Tell me about... your unfinished game ideas

[Andrew Norris]

I'm working on a design for Chick Flick (working title), so I'm excited to see how many other romantically-focused ideas people are kicking around.

I'm thinking about elements like intertwining stories, heavy Author stance, romantic complications introduced by other players invoking some kind of currency, etc. I have a strong feeling there's going to be a map or a board of some kind, representing where your heroine is on her Campbellian journey through the traditional romance plot, but branching (or even circular) because there's no reason the story has to turn out the same at the end every time.

I almost have an early playtest group together, and it looks like I'll be the only male.

The idea came about when we were watching Love, Actually, of all things, and we realized the structure of the movie was exactly what we were trying to do in our Sorcerer game.

[Walt Freitag]

Holy Shit, dude, I actually had a very similar idea.  

Actually, mine would be an "add on" to ANY d20 game, where diet and exercise in the real world translates to XP in the game world.

Basically, you set goals, do exersise, and maintenance (of weight, power, stamina) nets you XP, while GAIN (loss of weight, increase in power/strength/stamina) nets you even more XP.  So you can get to an ideal weight, maintain it and still get XP.

Basically, this XP bonus would be brought to the table weekly, shared with the GM, and added to the character.

The nascent idea name was d20 Fitness.

That's a pretty cool idea too. To me it looks like they could complement each other nicely. Your concept sounds like it emphasizes rewards for success, while mine emphasizes the day-in day-out decision making that achieving success requires. Motivation and methodology both together would be pretty strong.

Would there be an Atkins version? I might try it then.

Atkins would be, like, a character class in the D20 Diet. (Or a subclass of the Low-Carb class, along with South Beach, Sugar Busters, Zone, and Protein Power.) Other major classes would include Low-Fat/Food Pyramid, Calorie Counting, Glycemic Index, and Exercise-Intensive.

It's all about calories (consumed and burned) in the end, but the different classes give you different ways of accounting for them. Just like d20 is all about hit points (lost, gained, and inflicted) in the end, but if you're one class you use fireballs and in another you use bows and arrows and in another you use healing spells to manipulate them.

So the Atkins class, for instance, would have bonuses when rolling for some foods, minuses when rolling for others, and would be banned from some rolls altogether. If constantly applying the class modifiers to the core set of tables became too inconvenient, then I could publish class-specific splatbooks that have alternate versions of the tables with the class modifiers already applied. One for each major diet plan. Hmm. (Pardon me while dollar signs roll around in my eyeballs.)

- Walt

[Kit]

Well, the main game system I'm 'working' on is called Option. I've posted about it a couple times here. It's essentially a generic system that is loosely inspired by D20, but without most of the things that make it suck. I freely confess that it's a 'what D20 would be if I had designed it' game: It started out life as an attempt to combine GURPS character creation with the D&D system. It's since mutated beyond this so that it shares almost no common mechanics with either except a basic resolution system very similar to D20's and character point based creation, but the feel is still there. The main point of it is that it allows you to describe characters who are very versatile if you wish to but still allows specialisation, and character progression is more of a learning process than a 'I get kewl new powers and can hack stuff up more'. It's also got a couple nice unifying ideas. I'm particularly fond of the magic system.

A thematic idea I'm playing with at the moment is that I've always had a soft spot for orcs as a race, and would really like to create a game that is about them. In particular the PCs would all be orcs or related races (e.g. goblins, ogres, etc). Possibly one in which there are no humans, or if there are humans then they do not feature strongly in the game at all.

I generally have dozens of settings I'm tossing around as concepts. Embarassingly the only one I can remember at the moment is one that when I describe it sounds like a really blatant DitV ripoff. (I don't feel that it actually is. They share a common starting point of being a western game in which a christian-like church is prevalent, but rapidly diverge from there both in setting and themes. I just can't seem to explain it in a way that makes this very clear.)

[WiredNavi]

Currently in the works / Betatesting:

Echoes:  Narrativist, Immersionist horror ala Silent Hill.  Your ordinary everyday world is turning into a nightmare that reflects some terrible trauma that someone's experienced.  Your character has related issues or they wouldn't be there at all, so dealing with the situation necessarily involves confronting or dealing with your problems.  Not intended for campaign play.  The conflict resolution mechanic is somewhat inspired by Otherkind; roll 2d6 and choose one for Success (the higher, the more likely you win the conflict) and one for Horror (the higher, the less Trauma your character takes from bad stuff).

Still pondering:

Ill Winds:  I would love to have a house system for the animist tribal game I'm currently using HeroQuest for, but HQ seems to be doing the job perfectly well, so this isn't necessary.

Steam:  Post-apocalyptic steampunk, the Road Warrior meets Jules Verne, hijacking armored trains carrying rare and precious coal and water in steam-driven gyrocopters, etc.  At one point I had a proto-mechanic for it which bore some similarity to Capes, but it didn't work nearly as well as I thought it would.