Sure, why not. It's just this one and Enemy Gods and I'm done with the Big Book of Little Games, after all.
The Game: All the Days of My Children: Hospital
The Publisher: John Wick Presents
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one
Many of the games in the BBLG are kind of half-assed, if we're being honest. They tend to start off pretty flavorful and promising, but then the boring part of game writing kicks in and they just kinda fade away. Concepts are referred to early on that don't pan out, a lot of rules boil down to "make it up, but, y'know, in a cool way", and the concepts fall back on "D&D is for kiddiewinkies" a little too often.
(Not that I'm in any position to talk about slagging D&D, of course.)
All My Etc, though, is probably the least-assed of all the games in the book. I wish I had a PDF because I'd love to be able to screencap this, but in the section of chargen talking about Secrets, at the end of the paragraph, there's a little parenthetical thing that says (things you've done?). It looks very much like a note an author would leave to come back to later and flesh out a rule or an explanation, and here it is in a book that costs $30. Likewise, there's a sidebar that obscures text, on that very same page.
Anyway, gripes about unfinished games aside, All My Etc is a soap opera emulator. I don't imagine there's much overlap in the Venn diagram between "gamer" and "soap opera viewer", but that's probably why it's a little throwaway game (and, after all, Pasión de las Pasiones worked juts fine). The game is very much into secrets and who knows what about whom. Everyone is supposed to have two characters, a "hero" and a "villain." Heroes want to resolve secrets, while villains want to ruin them. I'm only gonna make one character, though, because the process isn't meaningfully different. I'll make a hero, I think.
First step would be building a Town, but that's a whole-group process, so I'll skip it. Step One of actual chargen is Name, Gender, Age, Profession.
Aaaannd looking at the character sheet, there's space for none of this. Well, that's not true, there's a space for name, of course, but nothing for the rest of it. This gets more ridiculous in the third step, but I'll get there. For now, I'll say my character's name Declan Jarrel, he's an adult ("age" is just "child or adult"), he's male, and he's a doctor (seems a very soap-opera profession, plus the word "hospital" is right there in the unwieldy-as-fuck title of the game).
Right, Step Two: Hero of Villain? Hero.
Step Three: Traits. OK, here's where the half-ass comes in again. There's no spot on the sheet for Traits. However, there are slots that say "I am a...", "I will always..." and "I will never...". These are roughly the same format as Traits as described in the book, but not quite. Ah, well. I'll say that Declan will always find a way to help a patient, and will never break doctor-patient confidentiality. I know that makes him sound very goody-goody, but if you think about it, having a pretty inflexible moral compass makes you ripe for conflict in a soap opera because everyone's going to use that against him.
Step Four: Relationships. Here we go again. We have a Relationship to the people to our left and right, but as written, the person on the left has one with our villain, and the one on the right with our hero. So far, so good. But on the damn sheet, there's a slot for a Friend and an Enemy, which is a totally different arrangement (singing, "we didn't playtest, nope not at all"). Anyway, I'll once again go with the sheet, and I'll make people up, because I have no other players. I'll say my Friend is Maggie Verachek, one of my colleagues, because we went to med school together and we've seen each other through some very tough times. My Enemy is Anthony Baylock, the hospital's ombudsman, because his wife left him after I inadvertently told her that he was having an affair (an STI test was involved, can't say more).
Step Five: Secrets! Two things that are secret about the character. Sure. This actually works on the sheet! I'll say that Declan sold (and used) drugs while he was doing his residency. He needed the money and he needed the pick-me-up. He's since gotten clean and he hasn't sold anything since, but someone knows.
Second secret: I stuck my father in a nursing home after I moved to the Town. He's got dementia and he can't really identify me as his son, but Declan can't forget what the man did to him while he was a kid, so he's not really interested in seeing him, either.
Step Six: Share Secrets. Actually, I'll skip this, because it would normally involve pulling secrets out of a hat and thus knowing them about other characters, but of course, it's just me.
Declan is in his early 30s. He's chiseled and blond and handsome, in that soap opera kind of way. I suspect that on the show, his role as a doctor isn't more specific than "doctor," allowing him to do everything from general practice to brain surgery, as the script requires. I think the fan base also suspects he might be gay because he doesn't tend to get romance subplots much.
