way to be logical and make sense, and then punching it up to try and make it a comedic read as a book as well, which I hope it accomplished.
How did you come up with all the different playbooks that are in the game?
I wanted to capture my favorite rom-com tropes and go for, leaning into what I thought were my favorite slash the most common tropes, which are just friends, meeting the family, climbing the ladder, which is co-workers, the bet, which is very much 10 Things I Hate About You, which is one of my favorites, the wedding.
I wrote down all of my favorite rom-coms, all of the ones that have been influential to me throughout life. Some of them started with a single movie and I asked, ‘okay, what trope is this movie?’ Like the Meeting the Family one is very much My Big Fat Greek Wedding. So it was a lot of just like delving into my viewing history and things I loved in rom-coms and being like, what’s the tropey version of this?
So the romance part, the comic part, those are kind of two thirds of it. And then the action part, how did you implement that and balance that with the others?
So if if the if the romance and comedy are one half, the Rom Com, the other half of the game is Drama Bomb. And the drama is sort of the in between move set for every playbook. You start to get that action of interacting with the villain. And then bomb is always action. Every bomb move in the game is action. It’s the villain acting their most villainous. It’s the lead acting their most rebellious and trying to break free and protect the other person. So the key to bringing in the action was the bomb moves. Because the moves all have to be connected, right? The bomb move still has to make sense to this character. So how does this character act if they were breaking out of the pretense of their own movie and thinking about this kind of meta storytelling where you know you’re in a story for a lot of these characters, like these things are true about you. You are the trope of a rom-com, but if you’re given the reason to break free of that story and you know you’re in that story, how do you act? So that was the key with the bomb moves.
What really keeps this action packed is the timer and the timed element. I think that when you combine the timed element with these token powered moves, everybody at a certain point in the game becomes a power gamer and that inevitably makes it feel more action packed. It’s something I think was really a joy to discover was that that happened to almost everyone. Almost everyone by scene three or four is like, okay, how do I power my way through these tracks so that like I can get a good ending?
I know you do art but for Rom Com Drama Bomb you brought in Victor Winter. So how did you come up with the sort of visual style in general you wanted to go for?
The first visual for the game was the four icons, the rom-com drama bomb icons. I knew that I wanted it. I knew I wanted it to be this really graphic, really striking look that is kind of akin to like 2000s DVD covers, the kind of thing that would stick out on a movie poster at the movie theaters.
I’ve illustrated my own games previously, but wanted to work with somebody new. I wanted to bring in a new visual style, something that characterizes the villains in a way that, I just can’t do. It’s not my style. So then Sam Leigh, who edited the book, connected me with Victor, and I originally was just hiring Victor to do the spread that’s before the villain page, where you’ve got the villain crafting the bomb and the dioramas with all the little rom-com moments, which each one of those is a moment from a specific rom-com if you look closely, which is really fun.
I talked to Victor and I commissioned them before the Kickstarter…and then they absolutely knocked it out of the park on this spread and they made this villain what would become the visual for Dr. Evol with these pink hearts shaved into the side of their head. The characterization was so clear that they really could do character work that I was said, are you down to be a stretch goal to make character art for all of them? Like for all the villains. I just really like how you like brought this villain to life.
I didn’t give too much direction other than like, I think this is over the top, cartoony and pink highlights and otherwise black and white. And the first piece of art that they sent me of all the characters was Don Coppola, who has got a foot up on this camera and is smoking a cigar with the pink stick. And that blew me away so hard that I was like, Victor, you are a genius. I trust whatever vision you have for the rest of these. So really the villain visual style, I owe entirely to Victor Winter’s vision for based off how these characters were written.
Otherwise I knew that I wanted this to be just the pinkest book you’ve ever seen. And I had that conversation with Brian who did the layout and we said ‘let’s just get as much pink into this book as possible.’ And I think we got just about as much pink as we could.
I think it’s really funny that this one does kind of stick out. Other games you’ve worked on, I think you clearly have an eye towards horror for a lot of your other titles.
I think if you had asked me before like this year if I thought I would write a romance game, I would have said, no, probably not. But if you phrased it as ‘would you ever write a rom-com game’, then all of a sudden I would have been like, yeah, 100%. And I think it’s that sort of distinction. I don’t know if I have true romance in me as a game designer. But as soon as you can give me a comedic bent on romance that I can really twist and play around with. That really works for me.
I think that like in terms of like departure from my other work…yes and no. Project Ecco was a more serious turn from my first couple small games, but I feel like Something is Wrong with the Chickens is very tonally similar to this game in that it’s something dark mixed with something silly and you’re not supposed to take it seriously at all. I think that one of the coolest things about TTRPGs is giving people the permission to be funny, even if it’s something they don’t think they can do. I think it’s really one of the fun things you can do is give people the tools to be funny. Like if you give them enough, like ridiculous combinations, like you’re gonna be funny when you describe that to your friends, like when you have to say, “I’m a chicken who just opened a third eye on their head.’ If nothing else that’s going to get a disbelief laugh.
The last thing I wanted to ask about was the theme song, which is something that I’ve very seen very rarely in gaming in general. So I’m curious where the idea to have one came from and how you kind of developed it?
So the theme song is written and composed and recorded by BE/HOLD, who is one of my oldest friends and a really, really good musician and music producer named Colin McClutchie. And Colin and I lived together for a number of years here in the city. I spent a long time working from home during the pandemic while he was on the other side of the apartment making music on synthesizers. He got really into synthesizers over the pandemic. And then when I started making games, he at one point came to me and said ‘I would love to write a theme song for one of your games.’ And this was before Project Ecco. And when Project Ecco was going to funding, I was like, do you wanna make a theme song? And he did, and it was this incredible dark, heavy, synthy music. We ended up meeting a stretch goal and he made this soundtrack for Project Ecco that is just one of my favorite things that has ever been made in relation to something I’ve done. So I knew he had it in him to capture the vibe and theme of a game.
When I had this idea, I was like, do you wanna make a weird hyper pop mashup of a song that would be in a rom-com that got pushed through a 100 gecs filter. I think that I sent him I sent him “DUI” by Estelle Allen, which is a very fun over the top hyper pop song, and playlist called 2000s Rom-Com on Spotify someone had put together, which just had all the classic songs from 2000s rom-coms. I said, I want these two things to have a baby. And he did exactly that by first writing a romance song that he recorded. And you can hear on the album he put out of these two songs and then putting it through the hyper pop grinder to make the theme song. It’s just a lot of fun and he really did it. He really did a great job doing that. It’s just a cool way to get the vibes perfect for the game, I think.
You can grab Rom Com Drama Bomb from the MoreBlueberries shop or on itch.io!
Images via Eliot Davis
Have strong thoughts about this piece you need to share? Or maybe there’s something else on your mind you’re wanting to talk about with fellow Fandomentals? Head on over to our Community server to join in the conversation!