So I was sitting around

[nicklalone]

So I was sitting around playing final Fantasy 11 (summer off of school's pastime 2004 entertainment) and I was messaged by an old Internet RPG person by the name of xiombarg about a game I was thinking about developing. I was looking at it and it seemed sort of interesting and I remember thinking that the idea was interesting when I was jotting things down. I was curious to know what is wrong with the idea and what sort of in-play issues the game could have in-theory. I no longer design or play games but I am always interested in group interaction so game design has some use to me. It's a few years old so the writing is a bit wonky but here it is:

A cloaked figure stands on a hill far in the distance, beside him is a smaller figure, the silhouette of a riding animal beneath him, as they stand a gust of wind blows through followed by a break in the silence as the man begins to speak.

"Someone once told me as they were passing on that he could feel himself leaving his body, " the man pauses, letting his statement sink in, "I didn't believe him until I too, felt that spirit, my life energy, leaving my body as I lie dying."

The second, taller man turns to the sky and says, "Why did he choose you?"

The smaller figure's face lit up in a smile. Happiness seemed to poor from his face like blood from an open wound. "I have never found out. My life in the past was nothing special really. I was a teamster for a trade company. We delivered medical supplies to dozens of temples around the area. Nothing special really but it was a living."

"And now you get a second chance?"

It seemed an impossibility but the small mans smile grew. "Yes. But why he chose for me to live the life of one of those Centaur creatures I'll never know. I mean, usually he only deforms someone why had great prejudices in their past life, as far as I can remember I had none." The man pulls back his cloak to reveal a hideous mass of wires, veins and blood tubes all tied to a mechanical mass that somehow vaguely resembled a horse. The horse's head was not there and was replaced by the upper torso of a small man. This man, who was grinning enormously, had no idea why the great Doctor had decided to grant him a second life. He had no idea that in his past life he was a man who had a terrible past as a murdering truck driver. A man whose life had revolved around delivering medical supplies and hunting the half-horse half-human centaur he had deemed unfit for life.

The doctor had decided to give him life as a centaur to give this man a chance to redeem his soul by correcting his past mistakes. All of his racial memories had been erased; his past life now seemed somewhat inconsequential. It was up to him to live a good life. If he didn't it was eternal life in a purgatory; a place of eternal torment and suffering. A fate worse than the death that still lingered in this mans thoughts.

There are kind sprites as well, those beings whose good hearts desired an extended life. The Doctor granted these lives with almost no cost as long as they continued their kind work. When their work was finished the doctor would place their souls in the place of eternal bliss. This place is like that feeling in your stomach when you kiss the girl you have loved your entire life for the first time, like waking up on Christmas morning to find a fresh coat of snow and puppies waiting for you under the tree. It is a good place to go, but the added life sometimes brings about change in the person. The soul can no longer stand the warm goodness of the light and desires, if only for a second, the burning pits of evil and chaos.

It is these souls, who are granted an extended life yet fail to use it to achieve anything, who are placed in the boundless confines of Limbo to think on what they have done for eternity. Limbo is a place where no one can hear you scream, no one can see you and your eyes cannot see anyone either. It is a void, a dead-zone of nothingness, empty.

Which shall you choose?

Welcome to The Doctors Lament, a roleplaying game about discovering your past or sticking to your goals. Unlike most roleplaying games this one allows what is usually referred to as the game master to come up with histories and characters to be played out in an anime world. However, all of these stories are set in the past life of their character and for some reason, The Doctor has granted them a second chance. This chance however, does not come without a price.

The price is this: the body is ready to die when you are presented to the doctor. While you lay before him he unfolds your past life and tries to determine whether or not you are special enough to be given a second chance at pure greatness. But, in order to attain this immortality through history you must make the ultimate sacrifice and enter an artificial body made of magic and metal. This body keeps the original going long enough to finish what is necessary and will shut itself down when the goals of the characters life were achieved. It sounds easy but what are you going to do when the skeletons of your past come to haunt you? What are you going to do when a former lover refuses to see you because of your transformation? Or what will you do if you try to do good only to find that you were once a terrorist hell-bent on chaos and anarchy? What will you do when the lynch mob knocks on your door?

If you can keep focused on your goals, you just might succeed

Welcome Players, Welcome to The Doctors Lament, an RPG by Suicidal Games.

For you players, all you need to play this game you is: preferably a copy of Big Eyes Small Mouth-I used a modified version of the system here but everyone should pick it up, it's a good game, a clear conscience and the yearning to discover who you were and why you were given a second chance. Only with these things can you discover and accomplish the tasks that could award you a place in the Eternal Bliss or Dead Zone of the after life. Remember this when The Doctor hands you your character sheet.


For the Doctor:

The doctor has a lot of responsibility in this game. Aside from running the game and creating the adventures and plot twists the characters will face, it is also up to you to create characters that the players will understand and enjoy.

A HISTORY OF MY DOCTOR:
The doctor, or so the story goes, was a great man on this planet once, creating cures for disease and solving world problems. While all of this was going on he fell in love with an innocent lab assistant by the name of Mia. Mia, as the doctor would later discover, was unfortunately a plant by the evil organization hell-bent on creating chaos in the world.

Mia and the doctor soon grew together as a family and Mia became with child. The doctor's life was happy, it was the first time in his life he had felt complete. While Mia had been pleasing the doctor she had also been warping the doctor to give up his fight on the world's problems, "they are not worthy of your intervention," she said. "They do not deserve to be saved. They will only repeat the same mistakes and beg for your help again."

"But they need my help." The doctor said with a confused mind. "They have never asked me for my help. I have just given it to them."

Needless to say that soon the doctor's good heart fell to his own uncertainty and turned his back on the world. About three years passed and the doctor awoke to find that his children were dead and Mia was gone. In his rage the doctor found the one thing that had eluded him his entire life, The Human Soul. Only in rage did he see it and the sight of his own mangled soul made him realize that Mia had been wrong the whole time. Humanity could prove itself given enough time. With this thought in mind the Doctor opened his lab for the first time in three years.

Now 300 years later we are beginning to see the benefits of the Doctors revelation. The Doctor found a way to prolong the lives of all humans indefinitely by implanting their body into a Mythical Centaur's cybernetic body.. By doing this at the time of the subject's death the Doctor can erase all past mistakes from the memory and give the person a second chance. A second chance is a new life indeed, but unfortunately The Doctor cannot erase the dark stains that past evil has on the placed within the soul and it is this stains which leave the subject open to once again fall victim to their fears and hatreds.

WHO IS THE DOCTOR:
The story above is the story I created for a game I will run. Each doctor is different. In fact, I would go so far to say that there are hundreds if not thousands of these doctors around the world.  I used the body of a bull to symbolize the jealous rage that controls the doctor. Also for this doctor I will choose to deform my paitents by putting them into bodies that do not co-exsist with the environment around them. My reasoning there was that by keeping them in a deformed body I could further separate them from the humanity and privide the kindling I would need for a future confrontation.

Although I have tried to keep this game somewhat setting free there are a few questions you should ask yourself when getting ready to write a campaign.

1. Who am I?
By creating the story of your own doctor you make this game in a way your own. It is tailored to your needs and wants as well as your own dark desires and insecurities. The Doctor should reflect you in some ways, and also be fun to play. The doctor oversees the game but does not take part in it. In essence you are playing almost entirely by your rules.

2. What will your doctor do to control his test subjects?
When a character goes beserk, as some will to be sure, the doctor in my world sends his force of failed vessels to subdue this new perpatrator. Some type of control is nessecary as my subjects have powers exceeding regular humans. Will you have this problem? And, what will you do to stop the rouges from destroying everything.

3. Why does your doctor do what he does?
My doctor gives people a second chance in thanks of the world giving him a chance after he turned his back on it. Why does your doctor do what he does?

4. Characters
My characters will be generally good people who did something evil in the past to get what they wanted. Now that they have died the memories of the evil event that occurred is gone, but the stain is not. When tempted this person may do something evil as they have forgotten the lesson they learned in their first life. What kind of characters will you make? This is also something you should discuss with your players as they will be ultimately be playing the characters.

A lot of who a character is also depends on how they will react in certain situations. When you, the doctor, creates a new subject there are several guidelines you should follow. First of all this new subject, as a first temptation, is implanted into a cybernetic suit complete with weapons powerful enough to level a city block. You should keep this in mind when making each character, how will the soul react to all of these weapons? The past should include all types of mannerisms and psychological profiles. The characters history matters less than the characters psychology.

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is it a salvagable idea? What could go wrong during gameplay? Is it too personal? What sort of system would there be?

Thank you for the input!

[xiombarg]

Hey, Nick! Welcome to the Forge.

I'm glad to hear you're planning on doing something with this, thanks to our conversation.

Obviously, for starters, you'd need some sort of system, or at least guidelines, for creating the Doctor for a given game.

The two major elements of this concept seem to be trying to achieve the kindly goals your character has in mind now that he's been reborn, and the sins of the past catching up with the character, so the mechanics need to focus on that.

I suggest having a look at the Lapse system in my own game, Unsung and everything in Paul's My Life With Master, which this game is almost an inversion of.

Frankly, the "GM creates everything, including the PCs" gimmick, as you say, works only if the GM knows his players very well, and even then human nature gets in the way. I suggest dropping this element... somewhat.

What I would do is have the players decide what Goals the character is persuing, and then the GM designs a character around that. I don't think skills from the past are as important as moral intent, so I wouldn't even worry about it -- assume PCs can do anything reasonably well thanks to the Doctor, or the Doctor scrambles their skills to suit GM whim. The important thing is what they choose to do, not whether they succeed or fail.

Once everyone has characters and Goals, I would open the backstory element to the players as well as the GM: Have everyone (including the GM) come up with two or three "problems from the past" that can come up. Whenever a PC directly attempts to achive a goal, one of the problems is randomly assigned to the character. There is no guarantee that any player will get the problem they created... So the surprise is still there. But the players can use this to inject issues and concerns into the game that interest them.

I'm just brainstorming here, but those are my initial thoughts.

[nicklalone]

Hey, Nick! Welcome to the Forge.

been here many times, been lurking on occasion for years. registered 3 times and have forgotten passwords that many times.

Obviously, for starters, you'd need some sort of system, or at least guidelines, for creating the Doctor for a given game.

The two major elements of this concept seem to be trying to achieve the kindly goals your character has in mind now that he's been reborn, and the sins of the past catching up with the character, so the mechanics need to focus on that.

I doubt any set systems would work that well. For a custom tailored game like this one I have to wonder what lind of system would accomplish the feel that this game really needs. I think there would have to be some sort of control stat built in. If I were a Tri-stat using man I think that a modifier would be in order in the essence of the Soul + mind roll (i.e. roll them together and add the modifier on a roll of 2d6 to see if you fail to do the right thing). I suppose that the inevitable failure of any game that I create will be that I believe that system doesn't matter and just having a coin around will bring the chance factor to a head (yes, i've read Ron Edwards article system does matter).

But this is me. I would much rather sit around telling stories (horray for once upon a time) than sit around staring at geometry and the numbers they've turned up. For this reason I have typically used Tristat in most of the games i've randomly written with some sort of modifier. I created a matrix game once, long ago, and it's modifier was your belief in nonbelief. I suppose that the major problem I also have is that I cannot ever bring myself to try any of these games out due to confidence factors (or, i don't know that this will really work). In the end i'm an idea man throwing up on paper, stuffing it away on a hard drive somewhere and moving along.

I suggest having a look at the Lapse system in my own game, Unsung and everything in Paul's My Life With Master, which this game is almost an inversion of.

Frankly, the "GM creates everything, including the PCs" gimmick, as you say, works only if the GM knows his players very well, and even then human nature gets in the way. I suggest dropping this element... somewhat.

What I would do is have the players decide what Goals the character is persuing, and then the GM designs a character around that. I don't think skills from the past are as important as moral intent, so I wouldn't even worry about it -- assume PCs can do anything reasonably well thanks to the Doctor, or the Doctor scrambles their skills to suit GM whim. The important thing is what they choose to do, not whether they succeed or fail.

Once everyone has characters and Goals, I would open the backstory element to the players as well as the GM: Have everyone (including the GM) come up with two or three "problems from the past" that can come up. Whenever a PC directly attempts to achive a goal, one of the problems is randomly assigned to the character. There is no guarantee that any player will get the problem they created... So the surprise is still there. But the players can use this to inject issues and concerns into the game that interest them.

I'm just brainstorming here, but those are my initial thoughts.

I like to think that I can somehow find a way to actually break human nature (or the idea that roleplaying games suffer because everyone knows they are playing a game) and bring the game into some sort of surreal psychological place that makes me shudder. I know that this cannot be done and I think that perhaps this is why I cannot bring myself to play the pen and paper games any longer.

One of the fun things about this game would be that you are playing a character that has a past that the players are not aware of. I think that this is fun but I also think that the system crazy dominating rules folks would find this sort of gimmick very annoying and would probably not bring themselves to play a game of this caliber. The GM would create the past characters and assign them to the shells that were created by the doctor to give them another chance. The success factor would come on certain roles that the character was going to make that somehow incorporates the fatal flaw the person had when they were alive the first time.

In any case, thanks for the brainstorming. I hope you enjoyed the brainstorming of my own.

Nick LaLone (a horrible man if you remember him)