The Gaming Den

Hotline Miami is awesome. There are a lot of things that make it awesome, and we are here to discuss. The question is:

For an RPG game trying to emulate Hotline Miami, what are the key elements too look for? Which system should be used? Is it a good idea to begin with, emulating Hotline Miami?

I don't know how you'd replicate the "twitch" gameplay that makes hotline miami work.

Outside of that, has anyone ever done an RPG that was centered around unreliable narration?

Longes wrote:Is it a good idea to begin with, emulating Hotline Miami?

For what it's worth, the big elements that made HM work for me as a great game were:

1. The soundtrack
2. The aesthetics (camera, bizzare insanity)
3. The twitch-based gameplay where combats happened in frantic seconds, every instant posed between life and death, where reflexive murder is king and no meaningful defenses other than speed and viciousness to strike first work.
4. Instant restarts and amazingly high difficulty curves.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I can't really see an obvious way to import much of that into a tabletop RPG. If someone actually did I would be both amazed and super happy, but I can't really see it working that well. You could include in a guidebook suggestions to put on tracks by M|O|O|N?

Hotline Miami's basically a grimderp '80s-'90s comic transported to your screen in gaudy neon colors. It's a fucked up game about fucked up people and it likes to be up front with that unpleasantness while being stingy with explanations. So right away you run into some issues with player empowerment--the game works as well as it does in large part because it refuses to give you any real narrative control. Maintaining that sort of dynamic is bound to run afoul of many players--some people just won't appreciate the content and others will feel jerked around if the MC actively tries to keep them in the dark all the time and every door results in dead girlfriends. My expectation is that a functional Hotline Miami tabletop game would result in something vaguely resembling a street level pink mohawk Shadowrun team, since ultimately I think you're really stuck ceding a bunch of control to the players.

I guess you could say it'd most resemble a really fucked up session of d20 Modern, but nobody cares about d20 Modern.

The only way I could see to replicate the twitch gameplay would be to create... I don't know puzzles? Maybe take a riff off of dex based board games where you physically do stuff?

Copying the aesthetic of Hotline Miami would be easier than copying the gameplay of Hotline Miami. Gritty neon wastelands can be achieved with narrative, but the twitch gameplay would not translate fully. You could make combat short and deadly for the NPCs, but the pure visceral thrill of Hotline Miami's combat is something you can only really do in a video game.

I think the awesomeness of Hotline Miami gameplay is too much tied to the videogame medium. And in a way, the tabletop environment is the anthithesis of it - its slow paced, ungraphical and.. safe. The most you could emulate would be the 80s acid aesthetics. But would it be enough ?

Now, if you want to emulate the hyper-violent death spiral towards sociopathy and schizophreny the character undertakes over a 80s acid néon background, probrably there is an indie game out there that already does this. And if there isnt, it shouldnt be so difficult to create. (perhaps taking some cues from Unknown Armies and Sorcerer "power in exchange for your social life"-promoting rules could be a good start ? )

Mask_De_H wrote:Copying the aesthetic of Hotline Miami would be easier than copying the gameplay of Hotline Miami. Gritty neon wastelands can be achieved with narrative, but the twitch gameplay would not translate fully. You could make combat short and deadly for the NPCs, but the pure visceral thrill of Hotline Miami's combat is something you can only really do in a video game.

Agree. You could do some neon noire in a game and I'd play it, but there'd be no way to do the twitch gameplay unless you incorporated crazy tests of player reflexes, by which point you're larping and you should just go buy some 80s-wear, find an empty office building, and have at it.

The twitch gameplay could be recreated by using a card-based mechanism.
For example :

Each player has a deck of cards, these cards are actions: hit, shoot, dodge, finish.
The GM has the same cards + enemy cards and conditions cards.

When an enemy appears, the GM put down an enemy card on the table, and it's combat time. Next to each enemy card are three columns: one for attacking the enemy, one for dodging and one for the enemy's attack.

There's also one "junk" emplacement.

One after the other, the players take the first card from their deck and either put it next to a character in the right slot or in the "junk" slot. There are rules for which cards can go where: you can only put a dodge card if there's an attack card you haven't dodged, you can only put an attack card if there isn't any attack left for you to dodge, and you can only put in the "junk" slot if you can't do any action. You can only finish if you have a successful attack, etc. No card should be put next to an enemy that was "finished", etc.

The "condition" cards the GM can sometimes reveal can change the rules: "open space" means that you can only attack someone if NO other enemy has non-dodged attacks on you, "doors everywhere" can turn a "dodge" into an attack, etc.

The combat ends when all revealed enemies have been "finished".

When a player makes a mistake, or takes too long to act (more than one or two seconds) he loses one HP. When all HP are lost he's out. When the GM makes a mistake, one enemy is finished. If nobody notices a mistake, nothing happens.

This is just an example, it's probably full of holes and problems, but it's mostly for the concept of a twitch game, that still has something to do with what's actually happening.

Hm. Here's an idea for solving the slow-paced combat. Do something like Paranoia/Shadow of Mordor (obviously doesn't work for realistic settings).

PCs are disposable clones that spawn from checkpoints. A fight with any enemy is solved with a single diceroll - PC vs NPC. If PC wins, the NPC is dead. If NPC wins, the PC respawns back at checkpoint and tries to come back to the party. If the entire party dies, they all respawn and try again/try to find a different approach to the encounter.

Party ? Theres no party in Hotline Miami. Also, I dont think the thing you describe sounds fun. I mean, sitting around a table for re-rolling dice until you pass an obstacle. Anse and repeat. Whats the point ?

Here's how you do it.

1- play really loud synth music. Basically get every speaker in your house blaring something from girlfriend records..

2- everyone wears Ryan Goslings jacket from Drive.

3-all light bulbs in your home need to be black lights or neon lights

4- an eight ball

5- order a pizza, that's an important plot point

6- Zima

7- realize that an infiltration game that turns into murderball can only be fun if the combat system makes it feel as though your actions have an impact. Sadly that means it can't be too fast paced or it falls to arbitrary dice rolls, so just play a modern rpg of your choice with triply aesthetics.

Twitch play need not be completely divorced from TTRPGs.

Games like Jab are card games, but ultimately that card game is a resolution mechanic. It's entirely conceivable to create a real-time card resolution system that replaces combat dice-rolling.

For discussion of unreliable narrators, check out the old Doubt threads.

TheFlatline wrote:I don't know how you'd replicate the "twitch" gameplay that makes hotline miami work.

Sometimes M:tG can feel like that when it's speedy red decks fighting each other.

I like the idea of cards. How about, each round, everyone gets a bunch of cards. Cards are played to a central pile whenever and are resolved at the end of the round in order played. The round ends when anyone runs out of cards. So, you have to make judgement calls fast, or you won't get everything done.

TiaC wrote:I like the idea of cards. How about, each round, everyone gets a bunch of cards. Cards are played to a central pile whenever and are resolved at the end of the round in order played. The round ends when anyone runs out of cards. So, you have to make judgement calls fast, or you won't get everything done.

Yes, I could see something like this working.

What I think is important is to have all characters be the same. The only differences would be elite fighters (military/SWAT/etc.) who'd be tougher, and psychos.

All characters should also start with a psychological issue. It makes them vulnerable to persuasion, but it also makes them more powerful. The more they kill, the more psycho they become, making them more powerful as well. They eventually become unstoppable, but also completely crazy. That's when they're turned into NPCs and become the big bad of the next campaign.

Of course, player agency doesn't have a place. The PCs are just manipulated from beginning to end. At best, they can get to kill whoever manipulated them, but they're already too far past the point of no return for that to change anything.

One thing that might work is to provide a mechanical incentive to playing your character recklessly. For example, with the right masks (particularly the unicorn to silence your gunshots), some levels are quite easy to pass with guns if you plan your attacks, and you're methodical and patient. You wait for guy 1 to pass the door, auto-aim at him, and bull-rush guy 2 as he passes the door and shoot guy 1. You clear the level with relatively few deaths this way, but you end up with something like a C+ or lower every time you win.

Compare this to me running around with the frog mask (longer combos) and only using guns to throw at people. On a good run, I'll sweep the whole floor in a single, continuous combo, alternating between fists and melee weapons. That will get me A- to A+ grades.

Now, unless you have some reason to make people care about a "grade" at the end of the game, the best thing I can think of is giving a mechanical incentive during the game. So,

• you get things like bonuses to die rolls for the next round when you switch weapons (you get points for "versatility" in the game).
• If you bust through a door without "listening" first (or however you resolve the fact that the player gets a top-down view of the map), you get a surprise round on anyone in the room.
• Executing people in front of others gives you a stacking bonus based on how many people saw you (the "exposure" metric in the game).
• Perhaps give stacking bonuses based on consecutive rounds of knock downs and kills to emulate combos (perhaps something like the Blood in the Water stance from ToB).

I'm not sure you can make the gameplay twitch without making it overly simple, and bonus tracking will slow things down. That being said, at least the mechanics would incentivize quick actions on the part of your character. As was previously mentioned, if you make the actual resolution too fast, you run the risk of the game being nothing but arbitrary dice rolls.


Also, I totally second reading the old Doubt threads for unreliable narration. There is even a bit of overlap on the conspiracy themes of Doubt and the motives of the calls in Hotline Miami. This could become important if the players ever get to a point where they start trying to get to the bottom of the reason for the calls instead of simply following the orders as they get them.


On a side note, I love this game, and already have some of the aesthetics planned for an upcoming plot arc in my current game.

silva wrote:Party ? Theres no party in Hotline Miami.

Technically, in Hotline Miami 2, I think you can have two players at once in a map (I think it's limited to two specific characters). Also, the storyline of the game shows that Jacket is not the only person running around with an animal mask killing Russians mobsters because of mysterious phone calls. It's not that far fetched that you could get a group of them running around together for a single mission.

silva wrote:Also, I dont think the thing you describe sounds fun. I mean, sitting around a table for re-rolling dice until you pass an obstacle. Anse and repeat. Whats the point ?

When it comes to actually playing the game, victories tend to come in the form of beating a level you hadn't yet, getting a higher grade than you had, or getting a particular achievement. None of those count your deaths against you, and all of them are a function of your own skill.

So, I totally agree that if the TTRPG version of this game has "unlimited lives", you have to make success about player decision more than about random dice rolls.

I like the idea of a robust Hotline Miami/GTA ttrpg.

And for a resolution mechanic. ..