The Return of my Amnesia Game

[earwig]

I've been busy with pre-production of a film, so I have not posted in awhile, but I wanted to touch base with the community again, for some basic feedback.

I started working on a game where the characters wake up in The City with amnesia.  The only memory they have is a shared memory of a figure in a tower overlooking the city. 

Mechanically, this means the players have blank character sheets.  The players are given a name and number at random, and are assigned as a work unit in the city.  Their age, physical features, etc. will be rolled up randomly.

Once they are in the city, something happens.  They begin to get their memory back.

They way this will work (hopefully) is that the characters will have Flashbacks.  When this happens, the other players take the rolls of GMs, adding elements, characters, etc. to the flashback.  During the flashback, the character is able to spend Memory Points (to be renamed later) on skills.  They may also spend memory points to change elements of the Flashback.  When the Flashback is complete, they will gain a Memory.  Memories have both positive and negative emotions tied to them.  The character picks these and the emotions.  So, if the character learns in a Flashback that he had a son named Gabe, his memory might read Son Gabe (Hope/Longing).  This would represent that while knowledge of having a son gives him hope, he longs to be with his son again.  Whenever a situation arises where these emotions can be called upon, the character will get a modifier to his or her roll.

So in an example, if the character were being tortured by agents of The City's Government, he could use the hope of seeing his son again one day in order to hang on.  Thus he would get a modifier to remain concious.

A majority of the game's "action" would probably take place in The City, but through the Flashbacks and Memories the characters would develope.

That's the bare-bones version. 

What does everyone think?  Any suggestions for additions or changes to "the system"?  I realize I haven't actually added any true mechanics yet, but I want to have a solid theory before I start throwing numbers in there.  I definately want to keep the system rules light.  I think a game like this would suffer under the weight of a crunchy system.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[brainwipe]

Nice idea! I've started campaigns with amnesia before and it's a good hook.
I agree that having a rules heavy system here would be too crunchy. If you can avoid it, all the better. Here's a few things to think about:

What keeps the characters together when they wake up? If they all have amnesia, they won't have either their own goals or a shared one.

The Flashbacks feel like dream sequences to me. Will they have the same rules as the non-Flashback world?

Who decides what the Flashbacks are going to be? There should be a seed to get the players going. "This flashback is about a son" who decides that? Does it come from the player of the character, the GM, the other players or is it rolled randomly?

When they are in the real world, what will the characters do? What will be their mission between the flashbacks?

A possible point of contention is that if you make the rolling of a character truly random, you might end up with a mix of skills/feats which aren't any use together. Also, I know most players like to have at least some control of the makeup of their character.

Just some thoughts there. Sounds cool, though!

[chris_moore]

In my and Michael Lingner's game, Psi Run, players take on the role of people who have been kidnapped and have lost any recollection of their former life. They have flashbacks while trying to escape their captors.  Our players start with Questions that are answered during the game, such as, "Why can I read minds?", or "Where did this scar come from?"  The answers to these questions are their memories.
I like the emotions attached to the memories! 
Regarding the rules, I feel that the only rules you need are ones that help the group tell these particular stories.

-Chris   

[earwig]

Thanks for the feedback!

The premise of the game is that the characters have been kidnapped and taken to a city on another planet.  The City is this huge hodgepodge of human achievement and degredation.  It's actually part of an experiment, where people are taken, their memories wiped, and they start out on the lowest rungs of society and must work their way up.  However, the race who started this experiment has died off.  THe experiment is basically on autopilot, continuing to kidnap and supress the memories of its victims. 

A revolutionary actually was able to hack the system and plant a virus, which was quickly detected, leading to the eradication of both the virus and its creator.  The virus did do damage though, and the memory supression is begining to decline in some (but not all) citizens.

Since the death of race which started this whole thing, the city is now run by a group of extremely powerful people, who may or may not know the truth behind the experiment, the race that created it, and the mysterious Man in the Tower. 

The characters will come together simply because they are assigned together as a work unit upon arrival.  They will live in the poorest, most deprived section of the city, in a shared living space.  As (or if) they work their way up through the system, they may be reassigned to a new Unit, or eventually even achieve individual status, but hopefully they will have enough invested in one another then to remain in contact.  This could also lead to an interesting storyline (forbidden love, class struggle, etc.) and themes as well.

One idea I had for the Flashbacks was to roll for a random emotion.  So fear, love, hate, anxiety, sadness, etc.  That would be the starting emotion.  Then it would be up to the first other player to narrate the Flashback to to add his/her element based on the starting emotion.

So let's say John's character has entered Flashback.   

GM rolls and it comes up Sadness.

Jerry is the first narrator.  Jerry says "You are in a funeral home..." etc.

Each narrator gets a certain number of Flashback points to spend, adding or taking elements (characers, objects, settings, situations, etc.) to the Flashback.  The player involved in the situation can spend his memory points to counter other elements of the flashback, but he must narrate it into the story in order to do so.

So for instance, in the above example...

Another player, Lisa spends Flashback Points to narrate the person in the casket is John's character's brother.

John decides he wnats to change this, so he spends a memory point.  But he can't just counteract it, he has to fit it into the flashback.

Spending the point, John says, "I shake the images of my brother lying there out of mind.  I decide that something needs to be done with him, before these images become a reality."

So now John's characters brother is not the one in the casket, but we know now that his brother is in a bad way, and heading in that direction if someone doesn't stop him.  By spending a Memory point, John not only changed what he didn't like about the Flashback, but also raised two other questions. 

1) Who IS in the casket?
2) What is wrong with his brother? Drug addiction, bad living, criminal background, etc.?

If the other narrators want to answer these questions now, they can.  If not, perhaps it's for another Flashback.

[brainwipe]

Thanks Earwig, that ties a lot of loose ends up.

How are flashback points given out? Per flashback, per session, per unit-of-game-time? If each player had a pool for the whole game session, I can imagine they might save Flashback points for one of the juicy characters later. Perhaps it would be best to give them out per Flashback.

For the main setting, I'd be careful not to make it become too generic. The premise is certainly novel but the powerful people and the opressed soceity is very familiar. If it's too familiar to something already available, it'll be more difficult for the GM to sell the game to their players. Just a thought.

Keep the ideas coming, it's really cool!

[earwig]

I would imagine Flashback Points would simply be a pool per player per Flashback.  So each player (other than the character in the Flashback) would get 5 FPs per Flashback to spend.  These could probably be represented by markers (poker chips, pennies, etc.).  When they spend them, they go into the pot.  More drastic narratives cost more points.  However, they would cost the Flashback Character the same number of memory Points to counteract.  t the end of the Flashback, the character would gain/replenish the total Flashback Points spent as Memory Points.

Keep in mind, that the character also spends memory points to remember skills, etc. from his/her past.  So even with the FP pool, the character could still come out of the flashback with less memory points.

As far as the setting goes, yeah, the distopia thing has been used quite a bit.  However, there are a lot of things in the setting that I think is kind of unique that I didn't type here because of time restraints.

1) The Shadow Police.  These figures are basically a computer simulation of the the scientific minds of the dead race.  These computers are housed in the tower in the center of the city.  These computers emitt these simulations as psychic signal which overtakes the minds of thosands of native insects, pulling them together as a hive-minded, human form.  These insects are dormant at night, so the computers are able to control them better at that time, so you will seldom (if ever) see one of the shadow police during the day.  These beings sometimes act as guides, sometimes as allies, sometimes as enemies.  They further the experiment as best they can determine, however, with the recent system damage, as well as the fact that the programming is now decades old, their motives are often convoluted and alien.

2) Leviathan.  A large beast(s) swims the seas outside of the city.  No one has ever actually seen it up close, however, if one stands at the city wall and watches long enough, they may catch a glimps of something very large moving just below the dark surface.  To the north, there are lights on the distant horizon, but anyone who has ever tried to reach them has never returned.

3) The City.  The city itself is still powered and run by the memories and simulations of a dead race.  Even though a powerful group of humans runs the politics of the city, the literall City itself has fought back on occations.  Rolling blackouts, the Shadow Police, shutdown of refrigeration units, are all examples of what the City can do to further it's forgotten goal.

4) Extreme social class system.  Everyone starts or started at zero.  No silver spoons.  So anyone in power, fought to get there.  When the characters start, they will live in a grimy, unclean area of the city, where the power is shut down in the evening and crime runs rampant.  Depending on their path, they could end up as a political leader or very rich executive.  But can they turn their back on their past?  What if they are given the opportunity to return to earth?  Which life is better?