"The Christmas Dinner" Revisited
A retrospective into a one-page Christmas game published two years: lessons learned & how it works
Two years ago, I was part of the TikTok “Beggartok” community, a group of people who were “begging” other people to play games besides D&D 5E. While my perspective on that has become a little more nuanced,1 one thing that came of that group was the Beggar’s Holiday Jam, where we were tasked with making a game/supplement with the theme “Giving/Sharing.” All proceeds earned from the jam were going to Black & Pink, an organization that provides support to LGBTQ+ & HIV-positive prisoners.
My submission was The Christmas Dinner, a little one-page RPG about a family prone to infighting and the cousins trying to keep the peace. I wanted to do a little retrospective on this game, talk about what I like, don’t like, and how I might update the game in the future.
The Basics
In The Christmas Dinner, there is one “Party Host” (PH) and between 2-6 “Cousins” as the player characters. The premise is that it’s the time of your extended family’s annual Christmas Eve dinner, and it is a stressful experience: racist uncles, disagreeable parents, trouble-makers and longstanding feuds all bubble to the surface every year. The Cousins, recognizing this, have to do everything they can to prevent the dinner from turning into an all out catastrophe while keeping their own sanity in check.
Mechanically, the game is pretty simple. You will need a LOT of d6s; each Cousin starts with 4d6 as their dice pool. Whenever they want to take an action with an uncertain outcome, the PH will tell them how many successes they need, and the Cousin will roll their pool, each 6 a success. On a success, the Cousin accomplishes what they were doing and the PH awards them with an additional d6 to add to their pool; on a failure, the PH takes away a die. Should a Cousin ever run out of dice in their pool, they are out of the game, the stress of the evening being too much for them (another Cousin can attempt a roll to bring them back into play).
Cousins can support each other in two ways: one, “Give Support”, means saying how you’re helping the other Cousin with their roll, and giving them a die from your pool. Giving the die is permanent; you do not get it back. On a success, however, the supporting Cousin also receives a reward die. A Cousin can also have a “heart-to-heart” with another Cousin, where they go off and have a chat to decompress. Afterwards, both Cousins are given a die.
Each Cousin has an “Archetype”; this determines what potential stereotypical Cousin you are playing; there are 6 ones laid out. The main role of the Archetype is to determine your “Trait”; if it’s applicable to a roll, you roll an extra die. The Cousins are:
The Queer Cousin
The Stoner Cousin
The Oldest Cousin
The Nerdy Cousin
The Artistic Cousin
The Punk Cousin
Looking Back
What I like
For me, I think the strongest point of this game, and why I designed it the way I did, was how it emphasizes providing support to one another. Looking at the dice math, on 4d6, the odds of at least one 6 are ~52%, give or take, meaning that while you are more likely than not to succeed, it’s almost a coin flip on whether that first roll will hit. And if you fail, further successes become vanishingly small; a success on 3d6 is only a ~42% chance.
When we start accounting for the interactions between the Cousins, though, things look good; if one Cousin provides a die to the rolling player on their first roll, the odds of success are 60%, and the rolling player keeps the die and gets an additional one on top of that, almost guaranteeing future successes (which I will get into below). In an ideal situation, this means that player has more resources to provide to the other players, thus allowing a free exchange of dice and support at the table. In the case where people start to fail, the players will be able to have their heart-to-hearts and replenish dice, preventing all-out failure.
Crucially, I think that the supporting player not getting their die back is crucial to the theme; they give a part of themself in order to stand up for another player. They are putting themself at risk, and will suffer with the rolling player. This has always been an issue with help mechanics in other games, I’ve felt; there’s rarely a downside! Who amongst us didn’t have Guidance up 24/7 while playing Baldur’s Gate 3? This wouldn’t do; I wanted risk, and so I think I partially achieved that here.
Given the theme of the jam, I think this is an effective way to promote supporting one another and encouraging the players to work together. Alone, a player is probably not going to succeed; with the help of others, they can accomplish anything. And that’s what I was looking for in this game; I want the Cousins to be a united front against the rest of the family, finding the balance between looking out for themselves and preventing the extended family from completely falling apart. I think at it’s base, the system accomplishes that.
What I don’t like
So, I think I over-tuned the math to make supporting each other too good, especially for the player receiving support. Not only do they keep the die, but they gain an additional one for succeeding the roll; this means that if their first roll is a success and they received support, they now have a 6d6 pool, meaning their next roll without support has a 67% chance of at least one 6. That’s crazy! AND the supporting player loses nothing in exchange because they also get a die, nullifying the risk of supporting!
I think that, since this was for a quick holiday jam, I was too worried about the possibility of people failing and a death spiral happening. Originally I had the heart-to-heart be a roll, meaning it wouldn’t always work; around then is when I started considering 4d6 for the dice pool to create enough of a buffer so that failure wouldn’t immediately be SO devastating. When I went back and decided that a heart-to-heart didn’t require a roll, only bringing back a character who had 0 dice did, I didn’t reconsider the initial dice pool size or the support mechanic. I think this could be tuned down again.
What I would change
In a hypothetical “Christmas Dinner 2E”, I would start by reducing the starting dice pool to 3d6 at most. This puts risk in the first unsupported roll in the game, while still not being absolutely devastating on a failure. This would also still encourage players to provide support, as it would improve their chances.
I also think I would remove the reward die for the supporting player. This was initially a relic of thinking I would need some sort of carrot to get players to support each other, but I think the game makes it pretty clear that that would be beneficial even without reward. I also think it’s thematically stronger; the reward for helping a Cousin is their success, and thus they have the resources to help YOU later. This would prevent a flurry of dice being added to everyone’s pools and suddenly you get a reverse death spiral; no one can fail ever!
I would also consider not giving a player a reward die if they received support from another player, but I hesitate on this change; on the one hand, this furthers the goal of keeping the total dice count low. On the other hand though, I feel this would result in a player refusing help; why roll if they won’t be rewarded? I don’t think this would be the case though; in a game like this, which is meant to be a one shot, players will likely mellow out about optimization and thus would be fine. Another solution to this problem is that the supported player doesn’t get to keep the supporting player’s die; instead, the die just disappears into the ether, a loss to both players on a failure, and to the supporting player on a success. I think in the end this is where I would end up.
Conclusions
Overall, I think The Christmas Dinner is one of my favorite early game design accomplishments. I think it is a strong cohesion of theme and mechanics with enough in there to tell an interesting story based on a single page of rules. The idea of encouraging support amongst players is one I thoroughly enjoy and have & will continue to carry through with other game design projects. It could be tweaked, of course; who’s first or second game couldn’t be?
Thank you for taking the time to read this mess of a game design rant! I just wanted to talk about and bring eyes back to an early project of mine that I’m still pretty proud of, and want to hear your thoughts! Would you be interested in playing the game? How would you fix some of the problems I identified, or are they even problems at all? Should I make a 2E?
I have some exciting projects coming down the pipeline, likely at the end of this month or the start of the next. Remember to follow me on my socials and subscribe here, and tell your friends about me!
For those who celebrate, I hope your own annual Christmas Dinner is better than those of these characters; for everyone else, I hope you have a wonderful holiday!
You should still play other games though for a whole host of reasons