[kathanaksaya] going back to the roots

[Green]

I know you guys are probably sick of hearing about this game, but for some reason I cannot let it rest.

I was reading Mercedes Lackey's The Fairy Godmother, and the setting of the Five Hundred Kingdoms got me thinking about Kathanaksaya again.  As I was re-examining the mechanics and the premise of Kathanaksaya, I realized that I've strayed from my original intent with the game.  I believe I spent too much time concentrating on the characters as individuals and not enough on the characters as roles within a story.

I've written some notes, but they aren't intelligible enough to be forced upon the public.  Suffice it to say that I'm working on making Kathanaksaya a world based in stories.  While the characters as individuals are important, they do have a greater purpose.

Of course, I like some of the things I came up with so far.  I'm definitely keeping story points and bidding.  At the most basic level, they'll function as they did before.  However, the exact details are going to change.

The rest of it is pretty much getting seriously redesigned.  Here is a basic overview:

1.  No more Fading.  The Fading is just sort of...there.  Not to mention, it is too close to the Nothing in The Neverending Story.  It adds nothing substantial to the game, so I'm getting rid of it.
2.  No abstracts and concretes.  The mechanic is too clumsy and takes the focus away from who your character is and puts it on what your character can do.
3.  Streamlined character elements.  While the actual time spent creating a character varies, it should not take more than about half an hour to describe the process to someone unfamiliar with the system.  It also shouldn't take more than 5 or 10 minutes describing an individual character.  With fewer character elements, there are fewer story points needed for each character, and this makes the game more portable and easier to keep track of.
4.  Introducing archetypes- narrative roles that characters play within a story (like hero, villain, mentor, ally, etc). And paths- how characters/players believe their archetypes should be fulfilled.
5.  Introducing destiny points- a mechanic that helps the characters in the fulfillment of their archetype.  They can only be used in circumstances where the character acts to fulfill the archetype by promoting a particular process (like sacrifice, redeem, corrupt, etc).

As of right now, the only problem I have is how to represent characters who are in transition from one archetype to another.  Right now, the best I could say is to create a new character and use the old one's transformation as part of its backstory.

Additional Inspirational Sources
Star Wars (Episodes 1-6).  Directed by George Lucas.  I'm likely to use Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader as illustrative examples.
The Fairy Godmother.  By Mercedes Lackey.