[GroupDesign] - System and Setting brainstorm.

[Sydney Freedberg]

...that mechanic is awesome....

Thanks. And while ideal for "possession" games (where it's both Simulating something and addressing Narrativist Premise), it could be applied more widely as a pure Narrativist device for any game whose premise is "heroism and sacrifice." In other words, you have a game where the hero will always succeed if s/he chooses to do so -- the question is, at what price?

I can imagine a GM in such a game thinking, for example, "Lucy's character Dom Rodriguez wants revenge on the Count by framing him for treason against the King.... If Lucy chooses anything level of success below 10, she fails; if she chooses anything from 11 up, she successfully gets the Count arrested; but if she chooses a 16 or higher, her false evidence of treason so alarms the King that he unleashes the Inquisition and Dom Rodriguez's niece Amelie is swept up in the purge."

Presumably there's some way to make this less dependent on pure GM judgment calls -- perhaps a formal way to swap narration rights between player and GM based on how high your Success and how far you were under/over the "Blackjack" limit at which things backfire.

Also (and here I'm thinking vaguely of something I proposed for TonyLB's Capes a while back), you could allow players to choose whether the bad thing that happens when they blow the limit affects them or someone else they care about. If you say "let the consequences fall on me," you're a hero; if you say, "not me! take her!", you're a heel.

EDIT for credit where credit's due: The real inspiration for this mechanic, come to think of it, is the "you succeeded too well" rule in Teenagers From Outer Space. (Crap, I just mentioned aliens...)

I will, however, ask Tobias if now is a good time to end brainstorming, select a concept, and flesh it out.

My feeling is we're starting to peter out on the brainstorming and are pretty close to a time to start choosing, but maybe should wait a few more days. That said, I bow to the Foot.

And by the way...

I liked so much Lone Wolf gamebooks... I think you all know what they are... books with multiple choices. I think they're beautiful!

Haven't heard of them, myself. Are these like the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, where you read a few pages and then were given a decision with each alternative leading you to a different page, e.g. "if you try to reason with the Count, go to page 37; if you fight him, go to page 19; if you run away screaming, go to page 112"?

[LordSmerf]

Now that bluffing has been mentioned again, i want to reiterate...  Bluffing mechanics are cool!  The real questions are: Do we have a good use for one? and Can we design one that works within the game?

That said, i also support the idea that Players simply choose their "roll" as it were.  Or (to get in bluffing) the roll their dice (or whatever) in secret and then declare their bonus.  There are two possible ways to move from here:

1. They get the bonus named no matter what, but if they are called and do not have the named value they lose something.  If they are called and they do have what they claimed (or better) they get something special!
2. If you are called and you do not have the named value you fail, regardless of whether or not the value you actually had was adequate to win the thingy...

Thomas

[Sydney Freedberg]

....Players ... roll their dice (or whatever) in secret and then declare their bonus...

This is an interesting variation on the "name your number" system I suggested -- it adds randomness and bluff to the uncertainty and Blackjack-style "bust" of my basic idea. The price of the extra elements is a little loss of focus and a little more complexity. It's worth trying to refine it, though I've not got a good idea myself right now.

you could allow players to choose whether the bad thing that happens when they blow the limit affects them or someone else they care about.

Thought on how to do this (and too late to edit into my original post): Have the player say up front whether s/he wants the negative effects of a potential "bust" to apply to the player character or to someone else -- i.e. risk yourself (heroic) or risk others (villainous). This would presumably involve a bit of negotiation pre-resolution between GM and player, rather like Trollbabe's "free and clear" phase.

[contracycle]

Okay, the opposite, huh? Hmm... All right, how about this: it's the humans who are invading the alien planet. Unlike those primitive, barely civilized savages, we've got the advanced tech and we need those natural resources. Those stupid aliens aren't even using theirs, and they'll probably just kill themselves off in a few generations, anyway -- they've just developed nuclear weapons and obviously aren't mature enough as a species to handle them.

There are a couple of SF tropes that have explore this sort of thing already.  I would mention that a lot of 'Trek uses this idea.

Example 1:
A long time ago humanity bumped into Another Species somewhere in space and there was an apocalyptic war that nearly wiped out both sides.  Humanity is recovering... slowly.  Mostly it consists of scattered barbaric settlements on the habitable planets and a couple of hi-tech emerging powers.  The crux of the story was that the characters came from one of these high tech places (that is, Earth) and were covertly intervening in order to hasten the technocial progress of these leftover societies, so that humanity would be able to resist the Enemy again in the future, who were presumably also recovering.  The main character had suffered tremendous burns after doing a walking through fire routine while masquerading as a local god.  The twist in the tail was the main character discovering that the earth itself had been subject to similar manipulation twice: 1914-18, and 1936-45.

Example 2:
Humans found a planet with an alien civilisation at about the bronze or iron age level.  A diplomatic/monitoring/xenographic post was set up to interact with some of these societies.  The going was slow and the locals were highly suspicious, however: the crux of the story revolved around  the fact that the post was so utilitarian and spartan that to the locals humanity seemed devoid of culture and appeared Fascistically heirarchical.  The main character resolved this by putting on an insane act in order to show to the locals that these conditions were not conducive to human psychological wellbeing any more than it was for them.

Example 3:
This is really an aliens amongst us story.  It started with a group of scientists researching medieval German village settlement patterns and identifying a village that had been strangely isolated.  Following this up lead to a chain of discoveries that revealed that there had been an alien presence on earth for millenia.  The eventual conlusion was that an essentially immortal alien had been stranded on earth for a loooooong time and was, rather like example 1, actively attempting to hasten human technical progress so that we could build it a ship with which to get home.

Anyway, the point of these stories is to show that the invasion trope is only one of the possible ways in which humans and aliens can be set side by side on the same world.  Another good example would be Orson Scott Card's book 'Speaker For The Dead'.

[Tobias]

Tsk Tsk, Sydney, says the Foot, as he slightly squishes you - get in line, like you promised.

The brainstorming does indeed seem to be petering out. I propose a moment of measuring the relative interest in the varying concepts that have been floating around. The measuring will be done in the following way: we will compose a list of items, mentioned in these brainstorms (i.e. you will have to convince me it's not a new item). Once this list is complete, every person who so desires gets to add 1 more item to that list (please PM your new item, and any items I will have missed to me, to keep the thread shorter). I will post the list of items I have received once daily, but I imagine we won't need more than 2 days for this.

You will each get 10 points to distribute over the items in this list. PM your distribution to me. Then I will list the results, and you will get 5 more points to distribute over each item on the list which is in the top 10. Everyone point is a unit of emphasis that should be placed on that point in-game. For instance, you may have a game of humans and aliens where both are equally important, or one where 1 of the two is merely background, because everything happens within one race's zone of experiences.

As a side note - I, too, like the suggested 'blackjack' mechanics, with or without the random added factor. As to establishing the blackjack limit - I read a thread this or last week about sealed envelope auctions, where the highers bidder paid the second highest bid amount. That was cool, maybe we can use it. (If anyone can mention the link, I'll be grateful).

Note that these are generally non-mechanics items - we'll hook up with mechanics later.

Anyway, here's your list:

- Archivists - namely, incorporeal beings questing for solutions to questions
- Aliens
- Humans
- Meme
- Human Nature
- Alien Nature
- Benign faction(s) important
- Malign faction(s) important
- Grey (balanced) faction(s) important
- Maintaining a Balance
- Playing a Faction or Group
- Posession ability
- Burnout
- Making hard choices
- Abstraction
- Cold hard reality
- The power of Fantasy
- Invasion
- Art
- Unexpected/Non-traditional Roles
- High-tech
- Personal sacrifice
- Earth-centric
- Galaxy-spanning
- Accumulation, working to a well-defined goal
- The journey's as important as the goal
- Multiple personality disorder
- No exclusive Player Characters (ok, partly mechanical, but important to setting)
- interior/dream worlds
- The choice between going Fast and Hard or Slow and Steady

I'm eagerly awaiting your PMs. No more mails, except from me, in this thread for a bit, please. If you have something you want to share, PM me and I'll distribute it if neccesary.

Thanks!

[Tobias]

This is Foot.

I have received 4 entries on the voting, not counting my own.

Closing time for the first round will be 17:30, my time (I'm on Amsterdam time), friday (tomorrow).

Thanks.

[Andrew Morris]

Closing time for the first round will be 17:30, my time (I'm on Amsterdam time), friday (tomorrow).

What's that in GMT?

[Tobias]

I'm on GMT+1.

[Tobias]

Ladies and gentlemen, the scoring, from 6 people voting:

13- Archivists - namely, incorporeal beings questing for solutions to questions

8- Posession ability

6- Maintaining a Balance

5- Making hard choices

4- Human Nature
4- The choice between going Fast and Hard or Slow and Steady

3- Abstraction
3- Earth-centric

2- Playing a Faction or Group
2- Burnout
2- High-tech
2- Personal sacrifice
2- Multiple personality disorder  
2- interior/dream worlds

---- top-10 cut-off point

1- Accumulation, working to a well-defined goal
1- Alien Nature

You are now free to PM me with 5 more points to distribute over those subjects that are above the top-10 cut-off point.

All the mentioned subjects will get some amount of attention, if possible, but emphasis will be put on the high-scoring items.

Obviously, the Archivists have struck a chord, and their posession ability is deemed cool. I'm very happy with the #3 and #4 - maintaining a balance and making hard choices. Note that there were no votes for 'aliens' (although the archivists are alien).

I suggest you put your 5 points in the lower-scoring items, possibly with one or 2 points in one of the top 4 items to make sure they stay in the order you like - if you like that, of course. Otherwise, some of the 'lower' items might jump up to double digits if there is too much focus on them by everyone.

Thanks and have fun voting again. :)

[Tobias]

Ladies and Gentlemen, after round 2, the scores are:

16- Archivists - namely, incorporeal beings questing for solutions to questions

10- Posession ability

9- Maintaining a Balance

8- Making hard choices

6- Multiple personality disorder

5- Human Nature
5- Abstraction
5- Burnout
5- Personal sacrifice

4- The choice between going Fast and Hard or Slow and Steady

3- Earth-centric
3- High-tech

2- Playing a Faction or Group
2- interior/dream worlds

---- top-10 cut-off point

1- Accumulation, working to a well-defined goal
1- Alien Nature

As you can see, some minor re-arranging in the lower regions, with the interesting twist that multiple personality disorder moved up quite a bit.

At this point, the key issues and some background are fairly well set. We will therefore move on to the definition of these terms, what they do, and why they are important. When they are well-defined, we can start getting into the mechanics further.

To do this, we'll try to define several 'clusters', in series. I want to keep it in this thread for, now, so the thread will end with the well-defined results of the brainstorm - after that, we'll get into a new thread for mechanics, etc.

The clusters we'll be dealing with are:

1. Archivists and their posession ability - Describing what the Archivists are, what they do, and why their posession ability is so important to what they do.

2. Maintaining a Balance, Making Hard Choices, FastHard/SlowSteady. As far as I can tell, these are intimately related - but I may be wrong, you/we may have different take on this. What Balance needs to be maintained for the Archivists? Why? Why do hard choices need to be made? Is FastHard/Slowsteady the primary description of the balance/conflict of choices, or is there more?

Note that other issues may be related to this - Burnout, Personal sacrifice, Multiple Personality disorder - but they seem to be extreme results of things going wrong on the balance end, which is why they are point 3:

3. When things go bad - Burnout, Personal sacrifice, Multiple Personality disorder. Over here we can go into more detail.  

The more general points: Human Nature, Abstraction, Earth-centric and High Tech are things I would like you to keep in mind while we're forming the definitions of these three clusters - as color, or backdrop, if you would.

So, the procedure from here:

- Take clusters 1.
- Post your definition, the basic concept as you see it, short and tight but complete, of this cluster.
- Wait until all participants have done so (about 5 right now, but outsiders are still very welcome). Please don't discuss until all have posted.
- Questions, short comments, etc. - please PM them to me
- After they are posted, I will try to summarize, and post that. At that point, if I have missed anything, or there are conflicting takes, we'll try to hammer that out.

After that we'll go to cluster 2 and 3, but let's get 1 sorted first.

edit: let me emphasize again that this is to get the CORE of these clusters defined, so we're working on the same thing. We'll flesh them out in seperate threads

Thanks for playing!

[contracycle]

[shoves to front of queue]

K, I have a concept for Feersum Endjin-meets-Battlestar Galactica-meets-2001.  It has arisen from the listed elements rather than from a conception of gameplay, and I have some doubts about this direction, but what the hey.

Our basic concept is a colony ship in the depths of space carrying a human cargo in suspended animation, presumably justified by some stock megascale SF catastrophe.

Cluster One: Archivists

The archivists are artificial personalities running the ship.  The data they research are the records and resources of the ship itself, and the problems they deal with are related to the course of the ship, its ultimate destination, and any space-based or internal hazards they encounter en route.  As I see it, most of the action takes place in a matrix-like virtual world, in which the AI's "channel" the personality records of live crew in order to access their skills.  Thats something of an inversion of the posession ability - a more orthodox version could be that the AI's decant humans and introduce a personality to the jellyware in order to solve various problems.

Cluster Two: Balance
The main balance issue is that this is a closed system and all energy expenditure has to be accounted for.  Things need to be done but doing things has the potential to destabilise some other thing.  Because these personalities are not human and immortal, real time can be abandoned; that is game play might deal with a consequence of an action that took place a century ago.  Another category of hard choice would be finding a suitable colony world - how good a match aganist the ideal do you accept as worth the risks?  Is staying in space better than landing on a rock?  How will the human society be built once the landing is decided?

Cluster Three: When Things Go Bad
I'm kinda thinking, you might need to balance the needs of the environment maintance system with the energy dmeands for running an AI.  Personal sacrifice might be that the community of AI's may agree to terminate one of their number for the sake of the energy budget.  Multiple personalities can arise through hosting or posessing human perosnalities.

I would envision such a game is being heavily episodic - even within a single session centuries might pass as play jumps to significant moments.  This could be even more present if the ship is moving at near lightspeed with attendant time-dilation; I like this because it allows astrographic features like clusters and gas clouds to be more dynamic in game time.

[Tobias]

Ok, as foot, I'm going to have to trample on this one a bit.

1. We're only on cluster 1 - but I'll save your comments on 2 and 3 for later anyway. If that was unclear - my apologies.

2. One of the 'Tenets', if you will, is earth-centric. While you could argue that the global destruction of earth and search for a new one is fairly earth-centric, it is likely not what was intended - but I may be wrong on that. The group will let me know, undoubtedly.

3. It isn't so much an attempt to consolidate what we have already, but an expansion. I see that I didn't make this clear from my last post - for that, my apologies. There are valuable things in your post (and the game/story/setting sounds interesting), so I'm not going to cry foul.

Thanks for your efforts, though, contracycle - they are appreciated.

[Tobias]

I just received a PM from Sydney with the excellent suggestion of designing the game in such a way that the setting that contracycle posted is ALSO possible.

In other words, the core concept of archivists is explained and rules are given - but the setting information for that might as well be the AI's contracycle posted as the incorporeal aliens posessing meatbodies on earth.

This is partly in line with the CCG or modularity concept that was also tossed about.

I'd prefer it if we kept to cluster definition for now instead of discussing this development, but if you post a definition that, like contracycle, seems different from the original Archivist/Posession concept I will presume you like this idea. If you feel strongly about having only one setting for the game we're designing, please note it as a single line below your definition of cluster 1.

Thanks.

[Sydney Freedberg]

1. Archivists and their posession ability - Describing what the Archivists are, what they do, and why their posession ability is so important to what they do.

As I see it:

We were human, once:
Archivists are incorporeal beings. They were human once (remember those votes for "Human Nature," plus how hard it is to roleplay a true alien). Now they have lost their bodies and much of their memories of who they were -- yet, ironically, they have gained vast knowledge and power. They are at once grand and tragic, superhumanly potent and terribly crippled.

Possession:
The only way an Archivist can act in the world is through others -- by possessing the body of a living person. (Perhaps it's not even possible for an Archivist to think except by possessing a living person and borrowing their brain). At the Archivist's choice, this possession may be subtle or brutal, anywhere from quietly observing through the Host's senses, to giving the Host small boosts of power and intuition, to granting visions and superpowers, to outright takeover. Not to get ahead of ourselves to Clusters 2 & 3, but the more the Archivist pushes, the higher the price paid by the Host.

Now, why do Archivists want to act in the world in the first place?

The Question, and the Nemesis:
An Archivist is defined by the quest for knowledge. An Archivist's mission, while possessing a Host, is never simply "blow up the bridge" or "stop the bad guys" or "find the magic thingy": It is always, always, always to Find Something Out. (This could even be reflected in mechanics, allowing each successful mission produce knowledge that gives a bonus on the next mission).
But Archivists are not merely accumulating random facts. They seek the answer to an urgent question. Something terrible is coming -- some disaster or enemy: the Nemesis. The question is how to defeat it, or avert it -- or maybe Nemesis has already come and the question is simply how to recover (as in Contracycle's setting).
In any case, every session of play should be about Archivists taking possession of mortal Hosts to answer some part of the big question: How can we survive the Nemesis?


What I'd like to leave undetermined:

I'm a big fan of customizable settings (following the model of Sorcerer, or even D&D's multiple world options from Forgotten Realms to Spelljammer, as opposed to White Wolf's rigidly defined World o' Dimness).

Accordingly, exactly what kind of incorporeal being should be a decision for each gaming group: The primary options are (1) whether they're technological (uploaded personalities) or mystical (ghosts) and (2) whether they became Archivists intentionally or not (e.g. did you meditate a lot? Did you have your brain backed up to a computer? Did you die tragically while seeking knowledge? Did someone sacrifice you so your spirit would watch over the tribe?).

(Note that I am ruling out Archivists as pure AIs or spirits that are programmed or otherwise come into being without being derived from or at least modeled on a specific human being).

Likewise, the exact nature of the Question, the Nemesis (plague? evil empire? mystical disequilibrium? lost your planet and need a new one?), and the scale of what is threatened (a family? a nation? a world? all reality?) should be group-determined.

Now, here the CCG element comes in: If a group wants to create setting from scratch, as Sorcerer essentially requires, fine; if not, they can choose, mix-and-match, from a bunch of modular options we've written up. E.g. if you like Contracycle's setting, you could choose "Archivists are uploaded personalities" and "Nemesis is the destruction of earth; Question is where can we find a new world to live on?" But you could equally well choose a colony-ship setting where magic and technology mix so that Archivists are ghosts, or alternatively have Archivists as software in the world wide web back on a still-intact Earth threatened by the Nemesis of pollution or impending world war.

[Andrew Morris]

Okay, my thoughts on cluster one:

I'd rather define exactly what the Archivists are, who they're fighting, etc. rather than leaving it up to each play group to define. Also, I'd like to have the Archivists exist in "some place else" when they are not energizing their host(s). That way you could have some interaction apart from "missions." Maybe even both the Archivists and the Nemesis can come together and talk in the other place -- have debates and such. But on Earth, it's like the front lines of a war, with quarter only rarely asked for, and given even more infrequently.

So, Archivists. Yeah, I like the idea that Archivists were once human, but have become something else. Their "else-ness" is part of their coolness factor, for me, at least. Now they are trying to gather information and collect it in their Great Repository or something. Maybe it's just information in general, or maybe it's about a specific thing. Maybe their possession ability is so important because they have causality limitations. They're hopping about in space and time, right? But maybe paradox is impossible, so they have to work within the limits of what is known. So, for example, neither they (nor their enemy) could go back in time, energize a host and have him kill Hitler before he comes to power, because it's already known to history that he did. Maybe that's even what the conflict is over -- the Archivists want to observe and record everything, thereby "locking it down" and keeping it safe from manipulation, while the Nemesis wants to exert subtle pressure on history, working in the hidden spots, in order to increase their power in the current time.