Pudding Rancher

Sometimes I get very strange ideas. It started out innocently enough: I suggested "Pudding Rancher" as an additional Fable 2 class, in the spirit of the parody on The Escapist. Then, with a mind poisoned by hours of Pokémon breeding and a recent viewing of Australia, it occurred to me that this would be a perfectly good game in its own right. In my initial conception, it was a bit like how I imagine Viva Piñata, a brightly colored animal breeding game, except with an additional FPS like mini-game of pudding wrangling, and special titles based on the particular combination of puddings you owned, or what you'd done to your puddings.

Sadly, I'm not in any position to create a computer game. No programming skills, no interest in acquiring them, and too short an attention span to see the project through at any rate. And so, lacking the skills and the drive, I'd resigned myself to leaving Pudding Rancher in the bin of unrealizable projects, until I realized:

I can write a roleplaying game. The math will necessarily be less complex, the possible combinations somewhat simpler, and there won't be any shiny graphics to advertise it, but I can make a pen and paper game about buying, catching, breeding, growing, and selling puddings.

I further pondered the idea of making it a board or card game, but in the end have decided against both options -- mostly because I don't want to have to produce the materials needed for such games. It may very well end up being board or card game like: you might take a stack of 3x5 cards to write your pudding's stats, or draw a picture of your ranch to ease management of it and the puddings on it. But though a game with pre-drawn cards or tokens or whatnot might increase the appeal of the game, I'd rather have the grand flexibility that an roleplaying game (or roleplaying-like game) can provide.

So far I've just got a general idea of the stages of the game ("pudding wrangling," "the pudding auction," "pudding breeding," and "the pudding drive," for starters) and some ideas about stats for puddings ("flavor," "charm," "size," and a derived stat, "tastiness"). I'm considering giving pudding ranchers stats, to make it more distinctly roleplaying-like, and I have some vague ideas about different ways of rolling up puddings, depending on their origin.

It remains to be seen whether I'll actually get this done, but I needed to share it with the world. You may now resume the pudding free portion of your day.