The Modern Wild West

[MistHunter]

I have this setting idea, and I would like to know other's players opinions on it. The setting makes the RPG itself, highly Gamist, as your goal is to become the richest man in the world. How? Just read on.

Actual setting:
The setting is the Wild West with a bit of modern and a bit of magic, called 'Majick' in this game.
Everyone in this world, even children, carry Majickal credit cards (yes, I know this is getting weird, but that's my point with this setting; to create something no one has ever created before). These cards store the money gained from killing monsters, but can also store money from normal day jobs, though the former is the most common way of making money.

Why every one wants to be so rich:
This is to buy a Life Pass at the monthly auction. The world where this etting is in, is called Pre-Life, a test to see which souls would be the best candidates for entering the real Life, by the means of a Life Pass. Every rich person will try to buy that Pass at the auction, and escape from Pre-Life and go to the famed Life.
The Life Pass isn't the only way to getting to Life, when you die, you will also be born into Life, but you will most likeley live a miserable life, die young, or eventually commit suicide when entering Life this way.

More about killing monsters and the Credit Card:
Every monster has a set amount of 'Credits' on him, which is always dividable by 3 and 4. If fighting alone, you get the whole amount of credits, but when in an official group, bound together by a 'Group Credit Card', it is different.
When with two, if you kill a monster you quickly play Janken (Rock-Scisors-Paper), and the winner get 2/3 of the monster's credits, and the loser 1/3. In case of a tie, each gets half of the monster's credits.
With three, it's about the same, the one in minority gets 1/2, and the other two get 1/4 each. In a draw, each gets 1/3.
You cannot see the amount of money on your Credit Card, unless you choose to throw away 50% beforehand to look at it. By use fo Majick, the amount of credits on your card will than apear, with the 50% already taken off of it. All money will be noted down by the GM, to keep players from knowing their amount of credits.
Players go to special 'Money Shops' to cash their money, or to buy better skills (money < > experience), but not both at the same time. Buying better skills must be taken directly from the Credit Card, so if you don't have enough money to buy better skills, you just have to cash it, cause any money left after taking your Credit Card to the Money Shop will be thrown away. And as you can't cash and buy better skills at the same time, buying better skills will probably waste a lot of money.
One credit is worth about one dollar cent.

This is just a rough draft, so any comments are welcome.

[anonymouse]

Knee-jerk thoughts:

'Majick' looks pretty dumb; if you're going to muck with the spelling, you might as well come up with a different word to use.

Do you see this as something that would be played over more than two or three sessions? How?

You've answered the questions, "What do the players do?" and, "Why do they do it?" pretty clearly. I have to ask, though: "What else?" They kill monsters and gain credits, but.. in the Pre-Life, do people eat? Go to the bathroom? Have to hold a dayjob? Or is it very much like a video game, where such mundane things don't really happen, and you just go about killing things?

It seems like there would have to be something other than a straight monster bash; otherwise, it's just Everquest (the online version, haven't looked at the d20 product).

[Thomas Tamblyn]

Every monster has a set amount of 'Credits' on him, which is always dividable by 3 and 4.

And why do they get credits for killing monsters?  For that matter, why do all the monsters have credits divisible by 3 and 4?

Who runs the life auctions?  Why do people beleive that this is what will happen if they get a life pass?  Is there some kind of godlike being who's set this all up and explained it to to everyone (perhaps via some kind of prophet)?

Oh - And don't call it majick, or magick for that matter.

I think the setting could be interesting - you have a unique starting point so far - but I'm a little vague on the details.

[MistHunter]

About the spelling of Majick, some people spell it this way, though magic is the most popular way of spelling it. I chose Majick, becoz it has this mystical feeling.

Also, the players don't really have to go for the most money, and if they do, they will be encouraged by the GM to have simpler goals. Also, the players can choose to become Bounty Hunters and such for cash (not Credits for the Credit Card).
And the reason I also have cash, is not only for items to help kill monsters with. The players also have to eat and such, as Pre-Life is meant to resemble Life in a lot of ways. Only 1% of all inns and restaurants accept credit cards, so that's the other reason for cash.
And day-jobs, killing monsters is actualy the day job of many. Though a lot of people work at inns and such, or become Bounty Hunters.

[Walt Freitag]

Intriguing, but what you've presented so far raises a lot of questions.

Am I correct in interpreting the three-way Janken contest as ignoring the precendece (of scissors over paper, etc.) and the winner being whoever's in the minority (so if it's, say, one paper and two scissors, the paper wins)? This would give you the same 1/3 probability of ties as in the two-way rock-paper-scissors contest, so it makes sense but it's not really clear from the text.

Can more than three characters ever join in fighting a monster? If so, how is the Credit divided up?

In Life Auctions, are the players bidding only against the other players or are there NPC third parties in the auction? If there are NPCs involved, how does the GM decide how much cash the NPCs can bid? It seems that the GM, knowing all the numbers, would simply be deciding whether a player-character can win a Life Pass or not. Note that there's no reason for a bidder to bid less than the full amount of cash he possesses, because presumably if you win the Life Pass you have no further use for cash and if you don't win it doesn't matter how much you bid. So the auctions should be really brief, just everyone who wants that particular Life Pass comparing how much cash they have.

What's the reason for keeping the players' credit totals secret? It seems like a big hassle for the GM, the only purpose of which is the chance to randomly hose the players for the leftover balance when they buy skills. It turns what could be a reasonably strategic game into a guessing game. (Either that, or it forces players to keep track of their balances in memory. Memorizing stuff is an not-fun chore for most people, so a game that rewards players for doing it can be annoying.)

As a competitive one-shot game (all the players play until the next Life Auction comes up, and one player wins), the winning strategy depends mostly on the mechanism by which it's determined who gets to fight which monsters. Clearly, near the start of the game it should be most rewarding to use Credits to buy skills, because there's plenty of time before the auction for the skills to pay off (produce a greater return in Credits than they cost to purchase) in increased monster kills. As the auction gets closer, at some point it becomes less advantageous to buy skills. Depending on how the other game mechanisms work (espcially, the system for fighting monsters and the system for finding or choosing monsters to fight), this break-even point could become very predictable.

As an ongoing game, it appears that everyone wins eventually, mostly by being the character who's been in action longest. It's important in a design like this to reward risk-taking, because usually the best strategy in such games (including most computer RPGs) is to be very cautious and conservative, which gets dull. When the rewards are cumulative, but taking risks puts all the accumulated rewards in jeopardy (such as through character death), then taking any unnecessary risk simply does not pay in the long term; the cowards always win in the end. This forces players to choose between playing in an exciting way but being almost certain to lose, or playing in a dull predictable way to have a chance at winning. You want to avoid that.

Your setting reminds me of Philip Jose Farmer's novels, which are often bizarre pre-life or afterlife worlds with a few trappings of mundane real life strangely mixed in. In Inside Outside, for example, it was telephones in (what the inhabitants believed was) hell. I'd like to see more development of the idea, such as:

Are children born in this world? Do children grow up? Do adults age? Or does one need to enter Life for these things to happen?

Do people re-enter this world when they die at the end of a Life? If so, what state are they in? That is, are they the same age as in Life when they died, or what? How much of the Life do they remember? (If people are entering Life in the modern world, and if they remember that Life, then what stops them from re-creating modern technology in this world?)

You describe the setting as Wild West but none of the specifics so far have anything to do with the Wild West. Are there guns? Saloons? Cattle? Horses? Railroads? Telegraphs? Indians? (Do the Indians bid on Life Passes too?) Gold claims? Silver mines? U.S. Cavalry? Beautiful but naive schoolteachers from Philadelphia? People of other nationality? Where do the Life Auctions happen (and how do the bidders get there)? What prevents all the gun-slinging cowboys from shooting whoever's auctioning the Life Passes and taking them all? (And who is issuing those Passes, anyway?) How do monsters affect the cattle ranching business?

How large is the world? Is the Wild West all there is, or can you ride to Mexico or take a train to the cities back east? Where do manufactured goods (like guns) come from?

Why do people want Life Passes so much? Why not use their cash to live in luxury in the world they're in?

Farmer isn't my favorite SF author, but he delights in figuring out all this kind of stuff in the bizarre worlds he invents. Usually there are mysterious aliens responsible for the truly inexplicable stuff, like where guns come from if the whole world is the Wild West, or who's enforcing the rules about the Life Passes.

It's possible that the answer to most of these questions is, "Who cares? It just is the way it is so that players can fight monsters and try to win Life Passes." That's fine, but it then the whole setting comes across to me as very abstract, color for a set of competitive rules that might be implemented as a board game.

- Walt

[Thomas Tamblyn]

Sorry, but this struck me as very odd indeed.  What need is there for cash when people have credits (I know you said only 1% of places accept credits, but that just begs the question of why they're unwilling to deal in credits)?

Credits are the No1 commodity in this world, right?  So it seems logical that all transactions are carried out in credits - or at the least cash that is valued on the basis of it being exchanged for credits at some future time, just like in our world the value of money is based on the ability to have it exchanged for gold.

The world is built around credits, so why doesn't everybody cut out the middle man and trade in them directly?

[M. J. Young]

So it seems logical that all transactions are carried out in credits - or at the least cash that is valued on the basis of it being exchanged for credits at some future time, just like in our world the value of money is based on the ability to have it exchanged for gold.

The world is built around credits, so why doesn't everybody cut out the middle man and trade in them directly?

Oops--that was true even forty years ago; but it's not true today. Cash today has value solely because of convention--everyone accepts it as having value, so it does. If you look at the current situation in Brazil, the Brazilian official currency is undergoing such rapid inflation and devaluation that the Brazilian merchants won't accept it--they have built their own currency based initially on a barter economy which has grown to cover limited services. Money in our economy has value solely because people accept it. There is no exchange for gold anymore.

As to why people wouldn't either accept credits or have a currency which can be exchanged for credits, it would seem that those who control the credits aren't interested in anything but their system. It would be a bit like turning Green Stamps on its head. Decades ago, you would get trading stamps (Green Stamps were the most famous, I think) at those stores who were willing to give them to people with their purchase. You collected the stamps in books. They had no cash value, but they could be redeemed for merchandise at the trading stamp center. Now, let's think of credits as something you receive for certain activities that instead of actually being given to you are recorded by the credits people; thus they aren't negotiable--you can't give them or sell them because only the credits people can actually conduct the transfer. So if you want to use your credits, you have to buy from the credits people themselves. This makes it extremely difficult to use them for most purposes; the credits people don't care. Thus a parallel currency develops from the basic barter economy--we begin by trading this for that, but eventually agree on trading this for paper or coinage which is worth so much of that, but which can be traded to someone else for the other thing, which they can then use to trade for either this or that, and we've got money. The credits people aren't interested in the money, and the most important thing in the world can only be purchased with credits, so you wind up with two parallel monetary systems.

For more on monetary systems and how to figure out what to use in a milieu, check http://www.gamingoutpost.com/GL/index.cfm?action=ShowProduct&CategoryID=54411&ProductID=63788&publisherid=54849">Game Ideas Unlimited: Cash from last summer, which details the various stages of development of money, the sorts of crimes that each form encouraged, the current situation in Brazil, and what money might be like in the future.

--M. J. Young