Narrative Based game idea

[scimon]

More than anything else this is a post to try to understand the etiquette of these boards. Malcolm, of the a and the state,  recommended as a good place to get critiques of games ideas. And then the next day, while vegetating on the sofa I had an idea.
And again taking Malcolm's advice I actually wrote it down which might not sound that impressive but for me it's quite an impressive first. I have a huge collection of half started ideas but for once I've got one that's mostly finished.

It's a storytelling game, or a structure for one anyway, based around the concept of a journey. For me a journey is a useful construct for storytelling because it has a beginning and an end, you are filling in the middle. This got me thinking about how often in games you hear the phase 'The journey was uneventful.' a week long journey on horse back was uneventful? I wanted something that could be a fun way to fill in some events without resorting to Random Encounter Tables (TM? Probably).

So put together a game, similar in many respects to Baron Münchhausen and Once Upon a Time in style with a single storyteller and a method for resolving passing this position. It uses dice, lots and lots of dice (sort of).

Linking into the idea of a journey I wanted to constrain the game a bit more by making it possible to play on a journey. Mainly because I had a 7 hour train journey looming in my mind. So I wanted to reduce the amount of components and cut it down to a pocket full of dice for each player. Dice are drawn without looking instead of rolling them to give the random element, a set of weighting are used to ensure each dice as the same expected value so a d4 and compete with a d20 as I didn't want to exclude any  (in fact the different types give a nice risk to reward factor).

Anyway I'm blithering, I've sent the document to a few people I respect in these matters to see what they think but I thought I'd post the basic idea here for peoples views. If people want a link they can drop me a line. As I said at the beginning this is more a 'Hello, how does this place work then' kind of post.

[David Artman]

Let me be the first to say welcome to the Forge!

It is wise of you to seek to learn the forum's standards--it's not the usual internet web board, by any means.

The first thing I suspect you will learn is that we are very focussed on real issues, actual play, specific questions. It's great that you have a game started... but you didn't even make a link to it in your post. But that's not so bad, because "what do you think" threads don't get much traffic, here, anyway: rather, it is better if you present a specific issue with which you are having trouble and ask specific questions, to get help.

So what's brought you here?

If you have some tough calls to make WRT the game system, setting, rules, or what-not, then you are in the right forum (First Thoughts).
If you want to promote your game, consider using the Actual Play forum to talk about your own initial experiments with the new game.
Then move to Playtesting, where you can find others to help hammer on it and figure out where it has holes (or where you make assumptions that others do not).
Once the rules are all square, the Connections forum will be your key to finding book producers, artists, or whomever you might need to help you finalize the product.
With perseverance and commitment, you will end up in the Publishing forum, seeking the best channel for your final product.
And if your game(s) start to really take off, and build around them a community of conversation and advancement of the game, you too might someday have an Independent Game Forum of your own.
(And all of this is only true until the coming changes reforge the Forge....)

Happy creating!
David