Heavy Metal Hand Clash was conceived as a result of a surprisingly dangerous kayaking trip combined with one man’s fascination with wrestling, Rock, Paper, Scissors, and a foolish blood oath he swore as a teenager. It is a game designed to be played anywhere at any time provided there are at least two people present who are vaguely aware of the rules. No stats involved. No dice rolled. Hell, it even touts that there’s no table required! I wanted to make something spartan in scope, but not in feel or flavor. There’s two things you do in this game: describe something to the Ref (usually either one mecha punching another mecha OR some underhanded operations that modify one mecha punching another mecha), and play a metric fucking shit-ton of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

The genesis of HMHC was spurred by a few of my friends (the magnanimous C. Keoni Barfield & the legend Antonio “the Beff Killer” Howard himself) telling me about something incredible. They had been regaling their amazon co-workers with our 5E home games to keep their spirits up while melting in the back of shipping trucks during Prime Week. As they tell it, what had at first been two or three folks rolling their eyes and sarcastically asking “you mean Stranger Things thing- that nerdass shit???” had morbed into a small following of folks who became seriously invested in the plot of our games, and became interested in the tabletop world in general. Eon Kel got his memories back finally? Kenneth Roe attuned to the Hand of fucking Vecna? King shit. 

Sick, right? Every player turned Forever GM dreams of creating the same gnawing obsession in the hearts of young nerds in their local community. This might even be the platonic ideal of GMery. My games were radiating out in the world and spinning off into games involving people I haven’t met and will never play with.

 Here’s the problem though. All those folks working at that Amazon fulfillment facility commute in from an hour out in any given direction. It’s already really hard to schedule TTRPGs even with the people living in the town in which you live. How were they supposed to be expected to play? Well, what if they could play a game in the back of that truck in between tossing boxes of next day shipped dildoes and lightsabers around? Something exciting and pulse pounding that had the energy of an entire kitchen staff popping the fuck off when the new dishwasher who’d been getting picked on by the nicotine deprived expo finally gets the win they so desperately deserve.

While pondering this one day during a particularly slow shift at my office job, I remembered an interesting story I’d heard while trying not to drown my first time kayaking from a chef my Wife Ashe used to work with (who we’ll call Davie for the purposes of this story). He described the most interesting “home” game I’ve ever heard of while we drifted lazily in kayaks down the Broad River in Athens, GA. For this story to have impact, I must first describe this absolute unit of a guy. This enormous man of few words was an certifiably amazing chef and had a naturally intimidating presence. You want a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich? He DGAF that it was off menu. He really only spoke when directly engaged and had a deliberate way of talking that at the same time made it feel like he wasn’t particularly attached to the moment. Davie was simultaneously here, and in a world far away. On top of all that, he was quite the accomplished drug dealer. All of these things combined made perfect sense for someone who had been exclusively GMing Vampire the Masquerade for years. 

As the story goes, Davie and a few of his chums would meet at a park at night to play VtM and they would LARP the sessions as the story progressed in the setting of the game- the town in which they all lived. Since none of the folks involved had a good place to host, playing outside was the norm. They would move all across town, visiting certain places that were relevant to the particular moment in the plot, and most interestingly to me, Davie resolved all conflicts by flipping coins he kept in his pocket. 

“Coins?” I ask, in between trying not to scrape a rock poking up out of the water like the amateur kayaker I was. “You gave your players a 50/50 shot whenever they tried to accomplish something that required a check?” 

He looks off ineffectually to the horizon down the river ahead of us and takes a stiff drag of a joint. 

“Sometimes I would make them flip multiple times in a row. If it was favorable: two flips. Only one call to pass the check. Unfavorable, and you had to win more than one flip in a row. One time I had a player single handedly fight off a squad of vampire death commandos by winning seven consecutive flips in a row.”

The boldness of that system consumed my mind as my Wife ever so gently bumps her kayak into mine and inadvertently knocks me down a small waterfall. I come up for air next to a capsizing kayak, a changed man. Even then, HEAVY METAL HAND CLASH was brewing. The chance to play wherever and whenever- the natural fix to TTRPG’s most notorious and difficult to solve problem: scheduling. I dreamed of a game that people would pick up and put down as fast. I could take Davie’s experience and forge it into something a little more pure and streamlined, something less contingent on being awake at 3 AM with pockets full of quarters. We could simply play Rock, Paper, Scissors. Like a fucking LOT of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Simultaneously and parallel to the events described in my above rant, I’ve always had a fascination with Rock, Paper, Scissors. There are few games that exist so pure and straight forward. In fact, many games that we all know and love are built around the concept of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but with far more steps. The most influential on me was probably Pokemon Red for the Gameboy Color. Fire beats Grass, Grass beats Water, etc, etc ad infinitum. My youth was spent causing goonish rumpus to happen to the loser of many a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but it all came to a head when a friend of mine convinced me to swear a literal blood oath to only pick Rock. It’s been so many years now, that I cannot for the life of me remember any of the circumstances other than someone involved was real butthurt about me winning RPS at a post practice jam my shitty teenage band had. My drummer was the one I swore the oath with. We looked deep into each others eyes (yeah, it was pretty gay). Wouldn’t it be funny, if we spilt our own blood to pick only Rock? Would it be funny? Would it? Queue canned laughter. 

So for nearly 15 years, I only chose Rock (to the best of my ability that is.) I would try nearly every underhanded trick in the book to still win. I would intentionally pick RPS to play with people who were unaware of my blood oath; I would intentionally obfuscate on which count we’d throw our choices, I would intentionally play mind games with opponents. At one point I even became aware of the competitive RPS scene and the meta that has been cultivated by it. I became fascinated with the concept of a game that was born of pure prediction. REAL Rock, Paper, Scissors was a game of reading your opponent. Getting inside their head, and predicting their choice before even they know what they will choose. Sounds like complete bullshit, right? RPS is a game of psychology. Like most psychology, it sounds vague and unprovable at first, but experience leads one to realize otherwise. Most importantly to the matter at hand, (HMHC and this post mortem) what matters is not whether or not this is valid. What matters is that this is an inherently interesting concept and I genuinely think that HMHC proves that it’s fun to simulate.

I sent a prototype of the early rules to the same friend that somehow convinced complete strangers in the back of a sweltering truck at Amazon that our little make-em-ups game was something they should be expending precious brain juice on instead of whatever capitalist and mechanical horror Jeff Bezos had relinquished on the staff that week. He made a surprisingly insightful remark off the jump.

“This is supposed to be like robot wrestling, right?”

I stare down at my freshly spilt coffee and ash stained keyboard.

“IT IS NOW.”

The flavor of HMHC was originally supposed to be like the blockbuster summer mega hit REAL STEEL starring none other than Huge Jackedman, but like a TTRPG, and good I guess. The wrestling analogue was dead on. Let’s make it as hammy as possible, with big sweeping speeches about how one pilot knew exactly the move another was going to make like everyone was living in Battle Tendency. That went right along with the concept that RPS is really a game of prediction and getting inside your opponent’s head. The first playtest was a beautiful cavalcade of everything I just talked about.

The days leading up to the first playtest, I realized I had made a grievous error in design. I had made a game that I could not play! Not without literally breaking a blood oath anyway. My mind raced over the last week preceding the big day with what seemed like only two legitimate outcomes: I never play my own game, or I do something stupid and what I thought would be funny. I’m not always right, I guess.

Everyone’s assembled in my living room happily munching on the grilled burritos I’m slinging from my griddle, and I catch Keoni off guard with a quick question- much like the way I used to win at RPS even though I could literally never pick Paper or Scissors. 

“Hey bud, do you have a pocket knife?”

“Yeah, right here. Just make sure you wash it off before you hand it back to me.”

He doesn’t realize how right he was to say that. As I slit my left thumb open in the kitchen I call out, “Who’s fucking ready for some Heavy Metal Mayhem?”

I hear a chorus of jovial confirmations in between burrito monchin’ from the living room.

“Sweet. Tony, real quick we need to play an opening volley. Keoni has more info than you on the game, so if you beat me in Rock, Paper, Scissors you can have the first Explore phase. Ready?”

“Yeah, bruh bring it on.”

I walk in clenching my fist so hard my knuckles are turning white, and we both throw Paper. The room is airless as my hand glows like a radioactive anime character due to the blood smear on my palm reflecting the blue LED lights of the living room. I watch Ashe’s eyes go wide with surprise. Everyone thought I would choose Rock. Half of the people in this room haven’t known me longer than I’ve upheld this stupid teenage dare.

“Let’s go again.” 

No one replies. Just a silent, one, two, three, shoot.

I choose Rock. Tony chooses Scissors. I smile knowing I can always rely on Rock, as I had for the past 15 years. I got inside Tony’s head with my grotesque display. It was all the confirmation I needed that RPS was indeed about psychology. Everyone pops off in response to the results. Tony wouldn’t get to go first in his Explore phase after all. 

Keoni’s first pilot was Beff “The Bank” Jezos. Anytime he could, he would say the phrase, “Our reach is global.” Tony, following suit, made “Zark Muckerburg” to match. Their first Explore phase was full of corporate espionage and smear campaigns. Their first match was a stunner that went down the last match of RPS. Every round that went by the winner would pop off and give a big heartfelt speech about how the other was just not quite up to caliber. I stood with blood dripping from my clenched fist, swelling with pride. All the way down to the last throw, even though Keoni was playing out of his mind, due to the advantage gained in the Explore phase, Tony had to win one game less. The final score: Keoni three wins, Tony three wins. Tony wins the match.

This whole experience has been a bit wild for me. I joined the One Page RPG Jam 2022 on a whim, really. A Wilder Whim- ayy lmao gottem. I have been working on TTRPGs outside of the normal work required to GM D&D 5E for about a year and have two other big projects in the pipeline. Making a TTRPG from scratch in less than a month was a harrowing experience, but I totally get why folks engage in jams in the first place. It’s similar to playing music, but my adult life doesn’t see me jamming with folks often anymore. My band writes, practices, records, and plays shows. There’s little to no jamming involved. This process has weirdly put me in touch with my roots a little. There's a big part of me that misses the freedom and privilege to make a decision like swearing a blood oath on a whim because it was funny at the time. Adults have no such luxury. 

I sincerely hope that someone gets something out of this weird period of my life, even if it’s just realizing that making commitments like blood oaths for a goof is really not a good idea at all. Hopefully, some folks somewhere play HMHC to waste some time waiting in line or something equally as boring. My group had planned to do the same at DragonCon 2022, but the badge pick-up lines were so well coordinated that the wait was only like 45 minutes in comparison to last year’s near 4 hour wait. Alas, life isn’t always as predictable as Tony’s next choice in Rock, Paper, Scissors.

P.S. - If the person who took a copy of the ruleset at Dragon Con 2022 reads this, message me! I want to know if you played while at the con. Nothing would make me happier.