Dream Police - fantasy free for all

[Bob the Fighter]

So I've been poring over Hellboy, Lucifer, Ultimate X-men/The Ultimates, Fables, and a bunch of other comics long enough to get some ideas.

Someone said recently at the Forge that a good setting draws people in; a bad set of rules with it will just get amended until it's playable. The inverse is not true, however (this was the person's next point): good rules can be killed by a bad setting, if the game is plugged as a package deal.

With that opinion in mind, I've stopped development on Damage Control in favor of hashing out a setting to get people excited, and designing rules to get people *into* that setting.

With that in mind, I give you Dream Police. In DP, there are magical realms that hover near Earth, odd cousins of a sort. The realms are an attempt to gather as many different types of superheroes, folktale monsters, divine beings, and sci fi weirdness into one setting. Each world has such a theme: Fairy Kingdoms (fantasy, folkore), the Iron Dawn (sci fi), Hollow Earth (Lovecraft-esque), Holy Houses (divine beings), the Underworld (demons and devils), Earth, and the Land of the Dead.

The PCs are usually members of the Dream Police. The goal of the mechanics is to push the super-normal nature of the PCs (as they're heroes or folk-monsters or godlings or whatever) as well as encourage creativity in describing the use of superpowers.

Check out a link that describes character traits:  

http://www.livejournal.com/users/totallypinkrock/74306.html

[Mike Holmes]

Cool setting is not, in and of itself, having more setting. That is, your response to the "cool setting" requirement is to ensure that the characters can end up doing "anything." The problem with this is that, while it seems to be a good idea, people have trouble imagining the setting. In fact they have to imagine what amounts to several settings.

When, in fact, "setting" is really somewhat of red herring. What you have to be able to do in order to get players interested is not just to have setting elements, but to enable players to see what they will be doing in play. So, OK, you've got the "Hollow Earth" portion of the setting. And the characters do....what...there?

In fact, the more setting material like this that you have, the harder it is for people to envision play. I mean, if you tell them that they play cops in people's dreams, that's fine. But once you throw in Iron Dawn, then the player thinks, "I've never had a dream like this."

It seems to me that your general idea is that anything can happen in dreams. If so, this is fine, just say, "Chasing baddies in the realm of dreams where anything can happen and often will." In fact, you probably don't have to include a lot of setting for this. Even if the concept is that the topology of the dream worlds are set and not variable (like some dream games would do it), you can still get away with ignoring a lot of setting details. What'll draw people in is the general idea of playing in the dream world. Everyone has dreams, and they can just use their own. What you have to hook them on is the idea of playing characters running around inside of them.

The game you're creating sounds very close right now to both Rifts and Torg. Which is not itself a bad thing. But in competing with them, it's less important to make up a better set of setting books, and more important to have the play concept be a good one. In the case of Rifts this is not hard, really - Rifts really doesn't have much of a concept for what PCs do. The answer is just "anything."

Torg seems to have a similar theme to your game, the chracters are "Storm Knights" who travel from dimension to dimension trying to prevent them from taking over. That's got some instant appeal. How's your game better or different? Do the Dream Police (I now have Cheap Trick going on in my head), chase dream criminals through these environs? Just what is the point of play?

Come up with that good point of play, and then you'll have the hook you need setting-wise. This is far, far more important than having a setting stacked with stuff that'll never get used because nobody can envision how to use it.

Mike

[Andrew Morris]

Cool setting is not, in and of itself, having more setting.

Right on. I like Dog in the Vineyard because of the pseudo-Mormon gunslingers running around in the old west. If Dogs had some component that let you play with the core rules in any genre, I wouldn't be as interested.

[Bob the Fighter]

well, i'm really intrigued, mike.

let's see... with the premise i've given, i think that the point of play was to create a Rifts-esque hodgepodge, with a focus on making superheroes. there's sposta be this element called the Shaping, which changes the appearance of Dream Police to suit the style and theme of the world they're in. so a robot-man might become a living suit of armor in the Fairy Kingdoms, while a fire-hurling superman might become a volcano god in the Holy Houses. but i don't really want to keep the Worlds that i mentioned. they're really just suggestions for basic character concepts.

i want to keep the hodgepodge thing going, but the actual bit involving Dream Police would consist of hunting down Nightmares and nullifying them. i think that the Dream Police could be part of a new form of humanity (called Dreamers): individuals whose really strong imaginations have granted them superpowers and strange, new bodies. by necessity, they separate themselves from humanity and create their own little world apart from ours.

the Nightmares i mentioned would be Dreamers too, but they are lashing out at the world in unbridled fear, rage, jealousy, etc. instead of simply removing themselves from it to escape their pain. the Dream Police would then be folks who removed themselves from the human life and then rededicated themselves to finding new Dreamers and hunting down Nightmares.

Nightmares hang out on the Earth-side of portals leading between the dream world and Earth; they and other fledgling Dreamers are drawn instinctually to these gateways. a typical mission would include identifying the problem, transporting fledglings out of the area (to keep them from becoming Nightmares too), and then containing the Nightmare while they find out what happened to it to make it this way.

when the Dream Police actually confront a Nightmare, they enter its private dream-world. there, they seek out information on the trauma of the entity and purge the psychological scars. if there's enough left of the Nightmare afterwards, it might become a weak Dreamer; if not, the creature briefly regains lucidity and has a moment of peace before dying.

play consists of a) finding fledgling Dreamers on Earth, b) struggling with the very real memories of their old human lives (and the temptation to return to them), and c) hunting down Nightmares to pick their brains, thus transforming them into Dreamers.

i dunno how cogent all this is, but i think it's a much narrower focus than before. the Shaping could factor into fighting Nightmares, in which Dream Police can "sneak around" by taking on forms like those they find in the private dream-world and thus put off a confrontation with the creature.

[Mike Holmes]

I think you've got your setting hook in there somewhere. You just need to work it out a bit.

For example, do the superpowers manifest in the "real world" or only in the dream realms? If the characters change appearances, do their powers change, too?

Familiar at all with the game Whispering Vault? Or the work of Lance Allen from herabouts called ReCoil? These have some similarities to your concept, but some disinct differences, too. Check them out if you can. They both have very tight and graspable focuses to attract players.

Think about it in terms of marketing. You're at a convention, and you're going to sell me the game. I have it in my hand, but I'm looking at it in a confused way. Twelve words or less, what is the game about?

If it doesn't grab somebody's attention in twelve words, you don't have the hook you're looking for. For example, "Chasing down nightmares across the landscape of our dreams." Does that cover it?

Mike

[Simon W]

The game you are describing sounds almost exactly like this

http://www.geocities.com/dreamscape2020/

It has changed considerably since the free (24-hour) version, but the basic background and classes are still there, with more defining reasons for the classes to exist as they are.
The action in the real world is now pretty strict and defined, whereas in dream it is fluid and more flexible.

Simon W

[Bob the Fighter]

fascinating. my first reaction was "aw, crap." but this is pretty well laid out.

i'm glad that there's a presence of this kind of subject matter already; hopefully someone out there is playing a kickass game of Dreamscape right now. that being said, i think i should focus on something that's closer to the heart, a personal project that doesn't try to be everything to everyone. Ron, if you want to redirect this post, i'd totally dig it.

the setting, a lil dealie called Metahumans, is ridiculously post-modern in terms of some of the issues it explores. there's transsexuality, superhuman civil rights, and lots of gay/lesbian/bisexual characters. it's really about tacking superpowers onto real-life people we know (that is, we meaning me and my co-author, Alli).

the subject matter of the setting (or at least our rather ambitious framework for it) was a superheroic version of our own lives and our circle of friends. i think that might actually be what Metahumans should be about: collaborating to create a super-powered vision of the players' own lives. over time, new adventures would produce more heroes that are a subtle or unsubtle homage to people in the players' real lives.

with that in mind, i think that the characters' personal relationships would need strong definition, and would be the basis for the conflict resolution system. another important part of the system would be character evolution: as adventures come and go, the changing interpretation of a PC (which merely begins as an homage to a real person; it needs to grow apart from this initial concept over time) would be reflected in a changing interpretation of the PC's superpowers. The last stage of the character's power could be her Final Stage form or something; it's the point at which the power is at its most versatile OR its most powerful, depending on how it's evolved over time.

Triangular (a gay rights superhero) was one of our earliest creations. his power of emotion-control started out as really powerful empathy: he could make other people feel as he did. over time, this became direct control over people's feelings, and in Triangular's Final Stage, he could control people's minds.

Thoughts on the character creation/world-building ideas?
[i was considering creating a new thread for this, but i read the sticky, "indie design policy announcement" and it gave me the willies.]

[Mike Holmes]

Oop, time to refer to this one: Mike's Standard Rant #6: Concepts are a Dime a Dozen.

Pick something you like. Go with it. Been done before? Do it again, but better.

Mike