Motifs

[Bankuei]

I sat back watching one of my favorite anime series, Giant Robo, which is teeming with an actual story(more than blow things up), and is covered with motifs left and right that work incredibly well for telling the story.  I started looking at in terms of motifs ala QB.  I was also forced to look back at Brotherhood of the Wolf, the Watchmen, Kabuki, and Usagi Yojimbo as other sources of great uses of motifs.

Some questions started to hit me based off Ron's question of other folks using their motifs to aid another player in the game mixed with the examples above:

Could you use your motif against another player(if you were at cross purposes)?

Could a group as a whole have a single motif?

Could you use motifs post-mortem(flashbacks, advice"use the force luke", keepsakes, etc)?

Could a campaign as a whole have a motif that kicks in as extra dice when used?

Just some ideas...

Chris

[Le Joueur]

Hey, one of my favorites really plays with the idea of motifs (I think).  It would be Big O.  Sure its a 'giant robots fighting in metropolitan areas' story, but it's also post-apocalyptic (and plays heavily on apocalyptic themes without addressing them directly) and dripping with noir everywhere (story techniques, character archetypes, and art deco everywhere).  I love it.

A robot falls in love with a man whose privledge almost makes him inhuman.  A (military) police commander who has a heart of gold in a corrupt system.  The world has already ended and nobody remembers how or why.  It drips with noir pathos and yet it's about giant robots.  This is what I want to be able to do with Scattershot....

Oh, sorry.  I'll go back to my own forum, sniff.  Sorry.

Fang Langford

[James V. West]

Could you use your motif against another player(if you were at cross purposes)?

I suppose you could. You can use a Motif to get a MoV and in that you could mess with another player. I don't really address that too much in the rules cause I never really thought about it. But the rules do say that you can't actually alter another player's character, so there would be some limitations.

Could a group as a whole have a single motif?

I toyed with the idea of having a group quest, but I ditched it. I mean, the idea is to create a Cycle via each individual's Romance. This is something I haven't given much thought to.

Could you use motifs post-mortem(flashbacks, advice"use the force luke", keepsakes, etc)?

Definitely. As long as your Motifs stand, and you haven't officially ended your Hero's Romance, you can keep going. In one of Ron's posts he mentioned a character with The Heart Sword as a Motif. If that character died, but the player had not called his Romance finished, he could continue to use that Motif in play.

I suppose the line would have to be drawn someplace. Your Hero is the "glue" that holds the Romance together so once he's gone, the story has to get to an ending pretty quick. I skimmed over this stuff in the text because I wasn't sure how to handle it. I'll get more detailed in the "official" release.

Could a campaign as a whole have a motif that kicks in as extra dice when used?

This would go back to the idea of a central quest. Yeah, I can see potential in this idea, but I don't know where to go with it right now.

Thanks for bringing this stuff up. Its very helpful to get questioned because I need to be thinking about all the things I either skimmed, ignored, or forgot.

[Bankuei]

Here's some more to chew on with my previous questions.   In terms of a campaign motifs, I've been really thinking in terms of using QB/motifs to run a East Indian space opera, sort of like scifi Mahabharata or Ramayana.  In this, I was thinking of using campaign motifs to represent the different forces at work, the Sun, the Sword, and the Rose, each representing spirituality/ascension, courage/loyalty, and love/sorrow, respectively.  I wanted the players to work these themes in, and using them as a motif would be a great way to link together the greater saga.

Second, the part about using motifs against other players wouldn't necessarily be to remove them from play, but often in those epics people end up at crosspurposes, allegiences change, and players may not find themselves on the same side.  I wasn't thinking necessarily direct harm but perhaps the dice could work as a penalty to the active player, such as 2 less dice to roll, or appropriate to the motif.  A great example would be the Ring to rule them all working as a motif against heroes during critical moments...

As far as a group with a single motif, I was thinking perhaps everyone in a clan or a family could be using the same motif.  I was also thinking of Brotherhood of the Wolf, where the two heros share the wolf motif.

Chris

[James V. West]

Neat ideas. It just dawned on me how powerful a group or saga-wide Motif could be to get players in a traditional game to address the game's Premise or whatever.

Say you're playing something fairly standard like GURPS, but you add on the Motif rule so that each character can have a few Motifs and you name a couple of game-wide Motifs. When they actively bring these Motifs into play, they get a certain bonus to their die rolls. So, if you wanted the game to really explore the idea of kinship, make that a Motif and the players may use it more often in play.

Interesting.