BJD Table-top RPG

You'd either need really tiny BJD's or a hellofalotofspace to play. Either way, you'd need a lot ofBJD's to make up an army for that sort of game.... I just don't think it's workable.

Teddy

 

Oooh, I agree with Teddy, but also really wish it were workable! A current personal goal is to eventually have a doll of every character in the party present for play, and it would be really fun if we were able to do more than just play with them.

 

This would be a lot of fun! I'm thinking of a lego type assembly

 

Looks like it actually uses a lot of dnd stats with some things taken from other ttrpgs. Neat! Not exactly my cup of tea per se, but it's a neat mix of things

 

I for one am in favor of an army of 1/8 or 1/6 BJD to play fantasy adventures with.

As someone with two DnD characters shelled into BJD, my biggest worry would be that minis tend to be very 'handled' as compared to how much someone might not want to interact with their BJD. I don't mind playing with my dolls. But the amount I touch, place, and generally interact with my minis when adventuring in the Forgotten Realms, Sword Coast, or elsewhere, I can foresee BJD getting chipped faceups or damaged with that same amount of play.

 

This is a really cute idea. In general I think a storyline where the player is a doll would be really fun.

I'm in the process of turning a doll I've had for a long, long time (Volks Kun, circa 2005) into my main D&D character. I love the doll, I love my character, but even if she was small enough to tote along to a game I don't know that I would. My group (including myself) shenanigan far too regularly to trust that any dolls would come out unharmed at the end of a session.

 

It could maybe work with the more off-topic Penny's Box or other small blindbox dolls.
Failing that, it would be cool to use small tiny dolls as an alternative to minis.
A novel idea, at least!

 

*remembers all the times we've had dice/books/minis go flying when someone's cat decided to bounce across the table in the middle of a game*

*imagines that happening with dolls... even relatively inexpensive ones*

Nope.
No thanks.
I think we'll stick to traditional minis over here.

(Even though, thinking about it, some of our Hero Forge customs were twice the price of those little blind box dolls they're still a lot less likely to get mangled when a cat who's convinced that she's the tarrasque yeets them across the table and onto the floor. )

As for playing a character who is a doll... There are a lot of games out there that will already let you do that. Let me recommend a game called Nobilis as just one example. In spite of that review's author's belief that no one ever plays it, the last time I was involved in a Nobilis game, I played a character whose dominion was Beloved Toys. She was a living rag-doll.

 

So BJDs as playing pieces seems difficult due to size and fragility, but what about theme?

You could take the Toy Story inspo and run with it... BJDs (and prob other toys) are secretly alive and need to save their humans from supernatural threats without blowing their cover! You could run this in lots of systems, maybe with some BJD-related house rules (my YOSD gets bonuses to stealth and cuteness while your SD is better at hand-to-hand combat and can reach doorknobs.) Magical Kitties Save the Day springs to mind. It's basically that but cats.

Edit: like what @Brightfires said

 

I love the general concept of dolls in a human sized world. I think something like this would be the only way to get me into ttrpg long-term. It'd be fun to change poses and stuff alongside the rp.

I get worries about breaking them but like...just don't be reckless.
People play Warhammer with nicely painted figures without destroying them, right?

 

Okay wait, I got it... how you turn taking pretty pictures of your dollies into a TTRPG. As the GM, you take a picture of one of your dollies in a setting (you knew this was going to tempt you to spend lots of money on props, right?) and then the player controls that dolly, saying where it should go and how it should interact with its environment. Then you send a picture to them of the results, along with a description of what happened. Other dollies (you knew this was going to tempt you to buy more dolls, right?) can be introduced as non-player characters. ...and you can expand it to include multiple players by offering multiple dollies to inhabit. ...or go super crazy and start mailing eachother your dollies.

 

Also, @rainglow, maybe your experience of playing Warhammer is different from mine, but when I played, I routinely destroyed my minis and my friends' minis.

That's why everybody (at least everybody I played with ) brought super glue wherever they went.

 

I can see this as a good base for photostories

 

Yeah. As a former 40k and Confrontation player, I can confirm that one... Super glue and "green stuff" (two-part puddy epoxy) are sort-of your best friends when it comes to wargaming miniatures. You don't want to know how many Exarch parts and grav-tank bits I had to put back together, even sharing tables with people who were all pretty respectful of each others' minis.

No matter how careful you are, eventually somebody's gonna lose an arm. Or a laser cannon.

 

Love the idea of a doll-themed ttrpg-- you could, of course, do it entirely in theatre of the mind, but you could also have BJD-inspired miniatures-- a little lolita barbarian wielding a kitchen knife or meat tenderizing mallet would be a lot of fun to paint up, as a mini painter!

You could still have your doll sit with you with a set of tiny dice and an itty bitty character sheet, just at the table, but they wouldn't BE the playing piece.

 

Juuuust gonna leave this here:
7-die Metal Micro Dice Set for D&D Dungeons and Dragons - Etsy

 

I love the idea of a Penny's Box army table top game, lol. Although an army of Granado 15 cm dolls would also be hilarious - but super pricey?
No experience with TT games, but plenty of experience with cats and things going flying.

 

I would have to really sit and ponder on what a world about bjd would look like in ttrpg form... but Rozen Maiden springs to mind... though admittedly, I never watched it.

 

I have Ob11 dolls of my most recent D&D characters and do bring them when we play, but they just kinda sit amongst my stuff and "watch," or I lightly interact with them. For the campaign where we were using physical minis, I still had an actual mini of my character for battles/scenes that needed more technical staging. And for the most recent campaign, we used digital minis. I didn't use my dolls as the minis. I dig the Toy Story-esque idea of having the characters be dolls, though.

 

Now I want to find some other local BJD owners and do a dolls playing D&D photoshoot. There's a game store up the road from me that would probably let us do it at their shop...