Unskilled Labor
Unskilled Labor is an anticapitalist tabletop roleplaying game about a slightly fantastical working class. You gain new skills and powers from your various jobs, opening up new possibilities and building on old strengths. However, those jobs saddle you with obligations, take a toll on your health and sleep schedule, and pay you just barely less than enough to survive. You'll have to fight just to keep your head above water, let alone make any kind of meaningful progress. But hey, if you're tough, and clever, and lucky, and persistent, maybe you'll even get to punch a cop in the face.
To play, you'll need a handful of resumes, an old calendar, a deck of Zener cards, a handful of tokens, and pencils and pens. One player takes on the role of the GM (General Manager), while one to seven control PCs (Proletariat Characters). Featuring twelve PC occupations (from Retail to Office Work to Academia to Warehouse to Food Service), five antagonist occupations (from Cop to Landlord to Politician), 145 skills, three pregen PCs, and at least a dozen lines of rules text that made me deeply sad to type out.
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Community Copies
I'm very lucky to not have to monetize this hobby of mine. I price my games because I work hard on them, and they deserve to be valued, but the vast majority of the time any money I make from writing ttrpgs is a bonus. This is why I provide community copies-- my goal in making art is for people to experience it, not to have a side hustle. If you can't afford the game, I want you to take a community copy. Hell, I want you to take one if $10 has ever been enough money to make you hesitate, if $10 has ever been the gap between treading water and sinking. Take a copy. Check the game out. Maybe tell a friend, or let me know how you like it. To quote the Bread & Puppet Theater, "ART IS CHEAP! HURRAH!"
Comments
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It was so fun talking to coworkers about how landlords have literally no skills and being able to pull this up and show them and say, See? None.
Immutably satisfying!
Always happy to help you win arguments 🫡
Oh and this reminds me, I've still gotta answer your correspondence! Haven't forgotten, just been juggling too much lol
At some point, I;m gonna have to enlist you as a collaborator on my 'Existential Ennui: the RPG' game.
The Player Characters take on the role of ‘ordinary Joe’ (or ‘Josephine’).
Monday to Saturday, from 09:00 to 18:00, they go to work in some menial role (like shop assistant, warehouse worker, bank-teller, whatever).
It takes an hour to get ready for work in the morning (90 minutes if they have kids).
It takes an hour to drop the kids off at school and/or get to their place of work.
It takes an hour to return home after work.
They sleep from 23:00 to 07:00 (if they're lucky).
In the four hours per day remaining to them (after the shops have shut) during the week … and the sixteen hours on Sundays … they cook and eat, go shopping, do the laundry, etc. whilst trying to find things to do that aren’t mind-numbingly, soul-sappingly, spirit-crushingly tedious — examples of such activities being, say, cow-tipping … or going to bars to get blind-drunk and forget how much they wish they could simply lie down, go to sleep and never have to wake up again … or whatever.
Adventures consist of questing for, and participating in, these activities.
Obstacles to overcome along the way include grinding poverty that is inescapable thanks to inflation outstripping wages two-to-one, unemployment, the gig economy, racism, misogyny, ill-health, the depredations of age, traffic jams, vehicle repairs, broken washing machines and the need to take a day off work to wait for the repairman (who never comes, but logs a visit all the same), burglary, muggings, funerals for loved ones (so a reduced support network), the sociocultural oppression of the suburbs, acrimonious relationship breakups, feuds with unreasonable neighbours … and many other aspects of the futility and drudgery of Life.
I hadn't considered unemployment and the elan destroying search for work you never hear anything about (your online applications vanishing into the ether, almost like the job listing were a scam to get your details) though, so, there's clearly more (ha!) work needs doing on this idea ; )
That sounds absolutely awful, I love it already! (Too bad you don't have anything published. Unless I missed it?)
Nah, you didn't miss it.
Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to do anything about it - Life being "what happens to you whilst you're busy making other plans" and all that, our varying commitments as (alleged) adults mean I get to run my current game for my players once a month ... there's no room in the schedule for designing and playtesting games as well.
I very much doubt anyone would want to play it either; although I do do my best to include as much of it as possible in my game (it adds a certain piquancy to the proceedings 😉) ... I have to smuggle it in amongst all the other elements of the session (and occasional intersession updates for each of the characters [1]) - I don't think a (non-pornographic) game of Waiting For The Washing Machine Repairman (or Mom's Who'd Like To F*ck But Don't Have The Time And Are Too Tired Even When They Do) would go down very well. So, my game is still more 'heroic' than not ... I just take the personal aspect of 'personal horror' very much to heart and weave it into things in ways I suspect most people wouldn't consider including in play themselves - it's one thing to contend with monstrous entities in the dark, but something else altogether when you have to worry about what will happen to your kids if anything happens to you whilst doing so (or, conversely, how you're gonna actually do it whist taking one to the doctor and keeping the other out of trouble after school).
So, sadly, the best I can do is throw the idea out there for someone else to run with, whilst doing my best to drive my own players to wrist-slitting despair with what we do have time for 😉.
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[1] A tailored "This is what else is going on in your life" for each of the players to contemplate between sessions and bring elements of into the next one as part of their characters' motivations: one of the PCs is going through a messy divorce right now, another is having to deal with their kid falling in with a bad crowd, one's out of work and desperately searching whilst their
pitiful savings dwindleoverdraft increases alarmingly rapidly, one's unhappy at their McJob but doesn't have time to find anything better (commuting, working, commuting, taking care of the kids, it all eats into their time), etc. - there's seven of them in total (four/five of whom can play any given month), so, even when we're not playing, and I'm not 'prepping' (contemplating where their most recent activities might take things next, if they don't declare a specific course of action themselves), I've enough to be thinking about as it is ... and a life of my own to lead in the background too (places to go, people to see, bills to pay, washing machines and central heating boilers to replace, yada yada yada, *sigh*).I caught the tail end of your work on this as you were developing it! I'm super excited to play it some day with my group, you captured a lot of how this stuff suuucks.
it sucks!! its really a sign of the times that i put a ton of painful personal stuff in here and it resonated so consistently with other folks, but its also kinda encouraging, yknow? we've seen the shape of the enemy, even if we're all looking at it from different angles. we know what needs to be changed. all that's left is not giving up.