Superhero fiction is one of the decade’s most popular genres. Thanks to the MCU, DCU, and their numerous spin-offs, everyone knows the genre’s main tropes. However, there is one constant in superhero fiction: the heroes are the focus. The lives of the everyday civilians around them, who have to deal with the chaos they leave in their wake, are never mentioned. Thankfully, Nothing Ordinary is a solo TTRPG that flips the script, casting you as a regular person who lives in a superhero world.
Nothing Ordinary is a solo TTRPG about a normal person living in a city with a superhero. However, they’re not a Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen type; they’re just a regular person. The game uses a standard deck of playing cards, a die, and a coin.
A Normal Day In The Life Of A Normal Person
You begin the game by creating your character, deciding what your name is and what your character does in their day-to-day life. You also decide on your city and the superhero who calls that city home. After this worldbuilding is done, the main flow of the game begins.
You shuffle your deck of cards and lay them face down. Each turn, you draw a card from the deck. The card value tells you about an event currently ongoing in the city, while the card suit tells you how long the event lasts. Finally, before writing a journal entry about the event, you flip a coin to find out if the hero or one of their villains is responsible for the event.
Then you write your journal entry discussing this event and how it affects your civilian as they go through their mundane day-to-day life.
Standard Life But With Superheroes
Nothing Ordinary does a great job capturing what it must be like for mundane people living in a world of superheroes. A world where even the most basic task can be suddenly turned upside down by an alien invasion or two people flying up and down Main Street while shooting laser bolts from their eyes. The game’s simple structure means you can quickly get a game going and will quickly find yourself totally immersed in your little superhero world, meaning this is one of those solo TTRPGs that will quickly fill up your journal.
I love the game’s prompts because they perfectly evoke the tone of classic superhero comics while also featuring allusions to the genre’s most famous story tropes. However, these allusions are never so overt that they force the player to approach the prompts in a specific way or set their story in a specific comic book universe.
The game’s layout should also receive praise. Despite being two sides of A4, the game includes lots of text. But despite this density, the layout never feels overcrowded, and the text is always easy to read at a glance, which is quite the achievement.
One element I would love to see built on in a later release is the game’s handling of time. In most TTRPGs (both solo and group), actions or events always take the same amount of time. However, an event’s length can totally affect how you experience and feel about it. To steal an example from Nothing Ordinary, “A major street is blocked off, causing a traffic jam” for an hour is annoying, but a regular part of living in a major city, meaning you would be over it (and would likely have forgotten about it) by the end of the day. However, if that same street is blocked off for a month, something massive has clearly happened, and it becomes a much bigger issue, since you would likely have to change your daily schedule to deal with it.
By including this element, Nothing Ordinary sets itself apart from other games and opens up new storytelling avenues for players. However, it would be cool to see this expanded on, maybe via an extra table that you draw from when events go on for a long time, one with prompts covering how the event changes over time or the knock-on effects it has on your character’s life.
I really enjoyed Nothing Ordinary. While the idea of playing a normal person in a world of superheroes may seem like an odd idea for a TTRPG at first glance, after a few turns you’ll quickly realize that it works fantastically well, capturing the emotional core of the genre in an intense and deeply relatable way that will get you thinking about your favourite heroes in a brand new light. Plus, thanks to its compact size and limited resource requirements, this is the perfect game for TTRPG fans (superhero lovers or not) who are looking for a quick and easy solo TTRPG they can blast through during a lunch break or train ride.
