The other day, I was watching Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana from Geek & Sundry, and a question came to my mind: has someone come up with a way to gamify weight loss using a d20 system? I did some searching and came up empty. Well, someone should do that and it may as well be me. Almost immediately, the name “The d20 Diet” popped into my mind, and I decided to start playing around with it.
So far, I have the idea of players writing out their own Character to keep track of their personal stats – character name, XP, HP, level, weight, etc. – and to show their abilities and attacks. This would allow players to see on paper the positive changes they are making in their lives.
Next was the food. For me, there are a lot of junk foods that I could just keep eating; the first that comes to mind is Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. I thought we could look at this food as a monster which begat the idea of the Food Monster. Different foods could have a level based on how healthy or unhealthy they are. One idea for this was to use the A-F ratings listed on caloriecount.com. This gave me 12 levels of food. I began figuring out how to assign toughness to food using different polyhedral dice, like those used in other d20 systems, and came up with a good place to start.
However, I soon realized that some of these foods – the healthier options – should have some incentive to eat. What would make people want to “battle” the easy, healthy foods. This is where I have landed. I need to figure out how to make junk food easier to defeat, and provide incentive to eat the good stuff.
I think this idea has some real potential to help my fellow gamers find a way to enjoy fighting against the constant desire to consume that which we know we should not.
If you have any suggestions on how we can make The d20 Diet work, please let me know in the comments below.
Recent Comments