Tell me about... your unfinished game ideas

[Jonathan Walton]

Damn this login stuff!  That was me.  And yes, I know how to spell "Gobi."

[Keith Senkowski]

Always in the back of my mind is "Argghhh or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pirates."  The whole thing is modeled on the humorous characters in Dr. Strangelove, but with pirates instead.  The characters are all stereotypes of pirates from pop culture, just like the characters in the movies.

Seriously, who doesn't want to play a game where you get to be the Sea Captain?

Keith

[Emily Care]

I'm looking forward to developing my <Insert Cool Pirate Name Here>. It's a no-centralized-GM, improvisational pirate game about desperation on the High Seas.

Vincent and I have joked about the Reservoir Dogs on the high seas game that needs to be written.  Go do it!


This thread in general: Wow.  A huge assortment of fascinating games in development. Gobi I want to see your dolphins fly too.  Spooky's Psychofiction, Rich's Devils of the Deep Blue, Jonathan's Fingers on the Firmament, Mobius and We Regret to Inform You..., Ben's Shadowlight, Lxndr's Shangri La and Earth, Too, Raven's GoLeM, Walt's Arabian Night's Game, and hix' Fortunes of the Joneses are some games that pique my interest.  

Here's my handful of games:

Breaking the Ice Two player, dual-gm'd game of gender (or other difference) reversal.  Each player creates a character of the gender (or ethnicity, or age etc) of the other player, and guide eachother on a series of dates.  I've been working on it first because it's the "smallest" of the games I've got going, but giving it a really stripped down, fun narrativist engine is kicking my ass.  With some actual play-testing, I'm planning on posting the current rules set on indie-games soon, and my goal is to publish it this year, by hook or by crook.

Rise Up A fully-co-gm'd game about slaves and slavery. Ideally, it would be adaptable to various settings (American South, Ancient Rome, Indonesian Sweat-shop, sci-fi mining colony).  My design goals with this game are for the players to be invested in protagonizing their own and each-other's characters, with rebellious actions of the characters being made possible by the players' making bad things happen to the slaves and those they love.  

Sign in Stranger My entry to the Iron Game Chef - Simulationist contest.  System notes are here, here, here, and here.  This is my favorite of the games I've got simmering in my mind, and the one I've worked on the least. My thanks to Mike for the tourney, it never would have existed without Iron Game Chef. Yup, this game is intended to have an even spread of gm-tasks too. I think that's part of my aesthetic. Or sumptin.

Enlightenment I'd love this game to be made into a playable form. It's still on my list of things to do.

[Daniel Solis]

Rise Up sounds like it makes for some intense role-playing, definitely for a mature group. I'd love to see some more stuff.

[John Harper]

Okay, since the b-day forum is about to close, I thought I would mimic Rich and give a short list of games that I'm really looking forward to. If you're not on this list, don't despair. I hate you and everything you believe in, of course... but that's no cause for despair.

Fist of the Assassin -- Dude. C'mon... what's not to like?

Argonauts -- The game I'm looking forward to the most. So very, very cool.

GoLeM -- yeah... that's the stuff.

Walt's Arabian Nights game -- cuz I loves me some Arabian Nights.

Cthulhubabe -- Mmmmm. This sounds delicious.

The Labyrinth of Doors -- I admit it: the name got me.

Robots and Rapiers -- You know why, Ralph.

Making Friends -- Spooky, I want to have your babies.

Azure Dusk -- Man... what a freaky idea. I always loved Ecco, so this gets the nod.

Now. Go. Write.

[Shreyas Sampat]

I second those requests for Azure Dusk and Walt's Arabian Nights game. Rock on.

Finally: Mridangam, my Vedic supers game, I actually have ideas for this now and it might actually happen.

[Daniel Solis]

I've been waiting anxiously to hear more about Mridangam. That game got me interested in the whole concept of mythic gaming, inspired big hunks of Gears & Spears and really brought home how well-selected trait-names can create a more immersive play experience.

I'm honestly surprised by the support for Azure Dusk. I guess I'll have to move that towards the front burner now that PUNK is finished.

[Shreyas Sampat]

I had been hung up on trying to recreate authentically the different parts of the traditional dance-drama structure; I realized recently that that was domb and I should be leveraging that anatomy to do work for me instead of trying to just build a game around it. Once I've gotten a skeleton of this heaven thing together (hopefully soon), I'll get back to that and really do something with it. Thanks for the interest!

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Unfinished game ideas. Where to start?

Literati - The game where you play agents sent to hunt down rogue fictional characters in a 50s dystopia. I love the concept, but it falls down at execution.

Hahaha! YEAH! That's who came up with it. Okay.

I've been working on it.

[Judd]

I only have one real game idea floating around in my head but I've got tons of unfinished projects, taunting me, throwing their poo at me from their cages.  Now that I got into grad. school, there will be a tremendous push to get these puppies finished and done before masters work begins.

My only game idea:

Dimestore Katanas: A game about violence and how it spirals out of control, inspired by the tons and tons of newspaper articles every year about some schmuck snapping and going on a stabbing spree with a cheap samurai sword.

Projects:

Dictionary of Mu:  Its rounding the corner...really it is.

Wyrd West:  It was the first thing I ever thought to write up, as a kind of mini-supplement for Dust Devils and I should really just put it out as a kind of old fashioned newspaper.

d20 Project:  I've got a d20 setting that should be done soonish too, a refugee from when I wrote something up for the WOTC Setting Contest.

Riddle of Blood:  Nothing's official about it coming out but I wrote a ton about it when I ran it and might as well finish the little blood-sucker up just to be done.

I want all of the projects done by this summer but I'm more than happy to let DK percolate for a while.

[Keith Senkowski]

Dimestore Katanas: A game about violence and how it spirals out of control, inspired by the tons and tons of newspaper articles every year about some schmuck snapping and going on a stabbing spree with a cheap samurai sword.

This I have to see cause when my brother was in high school some nut came to school with a fucking saber.  He called me at college when he got home to tell me about it.  Said he was in the hallway when he heard yelling and watched this asshole run down the hall screaming with the thing over his head, being chased by security guards.  If you can capture that I'll buy two copies at least...

Keith

[Shreyas Sampat]

I had been hung up on trying to recreate authentically the different parts of the traditional dance-drama structure; I realized recently that that was domb and I should be leveraging that anatomy to do work for me instead of trying to just build a game around it.

Good lord, it took a year but I totally made this happen.

[Sean]

(double post deleted)

[Sean]

I was working for a while on a Karma + Resource driven fantasy game where each player gets a god and a hero to play...but then I saw that John Wick had already designed Enemy Gods.

My friend and I wrote a dice pool fantasy game with a tarot-driven metagame mechanic for his setting called Under the Azure Flame. I don't know if he's ever going to use the mechanic for anything but his own house rules, but we had a lot of fun with the fledgling system when we played it.

I've been chatting a little bit with Paul Czege about Posthuman, a science fiction game idea I've had for a while. The conceit of the game is that since genetic engineering makes everyone a physical near-superman, and since memory chips and computers you can load into your brain make everyone a functional Einstein, the only thing that differentiates people other than appearance is their passions. So your character is just a list of passions.

But somehow my obsession with D&D has taken over my life these last couple of years, and what I'm really working on most is The Darkness Beneath, which would be a fantasy heartbreaker if I wasn't self-aware about what I was doing.[/i]

[joshua neff]

My unfinished game idea is an "Elizabethan fantasy" game, influenced heavily by the movies Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, as well as The Princess Bride, and the second series of Blackadder. Also, the novel The Worm Ouroboros. The first idea I had got severely mutated by my reading of Dogs in the Vineyard.

It occured to me that most fantasy RPGs have very little direction about what one does with the game. You've got a fantasy world, you create characters, and then...you do stuff. Whatever you want! Reading Vincent's "Structure of the Game" bit in DitV, I thought, "If I were creating a fantasy board game, you'd have a good idea of how to play it and what to do--so why not do that with a role-playing game?" Also, DitV's "poker with dice" mechanics seemed to fit really well as "fencing with dice"--that is, instead of Raises and Sees, Block & Dodge, Reversing the Blow, Taking the Blow, I saw it as Attack, Parry, Riposte, Taking a Hit...that sort of thing. (Hey, Vincent, you don't mind if I steal your mechanics, do you? I'd totally give you credit.)

I also wanted to create a fantasy world that threw lots of imagination inspiration at you without overloading you with "here's MY world, now do something with it."

So, I've been imagining & working on this game in which you play a courtier in the court of a queen who is very much like Queen Elizabeth in a country that is very much like 16th century England. The other countries and places don't have names, just titles that sum up vaguely what the place is like--and it's up to each individual group to name the places and fill in the details. The PCs try to better their relationship with the queen by foiling treasonous conspiracies and going on quests to other lands. I'd also like to have some sort of PC endgame kind of thing, sort of like Transcendence in TSOY, but with a reward for the player--but this is the part that's giving me the most trouble.

I'm actually quite interested in finishing this, if only because it keeps nagging me to finish it.