INTRO

Let's be honest for a change, this game is a shitpost.  With a turnaround time from conception to release of roughly 45 minutes, this was raw even for my standards. The crusty scanwork coupled with mindboggingly obtuse mechanics truly makes me wonder why there are any downloads at all. 

I mean look at this:

What the hell even is that?

To understand how we came to this strangely teleport-less murder mechanic in a game ostensibly all about telefrags (not to mention the non sequitur debuff included), we must take a look at the initial impulse for all this.

THE MOTIVATION

To quote the first line of the scrawled, OCR-less RPG/game, it has "FUN teleportation (FUCK 5E)". Apart from coming on unnecessarily harsh, this reveals the inspiration pretty bluntly. The 5th Edition of the so called "dragon game" with it's wonky vancian magic system includes many spells, some of which i actually like. One of these is the 4th level spell called "Dimension Door", which you can take a peek at here, if you like insane ramblings.

In a nutshell it lets you teleport to any specific point in space (within range) instantly. 

What it does not do, however, is let you "telefrag" someone like in Quake. Which is fair, telefragging as a mechanic would probably be extremely busted in a game like 5E. No worries there. If you unwittingly teleport into a wall though, the ground or any other solid object, the spell gives your character a bit of damage and spits you out where you began. Again, it's fine, practical even. But it just seemed so profoundly unfun!

Now i'm not sure WHY my brain craves teleport mechanics that let you die in a wall, but here we are. In any case this realization set off a short but intense spurt of activity which resulted in this game.

WRITING THE GAME

Still seated at the table of our DnD campaign, i entered a fugue state during a break and scribbled the whole game as presented here on some A4 paper with a lead pencil.

Since i didn't just want to modify a 5E spell to be way more janky, there had to be a game. However, just teleporting around would probably not be very fun. Thus i quickly decided to lean more into the Quake-inspired side of things. That was basically how Telefrag! got to be this weird deathmatch game, steeped in DnD gamedesign philosphy, what with all the dice and tables.

Of course if the teleport was perfectly accurate, it would have just been a matter of who goes first to instantly frag any other player. To avoid this, i introduced some randomness, as a debuff from getting shot and in general when teleporting long distances. This seemed kind of cool, since it made the teleport risky and a bit unpredictable. The way i came up with to randomise where a character ends up, however, was maximally tedious. Rolling three dice and consulting as many tables to determine if you suceed in telefragging or end up crushed inside a wall seems excessive in hindsight.

Since we had a gaming table all set up, including a dry erase battlemap, we decided to give it a go.

We played with three people, drew a quick map with some walls and rolled dice for who went first. I think one "character" quickly expired in a wall, making it a duel. A few minutes, some shooting and copious amounts of teleporting later, someone emerged victorious.

My takeaway: the game sort of worked and was entertaining enough, at least for a quick match. I decided, oh well, no harm in putting it up. Scanned it in real quick, messed with the contrast until it was almost readable, uploaded it, done. And that was it, right?

AFTERMATH / FERMENTING IDEAS

As is usually the case whenever i make something, it didn't loosen its grip immediately after publishing. The plan was to at least layout it "properly" to increase readability and make it look less bad. I had some unspecific ideas about maybe adding classes or scenarios (with monsters interfering with the deathmatch, or objectives) later on.  Evidently, none of that ever happened.

I was aware that the game was fundamentally incomplete - there wasn't even a way to determine the order in which players got to act - not more than a quick little exercise in game design, an itch.io shitpost. If you played it, i hope you had fun or a cool experience anyway!

I just couldn't shake the feeling that Telefrag! had more potential than that. I mean, i had some ideas! For a bit over a year now, these ideas bobbed around, half submerged, in the sea of oddly coloured soup that makes up my thoughts. And as it tends to happen when organic matter is left unsupervised for too long, it grew into unexpected and different forms.

What if the role of the players was more strongly characterized, maybe as murderous wizards? What if we got rid of the dicerolling entirely? What if the game could be more like i remember Mordheim being, from the one time i ever played it? I asked myself all these questions and some different, secret ones during a bout of moon induced insomnia last night. My attempt to answer them can be found in Telefrag! 2nd Edition.