Sublime Dance

[Niedfaru]

The basic idea for the game is order struggling for survival in a world ruled by chaos.

Quick blurb: From Babylonian mythology, Tiamat wasn't properly killed by Marduk, but severely weakened. Since then, Marduk, with human civilisation as his champions, has conquered much of the world, despite the occasional attempt of Tiamat to advance chaos (the Fall of Rome, destruction of the Aztecs, World Wars, and so on.) Eventually, when scientist in the modern world began to push too deep, the encountered quantum science: Tiamat's ultimate blow. By infusing chaos into the nature or order itself, a project she has been working on for centuries, she immediately overbalanced the scales, and Marduk, shocked from the sudden turn of events, was easy to drive underground. The civilisations of the world stood at Tiamat's mercy and she tore them down, shattering humanity's grip on the world. This happened across all worlds, all universes. Tiamat and Marduk no longer fought about chaos and order, but over civilisation and nature.

Unfortunately, their servants, the men and women to whom they had granted power in order that they spread the work of order or chaos, were not able to let go of their original calling. In accepting the task, they had bound themselves eternally to the Sublime Dance of order and chaos. Their actions influence the Dance, but the Dance influences them too. A group of servants on both sides broke away from their masters in an attempt to care for the Dance on their own while the gods battled over their new agendas. Unfortunately in forsaking their masters, they forsook the guidance that came from them. Now they were flying blind, but their actions still altered the Dance. By the power they have been given they made a pact with each other, binding their actions in a permanent way to each other. Now, their actions influence each other, and their collective efforts influence the Dance, which in turn influences them.

Now, I've envisaged a kind of slider system - scaling from 0 - 10, for example. There would a global scale, a scale for the group, and a scale for the individual. They influence the one above them, while the the top one would alter the effect of abilities used on a personal level. At 0 and at 10, disaster usually occurs. If the personal scale ever reaches one or the other, the character is removed from play, but this may be beneficial on a larger scale. On the global level, a 0 or 10, which should be inordinately hard to reach, is end of the world. On a team level, you "win" or "lose" the game by reaching one or the other, but you don't know which one you are aiming for without taking other steps first, so it's safer to stay central for a while. I imagine the powers would be quite free form, working more on important occurrences than on the

The thing is, I'm rather new at game design, so I'm not sure what to do next. Maybe you guys know what questions to ask to get this pushed a bit further, or have ideas of other things to do. Apologies if this is too vague, but I really have no idea what counts as specific enough.

[Patrice]

Hi Nied,

I love the mythology part but I wonder how much of this material will actually be useful and used in your game. There's a lot of information and background story involving multiple steps and I'm nor sure the whole lot would be useful for your players as they carry on gaming. If I follow your statement, you want your players to get involved in a world ruled by chaos where order struggle for survival. When I read that, that involves for me that the characters are part of the order side but from what I read after, it seems that they are given a choice between order and chaos, both of these values being actually meaningless since the conflict is now about nature and civilisation.

You could maybe ask yourself a few very simple questions like: What do the characters know of the tension lines in the world? Do they know the whole Marduk and Tiamat story? What do they know about nature and civilisation? You could then build the whole lot about what a character needs to know and actually knows instead of weaving a big, high-level background story that will never be practically used. From very simple insights, I can already tell you that you've gone too far into background logic & theory and not far enough into actual play: You want the characters to struggle against chaos and yet you give them the option of choosing chaos, you set this struggle at such a degree of importance that it tinges the whole game and yet, you tell us that nature and civilisation is now the main conflict. This is not a critic of your main cosmology at all, it's just to stress the fact that it's meant to be played (or else it's not a game, maybe it's what underlines the lot, I dunno).

I quite like the idea of a scale, but I think you've defined it for the game at large whereas a scale could be much more useful at a game session level. Such mechanisms exist in a few RPGs already, it's like saying "This adventure has a scale, at 10 chaos wins and the mind wyrms will eat all the living matter of Alabama, opening thousand potentialities at the same time". Such a "session scale" interacting with each character's individual scale could be very, very fun to play with. In order to do this you'll have to design first what an individual scale might be and what changes it would bear, and you'll have then to sort the interactions between this and the session or adventure scale.

I'm maybe answering you with a different logic than the one you've chosen for your design, but hey, that's what the forge is for after all.

[Callan S.]

Hi,

What is 0 and what is 10? I know their the end of the world, but I assume they end in different ways?

Is play about deciding which way you go, or contemplating which way you've decided on and what toll your decision has had so far?

[Niedfaru]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Patrice: I take your point about the setting conflicting with the game. The setting is still evolving, so there's plenty of room to change it. The point of the switch from order/chaos to nature/civilisation was that it gave a reason for the emissaries to forsake their masters, to turn away. The Dance is still the main driving force in the universe - the gods have just gone off to squabble by themselves. The idea is that the players do now all this: their characters are these emissaries, trying to perform a job that has been forsaken by those that started it, because they have no other choice.

I guess the initial premise I set out for the game has altered slightly since I first developed it, and I just didn't notice . With a few tweaks to the background, it becomes more about the struggle between chaos and order, and trying to maintain a balance, than about any one being on top. Perhaps each session is a new "event" that holds a great deal of sway over the Dance, and the actions of the characters can push it one way or the other. Maybe each adventure is a new "world" meaning, you can run multiple campaigns with the same character, moving from world to world - and meaning the game itself creates a new setting each time, while maintaining the same meta-setting. Perhaps collaborative setting creation in session might be a fun thing to try. Maybe even have a universe created for the campaign and a world for each session - worlds have to be sacrificed to order or chaos to maintain the balance overall...

I don't know, maybe some of those ideas work better for gameplay?

I like the session scale idea, it works well with what I envisioned, I just hadn't thought about the functionality of it.

And, please, criticise all you like, this is very much a fledgling idea.

Callan: 0 is complete chaos, while 10 is complete order. More concretely, pure energy versus pure matter. I know this doesn't quite hold true, scientifically speaking, but it makes for a much more easily definable end point for the scales.

Play is about trying to figure out what to do next, but what has happened has a bearing on what to do next, as I want everything to be so connected it's hard to do anything without affecting something else. I envisage it being something like a philosophical thriller: you need to piece together all the clues to find out what is going on what to do about it in the context of the greater cosmology, but you know for a fact that *something* is going on.

[Patrice]

Just tossing a few more ideas in, bouncing upon your idea of philosophical thriller:

It seems to me that you've had a tough time taking the gods out. I say, why did you invite them in the first place? The characters could be immortals, principles or god themselves. That would explain their need for positioning and the potency of their actions as well.

Another thing is, if you do take this "philosophical thriller" direction, maybe you would need more oppositions. That's maybe why you took the nature and civilisation conflict in. I'm trying to guess why you designed all this like that actually. You could define a lot more oppositions, and reach a level of interaction, alliance and conflict similar to Illuminati, Paranoia or Over the Edge. The characters could be defined by many axis, not only one or two.

My guess is that you brought gods in the background in order to be able to explain the tremenderous powers the characters have and that you've defined a couple of oppositions in order to provide tensions and directions for your philosophical thriller. If not, you should anyway ask yourself why you've chosen these patterns instead of others. What you've got now is almost an alignment system (law-chaos axis and nature-civilisation axis) and characters as proxies of bygone gods, but not powers themselves. Is that enough for a philosophical thriller?

[Niedfaru]

My thoughts have split here, into what appear to be two different games.

Idea 1:

What I'm really aiming for is for the characters to be "caretakers", trying to clean up the mess left by the gods, but having little idea how to go about it. Maybe it would much easier to cut half the backstory and simply say that the gods left, leaving their servants with strict guidelines to continue their fight.  Some do, others have banded together to promote balance. You play the latter group, who, having forsaken the guidelines left for them, have no idea how to achieve their goals. Conflicts are largely in the fact the lack of knowledge, but there is a very real physical threat from the loyalists on both sides.

I think that idea cuts a lot of the convoluted twisted history and creates a smoother game.

Yes, I know it's an alignment system, but I wanted to create a game that provided a real narrative drive, where it didn't matter whether you agreed in reality with what your character was going to do, you had no choice, because, in this setting, it's the "right" thing. I didn't want anything so prescriptivist as "good" and "evil" so I settled in a more definable conceptual split.

Idea 2:

Actually, what would be interesting is if the characters were gods, embodiments of a concept, by which I mean each one would embody the dichotomous entirety of a notion: life AND death, pleasure AND pain, darkness AND light etc. The game is about balance and duality, conflicting with yourself and those around you.

I like the second for it's flexibility, but it lacks the narrative drive I'm looking for. Perhaps there is a way to inject a bit in there somehow.

[Vulpinoid]

I actually did something similar to this with chaos versus order in my game "The Eighth Sea".

To give it more of a piratey theme and to tie it ion with the back-story, I called the extremes Integrity and Piracy.

Those who followed the way of integrity had the aim of maintaining the status quo, and ensuring the laws of the world were maintained. The ultimate paragons of this virtue are a group called the integrity marines, who show up to set things right when things get too chaotic (regardless of who might get killed in the process of correction).

Those who followed the way of piracy sought to bring randomness into the world and gains as much advantage and self improvement from the ensuring chaos. The ultimate paragons of this virtue are a group called chrono-pirates, who could show up anywhere and any time, but always leave devastation in their wake.

The characters walk a balance between these extremes and their actions push them up or down the scale. The more they try to preserve things, the stronger their tendency toward Integrity; while the more they seek to bring change, the more they slide toward Piracy.

The nautical terminology of the game is due to the characters being time travelling swashbucklers, who exist beyond normal humans. Some of them even setting themselves up as gods to the mortals around them. Naturally, if you were going to use any ideas of this nature, I'd expect you to rename things to match your concepts better.

I hope it gives you some ideas though.

V

The standard element I used in this type of system is a bonus or penalty for dealing with others based on the alignment. If two characters interact who are on the same point of the Piracy-Integrity scale, they gain a bonus {the two characters know how each other think and they exist on the same mental wavelength}. If there is a slight difference between them, then the two characters think in a similar enough manner that there's no bonus or penalty. If the difference on the scale is too great, the characters just don't like each other from the outset, they feel a dislike to one another. When characters from opposite ends of the spectrum meet, they have an instinctive hatred for one another.

That's pretty standard.

The twist I used in the system is the the more characters push reality in different ways, the more reality is able to push them back. Characters toward the piracy end of the scale bring chaos, but they are also affected by chaos more easily and are more easily able to adapt to the changes that chaos brings. Characters toward the integrity end of the scale repel chaos, and therfore they are more resistant to the changes of the world {on the down side, these characters find it harder to adapt if they do suffer any changes}.

[Callan S.]

Hi Niedfaru (Is it your real name, btw?),

I'm wondering if what you had were authority figures (the gods) who told you what what was right and wrong - then these authority figures became absent, leaving a moral void and leaving the people to have to decide things for themselves, even though what they decide has no tint of higher authority at all. Is a moral void what you were aiming at?

[Mikael]

Hello N

How many and what levels of sliders do you envision between "individual" and "everything"?

Some references that come to mind:

Burning Empires has two levels of conflict, personal and humans vs. aliens.

Also perhaps related is the Fate/Evil Hat principle (they had a fancy name for it) of similar rules applying on different levels: people have aspects, countries have aspects, and when countries go to war, the rules are similar to two people fighting.

[Niedfaru]

Vulpinoid: I like the penalty/bonus for interacting with members of the opposite alignment, as it would work really well to illustrate the difficulties of the two sides trying to work together. I'm not sure about the whole "reality pushing back" idea: I think what I'm aiming for is more of a penalty/bonus for effects that are aligned one way or the other. Still, its something worth considering. Thank for the input!

Callan: No, my real name is Charlie: Niedfaru is the Old English word for an enforced journey/pilgrimage

Yes, that's exactly the kind of ambiguity I'm looking for, with the slight alteration that, regardless of the god's absence, the "morality" is "hardcoded" into the characters, while the not into those they use and manipulate - thus creating a sense of doing things for you personal gain, but which ultimately achieve results that are of cosmological importance.

Mikael: I envisioned Personal, Group, Global, Universal. However, I think the Universal scale is one the never needs to be included in the mechanics of the game.

[Callan S.]

Hi Charlie,

Just need to clarify, so I'm getting you at this stage of brainstorming. Morality is hardcoded into the character...the player characters? But NPC's (the ones they use and manipulate) don't have this hardcoded into them? Or are all characters are hardcoded?

If it's the latter, cosmologically important to whom? If all characters are hardcoded, then they are hardcoded - all that's important to them is what is hardcoded and since the gods are gone, the larger ramifications of their actions are cosmologically important to no one. Characters just live in their tiny little moral comfort zone, even if they make the sun burst. Basically all characters are insensate (ah, its fun using that word!). Or do you mean cosmologically important to players, who look down upon it all as if from a god like position?

If it's the former, that seems a bit lopsided to me, for some reason I'm trying to pin down. The players are set inside a moral flowchart, but NPC's are morally flexible? That sounds like the GM gets to have all the moral defining fun? I'm wondering if it's merely the idea that the PC's are hardcoded, when really in play players can do what they want, but everyone pretends that in the game world, that's the way they were hardcoded by the gods from the begining. I could see the equal engagement of issues in that. What do you think?

And if it's neither, dang! Didn't understand you

[Niedfaru]

I've want a situation where all PCs and some NPCs are morally hardcoded. The idea is that while those who are not hardcoded have more flexibility, their actions have less impact. So, they can be pushed around for the benefit of the bigger picture. Like the difference between mooks and nemeses in Wushu, though I'm not sure I want to go down the route of turning control of them over to the players. Depends on the rest of the system, I guess.