Turn the mundane events in your real life into an RPG with Chore Wars

10:18 AM on 07.19.2007   |   Niero

36 comments

Some people cannot appreciate the value of chores on their own.  Sure, it builds character, but what good is hauling the kitchen filth if you will never be as good as a level 60 garbage man? Some would rather level up their dark elves and let their children rot.  If you cannot find motivation to scrub toilet feces this weekend, we recommend the new online DIY-RPG dubbed Chore Wars. Yes, as in mowing your lawn for XP. This open-ended multiplayer system allows people to work in teams, assigning experience points to household chores.  The makers admit that their game is a unique spin on a time tracking system, but this is still rather amusing:

Chore Wars lets you claim experience points for household chores. By getting a few people in your house or workplace to sign up, you can assign experience point rewards to individual chores, and see how quickly each of you levels up. ... when a character levels up, their strength, dexterity and other statistics are adjusted to reflect the chores that the character has performed - if you've gotten most of your XP from high-constitution vacuuming and gardening, then your character will muscle up and develop a higher constitution value; if you've not done any intellectually-challenging chores, your intelligence will go down, and so on.

The character classes are simply derived from these stats - a high intelligence will make you a wizard, a high strength will make you a fighter, and so on. Your character class will probably change a bit as you level up. 

Hear that, fat kids? Daddy will make you a paladin if you repeatedly wash his white Mercedez!  As ridiculous as it sounds, it appears many people in online communities and real life communal living situations are using it to manage and motivate slackers.  I, on the other hand, have programmed my system to do the opposite: I've been using it all morning to track all the work I put into slacking and the wisdom I surely derive from it.  I also somehow managed to nearly kill a monster, earned a gold coin, and increased my filth by one. Check out my action-packed campaign screenshots!

[Via Wonderland]