# Misspent Youth tags: #game/rpg/misspent-youth ![[Misspent Youth (Ashcan Edition) (cover).jpg|600]] **Misspent Youth** is a near-future science-fiction roleplaying game about friendship and rebellion — the punk-rock cousin of the storygame family, in which a handful of teenagers are the only thing standing between an oppressive future and total shit. It wears its politics on its sleeve: the Orwellian epigraph on the cover (*"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever"*) is the thesis, and the whole game is the act of stamping back. The cover even advertises its contents as "l'il bastards & riot grrrls," which is about as transparent a mission statement as the hobby has produced. ## Setting The players build the world themselves, villain first. Before anyone makes a character, the table collaboratively creates **The Authority** — the force that's fucking up the world and making it a shitty place to live. You give it a **Vice** (Sadism, Greed, Fear, or Stability), choose the form it takes (often a State or a systemic institution), set its **Motif** and what it's destroying, and make sure it's the kind of villain you personally want to fight. The book is explicit about the trick: think about the shit powerful people do in real life that outrages you, and hand those traits to The Authority, so rebellion feels real. Against it stand the **Youthful Offenders** — the protagonists, kids between twelve and seventeen who belong to a **Clique**. They're the only ones who can redeem the future, because everyone else has been ground down. The game's own example sets it in the near-future Aleutian Islands, a handful of Native kids and gene-hackers fighting a bureau that would monoculture the seas and their culture in the name of "stability." That mix of the intimate and the systemic is the game's signature tone: a friendship drama that happens to be about saving the world. The player characters are exactly who the cover promises — the little badasses raising all that hell. Their job isn't to be the chosen ones; it's to be the friends who decide the future is worth fighting for, and to find out, episode by episode, whether they can actually change the world for the better or whether The Authority just tightens its grip. ## Mechanics Misspent Youth is a round-robin storygame with one player taking the whole other side. It needs **four to six players** (one is The Authority, the rest each a Youthful Offender), **two d6**, and poker chips or other markers. There's no GM in the traditional sense — no one rolls for the bad guys, and the structure does the job of preventing pre-planning. ### Character creation Each YO is built on a **Permanent Record** sheet: the usual name, age (12–17), gender, and three word-long Looks. The mechanical heart is a set of **five traits**, which start "free": - **Mistreatment, Motivation, Means** — *closed* traits, each picked from a short list. - **Schtick and Glitch** — *open* traits, written in: your specialty and your heroic fatal flaw. Traits aren't just description; they're what you spend to win. A free trait is youthful, naive, and pure — even when it's dark. And nothing stays free for long. ### The Authority and the world The group builds The Authority together, then layers in the world: a set of **motifs** (half belonging to The Authority, half to the YOs) and the episode's **themes**. The running joke of the economy is that The Authority's Motif empowers the YOs and the YOs' motifs empower The Authority — every gift cuts both ways, which is exactly the moral of the whole game. ### Episode structure Every episode runs on a deliberate **seven-scene arc** that models the three-act structure: **Exposition, First Plot Point, Heating Up, First Culmination, Midpoint, Climax, and Denouement**, with an optional *interstitial* (a mechanics-free character moment that only the YOs can frame) tucked in the middle. Each episode opens with **Friendship Questions** — each YO asks the player on their left a question about the friendship between their characters, and either the question or the answer must introduce an **Authority Figure** to torment them with. These are recorded by The Authority and mined for material all episode. ### Conflict — the Struggle Plot scenes belong to The Authority, who frames them and decides when a **conflict** happens — one per plot scene, at the moment it's most interesting for the bad guys to stomp the Clique. Conflict is called a **Struggle**, and the stakes are declared up front and are mutually exclusive: The Authority states what it wants, the Clique states what they want; they can't both happen. Resolution runs on a **conflict map** of the 2d6 results (2 through 12): - **The Authority never rolls.** It declares what it's doing and asks, with terrible patience, *"Who's going to stand up?"* The first YO to volunteer takes the dice. - **First roll:** a YO rolls 2d6, claims the number as a YO number, ties it to a fresh trait, and narrates her counter. The Authority then claims numbers on the map — always **7**, plus one scene-specific number (Exposition and First Plot Point claim 3 or 11; Heating Up 4 or 10; First Culmination 2 or 12; Midpoint 6 or 8; Climax 5 or 9; Denouement 2 or 12). - **Later rolls:** another YO rolls. Land on a YO number and you win the contest (possibly *through someone else's trait* — you borrow their courage or their move). Land on an Authority number and the YOs lose. Land on an open number and you claim it, tie it to a trait, and play another round, with The Authority claiming the lowest-ranked unclaimed number each time until someone comes out on top. The cruelest, best mechanic is **selling out**. On a loss, the YO who rolled may *sell out* a free trait to steal victory — but winning that way means acting like The Authority, in a way that visibly and permanently changes you. Sold traits never come back free: closed traits blacken out, open traits are rewritten darker. And **Glitch** won't even let you do it while you've got anything better to sell. When a Youthful Offender has sold out every trait, that session is the last of the series — the game's "Death or Glory" cliff, where you finally find out whether you changed the world or just lost yourselves trying. ## Editions - **Ashcan Edition (2008)** — *In the library.* Robert Bohl's self-published early draft, bearing the "issue 0 — only 10 bucks" cover and the riot-grrrl pitch; the text here is the complete game at that stage. - **Core rulebook** — the finished Misspent Youth, later published by **Fragging Unicorns Games**; *not in the library.* The full game keeps the same spine — a near-future rebellion, the seven-scene episode, the Struggle on the dice map — and picked up supplements including *Sell Out with Me* and *Fall in Love, Not in Line*. ## References - [Misspent Youth: RPG Core Rulebook — Studio 2 Publishing](https://studio2publishing.com/products/misspent-youth-rpg-core-rulebook) - [Misspent Youth — BoardGameGeek RPG entry](https://boardgamegeek.com/rpg/6344/misspent-youth)