[From the Ashes]

[purestrainhuman]

I've been a long time lurker both here and at the old site, but I've been reluctant to share my own work because it's still largely conceptual, and I've been moving very slowly on it.  If you're so inclined, I keep a blog where I talk about different aspects of the game I'm developing, as well as other stuff.

www.fromtheashesrpg.blogspot.com

If you search for "fta" on the blog, it will pull up all the posts that specifically deal with the development of the game. 

I've had two big roadblocks that have prevented me from really moving forward on things.  The first was a system to work with.  I don't want to do a d20 game, or use somebody else's system, if I'm going to make something, I want it to be mine at its core.  This, I think, I've worked through.  The system I'm wanting to be used can be found here - http://fromtheashesrpg.blogspot.com/2012/12/fta-system.html.  It seems to work for me, I need to tinker with it a bit yet, but I like the versatility and the fact that it creates shades of success, rather than pass/fail.

The second issue, though, is one that continues to be problematic.  At its core, I want From the Ashes to be a thoughtful, ultimately positive take on the post apocalyptic rpg genre.  You don't need PA games to be grimdark, they are that by nature.  I want to develop some sort of mechanic that ties the decisions of the party into the development of the world around them as they progress, the idea being that the PCs are the harbingers of What Comes Next.  The old world burned, what will the new one look like?  I don't want people running around killing kobolds because They're Evil, I want them seeing the Kobold Way of Life as a rival for the development of What's To Come.  I want the game to be as challenging for the GM as it is for the players, basically. 

I've been reading an RPG that, according to its hype, is based on philosophical inquiry and self-development.  Wow, sez I, that's exactly the sort of thing I want my game to be about.  Turns out, the development is just a PC finding something deep written on a wall every once in awhile.  No, that's not it. 

I figure, by making death a certainty in the game, it becomes less of something to work against and avoid, and more something to be aware of, and come to accept. 

Okay, I'm rambling a bit at this point, but that's where I'm at right now.  I've got a concept, I've got a basic system, now I need a bridge to bind them together. 

I'm glad to be here, no more lurking for me!

[Eero Tuovinen]

Not to say that my solution would be yours, but there's a game mechanic in my Fables of Camelot that has proven pretty good for encouraging promising and hopeful play. The game is about the fall of Camelot, so it's going to be somewhat grim, but an important array of player choices concerns what their knights might wish to preserve from the coming Dark Age, which provides for play that looks ahead into the coming world instead of just here and now.

[purestrainhuman]

Thanks for the link - it's got some great ideas!

I've had some time to think, so I want to organize my thoughts better than I did in my first post.  Rereading it, I realized that I did not do a good job of explaining what it is my game was about, or what my current challenge is.  Also, I couldn't help but think that one would be forgiven for wondering if English was not my first language :/

So.  From the Ashes. 

Setting: It's a Post-apocalyptic game, somewhat in the vein of Gamma World, but less silly, and more thoughtful.  It's a game of competing ideologies in an emergent social system, of co-operative world building.  I want to take the emphasis off of the character, and make the players focus on the world itself, and their part in its development, so the characters, while all mutated and possessing fantastic powers, are essentially doomed.  As their mutations grow in power, their bodies deteriorate physically, until they hit Level 9, at which point they are at the height of their power just before they die.

What does role-playing look like when you know you're going to die?  So many of my experiences in RPGs are based around the extension and glorification of the PC, by combat, by mighty deed, by social climbing, etc.  What happens when you take that away from them, and make them realize just how ephemeral all that is?  Hopefully, if I can do this right, it'll make them focus on the world around them, and how to make it better.

Which, of course, opens up a whole other can of worms.  What is "better"?  The natural inclination of most players will be to try and restore things to their former glory, aka The Way Things Were, but who's to say that some others don't have a better way of doing things?  Which brings me to the point I was making above regarding the Kobolds - that I don't want there to be random monster attacks for the sake of random monster attacks.  Each "monster" in the game represents an alternative to What Came Before, and each has their own motivation, their own worldview that they are trying to propagate.  They should be presented as such - just as the PCs have their own agenda, so to does everything else in the game. 

Challenge: I'm struggling currently with some way of keying the world building aspect into the system.  I want to reinforce to the players that their actions matter, and that in a tabula rasa society, each action has a direct impact on the direction of the society's development.  I want the world itself to be the silent player in the game, that "levels" along with the PCs.  If they wander the earth helping people, the world becomes a better place.  If they kill every problem that presents itself, the world becomes a savage wasteland. 

While I could just toss that in the GM's lap and say, "Make sure you do this as you go along!", I'd rather build some sort of system to reflect the changes as the party progresses.  I've toyed with the idea of reaction modifiers on a sliding scale, or some sort of world tracker that the GM uses to detail the results of the PCs actions.  Maybe at the beginning of each session the GM goes over the unintended consequences of the previous session.  Not Kobold babies going without their parents, necessarily, but rather by killing the Kobolds they created a power vacuum in the valley - it turns out that as much of a pain in the ass they were, the Kobolds kept the rodent population down, and now there's been an outbreak of plague in a nearby village.  That sort of thing.