Navigating Scales of Time and Size (A Dinosaur Game)

[Tav_Behemoth]

Woke up from a nap with some half-baked ideas, which I hope to bake a bit with y'all!

One of the cool ideas in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series is time travel through eras where human society doesn't change that much; he makes the point (in Castle of the Otter, I think) that it's quite rare for us to be living in a region of human history where moving just a few decades in time will produce noticable effects -- and there are still parts of the world where people don't know the date and life doesn't change much.

One of the cool ideas from an article by Rudy Rucker about wish fulfillment in SF is that he wants to see more stuff about changing scale; he really digs Incredible Shrinking Man, for example (and one of my favorite parts about designing Masters and Minions creatures with the new D&D rules is making diminutive or colossal monsters).

One of the cool ideas from Tensha Banro Zero (which I haven't read yet and can't spell) is that scenes & acts seem defined beforehand.

Putting these ideas together:
- The players get together beforehand and decide on a set of crucial elements which are woven into scenes: nexus points in history that have to be interacted with to achieve the meta-goals of the game
- These are woven together into an interconnected behavior map, making it explicit in advance how affecting one nexus will change the others
- These are somehow arranged in two dimensions, one of time and one of scale. At any point, the players have voluntary mobility in one dimension: they can change scale, or move forwards or backwards in time, but not both.
- Most of the game will be about dinosaurs, because they occupy such huge swathes of history and because there are fun things to do with dinosaurs whether you're gigantic or tiny. Humans are more efficient at making changes, but they're finicky -- you have to catch them at just the right point in time, and if you're titanic they tend to freak out, if you're tiny they tend to ignore you.

Questions:

How to mechanize the nexus dramas and construct the behavior map?

How to handle time and scale travel - a mix of random elements and univariate decisions?

How to have the roleplayed scenes affect the behavior map - victoryy conditions in each scene?

How to generate drama & conflict within scenes, at the meta level, and between players?

And, of course, just general reactions and "this should be in there!"

[Nathan P.]

Neato! Here's some stuff just off the top of my head.

How to mechanize the nexus dramas and construct the behavior map?

I think some kind of bidding/buying system would be cool. Say each player spends a token to create a nexus (f'rex Napolean invades Russia). Maybe have different magnitudes of nexus (magnitude 1 is a fairly minor event, with say 5 being earthshaking). Once everyones established a nexus, you can spend tokens to increase their magnitude, and also to connect them to each other. One token creates one connection. Connections take the form of if-then statements - like, "If Napolean does not invade Russua (nexus 1), then the Russian empire stays strong enough to withstand the rise of Bolshevism (nexus 2)" Tokens can also be spent to create more Nexus's, etc. Maybe keep track of everyones investment, and whenever a "goal" is acheived, those that invested in it get some other reward?

Anyhow, some post-turkey musings. More later, hopefully.