Ego & Soul

[Hannu Hurme]

Here's a rundown of what I've written down so far. Mostly to clear my own head. This all began quite a while ago when I made my first posts here at the Forge. I don't have that many posts, so if you're interested go ahead and do a search. One relevant thread was called "let's break some eggs".

*****
Game stuff begins
*****

Ego & Soul

How the game works

You have two attributes with number values: Ego and Soul. Ego is the dark side of your personality and Soul reflects the Zen like state on enlightened mind without urges to hurt yourself or others. When one goes up the other comes down. Total of Ego and Soul is always ten. Thus if your Ego is four, your Soul is then six.

Every time you take an action that has uncertain outcome from narrative point of view, you use either Ego or Soul to take action. Ego is used for negative acts like hurting someone and Soul is used for benign acts like making someone like you. Motivation behind your act is also important. When you try to make someone you hate like you, it's obvious you use Ego instead of Soul.

You also have pool of points called Inspiration. These fuel your acts when you use the attribute with lower value. Amount of Inspiration you need to use is the difference between the two attributes. Inspiration begins at ten and refreshes once every game session, unless game master and players decide otherwise. When you use the attribute with higher value you always succeed. Every success with either attribute also raises it by one point, thus dropping the other down by one point in the process. If you do not have enough inspiration points, you cannot succeed by using the lower attribute. Higher attribute can never rise higher than nine and the lower cannot drop below one.

Emotions and Passions are just that, feelings you live with every day. The character sheet has lines below these two words, Emotions below Ego and Passions below Soul. Emotions are negative feelings that come from hate, sorrow, infatuation and so on. Passions are fueled by love, joy, respect and other positive feelings. Write down what Emotions and Passions your character has. You shouldn't list too many and you can always add more at moments notice as long as you negotiate with your game master. Emotions and Passions can also cease to exist, just like that.

Emotions and Passions come into play in many ways. Most notably they are part of your characters personality and this should never be forgotten during role-play. When you're in love with someone, you take that person into account when you make your decisions. If you fear the dark, you think twice before entering that alley without a lantern. Secondly your character is a Dreamer and for all his powers he is bound to his feelings. Thus you bend the reality through your Emotions and your Passions to make it right for you.

When your Emotion or Passion comes to play in a way that requires you to take action, your powers as a Dreamer awaken. You can describe what you wish to happen and should the Emotion or Passion be under your higher attribute, your wish becomes reality. If the Emotion or Passion is under your lower attribute, you must spend Inspiration points just like when taking a normal action to make your will happen.

*****
Game stuff ends
*****

Alright I have read the post about presenting a game. I also feel my tiny brain is bursting as it is so bear with me. Below are few questions I've presented for myself and I have yet to arrive any conclusions about them myself. Maybe you people can help, seeing most of you have far more experience with these things than I do.

1. Passions are forever.
This would be saying that if you take a Passion "I love Anna" it's for good. Even if she should die during the game the passion will remain and will continue to empower you. Emotions are the stuff that can blink in and out of existence far more quickly. Also should "Anna" die you could add an Emotion that would reflect your quilty remorse.

2. Using Inspiration points to gain narrative power.
Should amount of Inspiration points spend reflect the amount of narrative power you gain? In this case you'd also need to use Inspiration points when using your higher attribute. This would also only matter when "Dreaming" ergo manipulating the reality. Taking normal actions wouldn't burn through Inspiration points as quickly.

3. Should Ego / Soul fluctuate more slowly?
That is should you gain one point in either at the end of game session rather than each time you use one? This maybe bit premature as the game is still quite a mess. :)

4. About the setting.
I'm a fan of fantasy and thus I would play a game like this in a fantastic medieval setting. I also recognize that modern setting or even a setting based on more sci-fi aproach could work very well with the added bonus of mind affecting drugs and all that. What do you think?

5. Anything you feel like commenting.
So really, could this work? Would it be playable?

As always, thanks in advance!

[Spooky Fanboy]

#1 sounds like a keeper.

I would also recommend keeping #2, as a way to scale the changes in porportion to the level of change. 1 point allows you to succeed in a specific task, whereas X (a really high number, possibly 10) allows you to change the world, with some sort of gradient in between.  

Keep in mind, though, this means that the points probably have to refresh at some point; how they refresh and how soon they refresh will affect game-play considerably. I'd tentatively recommend that refresh rates be slow, for example at the end of the gaming session; after all, the power to bend reality is a difficult task, not one to be taken lightly, and for game-play purposes, if the character can succeed at anything by spending Inspiration, then there should be something to keep them in check from spending Inspiration all the time. In this case, that would be the player decision on whether or not this particular case warranted the spending of the Inspiration point.  

Tying the refresh into which of their Emotions or Passions they fulfilled would also be a good idea. As, possibly, tying whether or not the player could spend the points in the first place to whether or not they had an appropriate Emotion or Passion to fuel their Dream-Weaving (miracle-working, wish-making, etc.)

#3: Without knowing more, I'd recommend stat change at the end of a game session. Keep some sort of a tally as to which stat a character used more of, and that stat gets the boost.

#4 is important to flesh out; it is hard to predict what impact using your Dreaming will have on the world and how the world will respond if you don't have a coherent setting in mind. After all, with that level of power, there's bound to be some unseen repercussions in using it.  In fact, there should be a "repercussion mechanic" based on how many points of Inspiration were spent; the more you twist the world, the more violently the world responds. How the world responds is best determined by the setting. For example:

Say you want this to be a fantasy setting. Fine. Let's assume that the characters are high-level Archmages from Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin) or The Dying Earth (Jack Vance). The more impact their magic has in the world, the more likely the world will react. Also, the main characters from C. J. Cherryh's Rusalka series of novels are worth looking into; each wish they focus on always has unintended conequences. In this case, repercussions=unintended consequences that come back to haunt them during the course of play.

Say you want a modern or sci-fi setting. Fine. Characters can be superheroes (similar to White Wolf's Aberrants) or modern wizards (similar to White Wolf's Mage), or futuristic psychics/mutants (think of "The Blessed" from Alyria.) In this case, repercussions= mental derangements (megalomania, obsessions, hallucinations, etc.) or obvious physical alterations (bulging muscles, height increase, glowing aura, changes in skin and hair color, emanating radiation, etc.)

If you want to keep repercussion mechanics simple, I'd suggest the following: the GM sets a target number for the amount of Inspiration that needs to be spent in order to accomplish a goal. If the player goes under that, the problem still exists. If the player goes over, the repercussions are determined by the amount of points the character spent over what was needed.

#5: Other than the addition of a repercussion mechanic, as I mentioned above, I don't see why this shouldn't be playable, other than expanding on the mechanics behind emotions/passions and how they affect the Dreamer's ability to wish.

I had a similar idea for a modern-setting game. If you want to compare notes, let me know and I'll PM you.

[Hannu Hurme]

Hi! Thanks for your thoughts Spooky.

#1 Will be a keeper, it simply feels right and I believe it adds certain drama into the play as well. One can never have too much drama in a RPG.

#2 It would be logical to spend more Inspiration for bigger miracles, yet I hesitate on this matter. Perhaps setting the scale seems too daunting. What could it be like?

10 points to change the course of the world, sounds decent. This should be used rarely if ever. I think that the more inspiration points are being spent, the more tightly the effect should be bound to the Emotion or Passion.

9 points to do what? Almost same as above but bit less, perhaps at this stage it would be simpler to decide things in geological scale. One continent maybe, but which is bigger, a human heart or a nation? How much does it take to make somebody fall in love with you?

4-8 points to do what?

3 points to watch a man you hate explode into bloody mess. Say a word and a person will obey it, unless it's suicide for him or someone he cares for.

2 points to make somebody run screaming. Enough inspiration to make you fly? Perhaps not but you could probably make someone believe you can.

1 point to cause a breeze or create a sphere of light. Make somebody you like look into your eyes, then step towards you. Make a lock open on its own.

There's also the scale of time. Some effects like killing a person is obviously for good (or is it?). But if you create a ball of light how long will it shimmer before fizzling out?

#3 I suppose that if Ego and Soul would change more quickly it would mean the person is mentally unstable. That sounds nice in a way. Mad artists take over the world with their unstoppable flood of Inspiration. Making one of the two raise one point at the end of session is probably a better idea. Actually you could even decide how many times you need to use either attribute before it goes up and that number of times could be different for each character.

#4 Here's a quick rundown on some of the stuff I've been planning:

*****
About the setting
*****

World has suffered a great flood that has nearly drowned out everything. Only an area high in the mountains has survived. This area is roughly half the size of England and it's full of lush valleys with high mountain ranges surrounding it from almost every side. Great forests grow in deep valleys where humans haven't stepped into for the fear of what lives deep inside. The ocean is retreating each year, revealing more ground as it drifts back. Great cities full of moss and weed are bathing in the sunlight and people are sending parties to explore these once sunken citadels.

The area is divided between few small kingdoms who are ruled each in their own manner. Yet the area is not that big and with endless ocean surrounding the mountain range from every side, a rigid peace has been kept between the kingdoms until now. With the ocean revealing more each year the new unconquered land calls for its owner and politics are being replaced by military power.

*****

About the repercussion mechanic:
This is interesting idea. I need something to keep the dreamers down. I absolutely don't want them running the world as their private playground. I want the dreamers to be vulnerable, sensitive and socially dead. They would live in the low cast of thieves and rogues, that's what I have in mind.

Hopefully this discussion will continue bit further, it would be a great asset for me.

[Spooky Fanboy]

See, I have kind of a personal stake in this; I had an idea similar to yours for a game that I never wrote down. Maybe the details of my game will be of help to you. The games are remarkably similar, yet differ in a crucial respect.

My pre-nascent game was going to be called Power Trip. It was a modern-day setting about low-rent losers who suddenly had The Power to make their wishes come true. There was a catch though:

The game, like yours, had two opposing stats: Need and Competence. Competence was a measure of how you were able to function in the real world. Need was how many unfulfilled desires you had, and how much time and energy you wasted brooding on them as opposed to doing something about them. Need was where you gained your ability to change the world.

Your Miracles drew their power from your emotions, your negative emotions. Your character had Fears, Hatreds, and Hungers (things she/he obsessed about). Every time one of those Fears , Hatreds or Hungers was thwarted, it would increase one point. At critical mass, you spent the points out of that pool to work your Miracle, which (naturally) had some violent, sudden and pyrotechnic result. Thus, you could use Miracles to your advantage, but they had nasty fallout tied to them. The point was an old one about those who "need" power are the last ones that should have it.  Inspiration, in my game, could only be used for negative, selfish, and ultimately self-destructive ends.

Now, your game has an opposition mechanic which is slightly different than the one I had: Soul. Thus, it posits that, by focusing upon the character's better nature (which didn't really have much sway in my game), the resulting Dreaming could have positive results. If you want to go that way, more power to you, but I think you need to delineate more precisely as to what qualifies as an Emotion versus a Passion.

BTW, what happens in this game if either Ego or Soul is reduced below one? I imagine if Ego disappears, the character Ascends to a Higher Plane, whereas if Soul is gone, the character goes on a rampage that ends up in an orgy of destruction.

Side note: You might want to throw into your background that most people blame the flooding, rightly or wrongly, on a Dreamer or Dreamers who went horribly wrong. Adds to them being on the fringes of society.

Also, have you read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven? In it, there is a man whose dreams remake reality seamlessly. He wakes up, and the dreams he dreamt have changed reality seamlessly, so that those who didn't notice the dream taking effect (usually everyone but him) don't notice the changes; things have always been that way. You might consider stealing that idea for your Dreamers.

[Hannu Hurme]

The games truly are remarkably similar. It's kind of relief that I'm not only one having these weird ideas sprout up.  My game's been slowly developed during the past two years or so, it has had its ups and downs and I had all but forgotten about it when I was browsing through a book about zen. That got the Ego and Soul aspects in my game and reminded me about it in general. At one point my games Emotions had a number as well, to clarify how important they were for the character. Then I dropped the idea because it's really though to say what Emotion is more important than the other. Your idea about counter that goes up is very intriguing and I like it. Never had that revelation myself.

On my first post I stated that neither Ego nor Soul can raise above nine or drop below one. I also had the idea in the begining, that when either goes to 10 and the other disappears you kind of loose the character. Either she would ascend or fall and be out of play. That's not very funny for characters thought, especially if it happens by accident so I dropped that idea pretty soon. I'm still fond of it thought if it would get it to work with some kind of game mechanism. I mean what do you do if you're totally run by Ego or Soul. You're not very interesting in game terms from that point on [IMHO].

Of course it was a dreamer(s) who flooded the world. I'm not sure about giving players that scale of power thought. The more personal the effects the more better in my opinion. I'm not going for supers RPG here even if the game might give oppoturnity for that. The feeling and setting I'm aiming towards would be very dark and moody fantasy with characters that are struggling with their every day (albeit adventurous) life. I'm still struggling myself with finding or inventing a game mechanism that would make this game work.  I believe I've read this book by Le Guin, I've read most of her books. It was in finnish thought and quite a while ago. Perhaps I'll read it again.

Thanks for posting. That counter idea of yours really got to me. In a way my game works in similar fashion, the counter is just in your head. So when you are afraid of the dark that Emotion comes to play and so forth.

This game still needs lots of time and refining but I'm hopeful.