[GroupDesign: Schrodinger's War] Feel of Play

[Sydney Freedberg]

Preface: This is the latest thread in the GroupDesign project, tentatively titled "Schrodinger's War," a collaboratively designed game about incorporeal "Archivists" who jump through time and space, possessing human hosts to alter history, constantly forced to balance the welfare of their individual host with their objectives for humanity as a whole. The most recent design thread is Drafting Mechanics; the most concise (if somewhat out of date) overview of concepts occurs in the thread Nailing mechanics; other threads are indexed here. But reading through all these past threads is by no means required -- all Forge-folk should feel free to participate.

Over on the last page of Drafting Mechanics, as we all bogged down wrestling with systems issues, Tobias wrote (among other things):

Why would I play the game? Probably to do cool stuff that matters to the world in a cool backdrop. Be that Viking Raider, boost his strength, throw an axe into the evil knight that would've risen to King otherwise, etc. - and have it matter to how history plays out as well. Overcome the opposition (other players) and impose your vision/passion on history. Why would a character become Archivist, leaving behind all the ties that make him human?...
...I'm tossing out things I want to be present in Hypothetical Play, to get me unstuck on my creative block on mechanics. Post your criticism, own hypo play, etc., what you want....

I agree with Tobias that the best way to stimulate new thinking on mechanics is to back off mechanics themselves for a moment and instead turn to what play should feel like -- the kinds of things that should happen, the interactions among players and GM (if there is a GM), the tone and type of stories it should produce. I further think this topic deserves its own thread, namely this one.

There's a good model for how to think about hypothetical play in the thread Structured Game Design; I'll try to write up such a hypothetical transcript of play myself in the near future.

In the meantime, I challenge all of you to tackle the question

What should a session of play be like?

[ADGBoss]

I intend to go back and re-read the other threads to better get an idea of what is going on, but I do have some comments on this thread.

1. The very first thing that came to mind was "How real will these changes be?" Will the game center around fictional history or psuedo fictional history? Making small or even big changes that ultimately do not endanger known History all that signficantly is interesting, but from my point of view is not compelling.  However, assassinating Hitler as a child and dealing with the consequences of that, well that IS compelling. Again I need to become more versed in what has alrady been written about this but that was my first impression.  

2. A second impression given the above is that Play would best be served by being very dense and very nerve wracking.  When dealing with time, not to be cliche, every second can count.  Every moment holds the potential for disaster. There would be trouble even stopping for a hamburger, in case someone or something else was trying to affect the past at that moment.  Also a sense of paranoia, can you trust your fellow Archivists? Have you crossed every T and dotted every I? Are you sure you did not leave that ball point pen in 1132 AD Hungary?

Just my 2 Lunars. Very cool btw


Sean

[Spooky Fanboy]

There was a time (I know this, without needing to access it) when sentience, no matter where or how it existed, had the luxury of believing that history was a dead thing. I cannot do this; to me it is a seething garden of delicate flowers and pernicious weeds that constantly sprout, threatening to choke everything that I and my colleagues have worked so hard to maintain. To believe history dead would, for me, be tantamount to believing in life after death, in religion.

I do not believe in any religion; I study it, in all of it's bizarre offshoots. It is my special area of expertise. I defend it, because our ancestor's attempts to interface with the unknown was just as vital as our technology when it came to elevating us to where we are now: the End of History. I know this for certain, and I've proven it time and again. (Despite what some of my comrades say about the possibility of "proof", given who we are and what we do, I am nonetheless confident of my assertions.) My fellow Archivists, each with their own specialty, berate my findings while championing theirs; the irony of this is lost on all of us.

I have to be confident in my proofs, for I am being called upon yet again to act in their defense. I can instinctively feel The Cascade, the "Fade" resulting from altered history, washing through me. It is no effort whatsoever to locate where (when) the trouble began (hmm, First Crusades), but what I cannot know until I establish my presence there/then is what, precisely, caused events to diverge and what effect that divergence will ultimately have. This means risking my very essence to correct the imbalance, or the essence of some formerly innocent bystander. (Neither of these options appeals to me, knowing what I know.)

But doing nothing, the unthinkable third option, holds even less appeal. I wonder who caused this. Was it one of our renegades, those who treat history's garden the way the now-extinct ccat would treat a sandbox? Was it one of my purported "allies" correcting (in his or her view) an unsightly glitch in history? Could it have been myself, in the past or future, who caused it? And of particular importance to me: am I Fading because of something that affects the entire Garden of Time, or just my chosen patch, the history of religion and the supernatural?

I must go and see for myself. Time flees, and for those who supposedly master it, it is even more precious than for those merely swept in it's current.

This is my idea of an opening scene, with some bits scattered about in regard to Color and rules. Hope it helps!

[Andrew Morris]

The very first thing that came to mind was "How real will these changes be?"

Sean, this is something that each group decides, if I remember the discussion correctly. It can range anywhere from "slight changes to unobserved moments in history" to "two-fisted time-travel adventure," to paraphrase, I believe, Sydney Freedberg.

[Tobias]

I had a unsticking moment yesterday evening as I was reading Bill Bryson's A short history of nearly everything.

Basically, it centers on the fact that if you go back a number of generations to, say, Roman times, the amount of ancestors you'll have needed to get there are larger than the sum of all humans that ever lived.

(I may be wrong on my timeline, here. Maybe it's further back. Don't have the book with me now, unfortunately).

So basically, he says, there's incest and cross-tree effects going on.

I'm taking that thought and expanding it into incestuous meme's and passions, hoping to mix it with the cyclical nature of things and all the stuff I wrote earlier about people-centered passion play.

<edit>
check http://web.syr.edu/~rsholmes/genealogy/howmanyanc.html for more amusing info.

There will probably be a goal of 'best reproduction (i.e. winning)' for species, thoughts, meme's, PASSIONS.
</edit>

And I'm still thinking the players will be all the Archivists that exist - and on things that will give them a reason to work together (as players, at least).

Just keeping you all posted. :)

[Andrew Morris]

All right, here's my swing at what "feel of play" I would expect from Schrodinger's War. I'll just list elements I'd like to see:

- Responsibility/Duty (We've got to make things right.)
- Urgency (Do it now, and don't look back!)
- Confusion (Who's the enemy? What are they up to? How? Why?)
- Moral Ambiguity (Wait...am I the enemy?)

So, to tie those together, I'm seeing the characters as being bound by duty, convention, or a sense of personal responsibility to act. But they've got to do it now, now, now! (Making me want to go back to the whole "deadlines" concept from a while back.) Which leads to confusion, often resulting in moral ambiguity.