Thanks for the ideas the really helped me out. I've decided to go with some sort of: bio-medicine company. Their medicines increase peoples (or animals) ablilities for a sort period of time. Soon they have lot's of money and become a full bown MEGA-CORPORATION. Then they think; why stop at bio-medicine when we can make the perfect army with our genectic technology. So they find a person and keep pumping bio-meds into him/her all they time and slowy take the DNA and use it to create the PERFECT AMRY (this could also be the title of the game) tell me what you think.
That's a nice idea for a setting, but what would the players do in the game?
For what it's worth, I think there's room for an RPG that actually involves financial/legal/ethical corporate stuff--the kind of stories you see in the financial pages of the newspaper--but that may not be the kind of thing you're going for here. But I think the idea of a Halliburon-style pharma company that's trying to secure military contracts in spite of a terrible track record and investigations would be kind of interesting.
Thanks for the feedback as for what the players do? this is how it would go. The so called perfect army would get out of control because the medicine had some not so great side-effects (violence+insanity) The whole goal would be to topple the mega-coporation (which I still have no name for)
Would players control the army? The corporate insiders? Government regulators?
Would this be similar to Dungeons & Dragons, where 3-6 people hang out all the time and have "adventures," or is this more like a one-shot where the army slips out of control and everyone has a mad dash to protect/further their agendas?
The player would be in a group that used to work for the corporation, but when they realized what the corp. was doing to created the perfect army they became a band of rebels dedicated to destroying the company. After the army gets lose the corp. goes into ruins killing the ecomomy,law etc. so they game would be a mad dash to stay alive.
Okay: so it's sort of a zombie horror/post-apocalyptic survival game with a strong anti-corporatist political agenda. That could be kinda cool.
Some simple questions:
1. Is the Perfect Army unbeatable? They are, after all, "perfect." I think it would be kinda neat to have a game where everyone knows the bad guys will win in the end--it's unavoidable--the only question is whether you can resolve your personal loose ends and go down fighting. But that may not be what you have in mind!
2. What have been your best gaming experiences? What were your worst? How will these influence your design?
Thats a good point you raise a guess that the army would be unbeatable. Everyone would know that, so it just adds to the mad scramble type of feel. If you've ever played final fantasy 7 you'll see that it has infuenced my imagination quite a bit... The game would be very open ended, in fact characters could even join the perfect army if they wanted to.
When you say "the game will be open-ended," what does that mean? And why would it be open-ended? (It doesn't have to be--and several very good games that have come out of the Forge have been tightly focused.)
Thanks for the help as i can see this game needs to be worked out a bit more i'll get back to you when it's further along...