Tourism

[David Bapst]

So, I've been messing around with some larger project lately, and this was sitting in a random folder. It's one of those "Have a sudden idea in Petrology lecture, rush home to write it down and print it out for friends to go Huh?" ideas, but it's something I'd actually like to see show up in a pdf at least.

So, since I'm going to post a bigger project soon, I thought I might as well put Tourism up for critique too. I am a little concerned... I haven't found anyone except myself who would want to play the game (my friends are generally accepting of Forge games and ideas, but they think this one is too "eh"). I guess I'm posting to see if the idea itself is flawed; the main idea was to try and rework the normal Simulationist CA in a different view. I'm not certain if the way I reworked it is really an RPG (how rhetorical) and whether that manner has the same attractiveness.

Plus, I'm not sure if the reward system really affects anything.

Tourism: The Game
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the vacation to end all vacations! First thing is to find a couple of friends willing to sign onto a tour! In this game, you'll be pretending to be tourists and tour guides, from some terrible, particularly drab and brutal dimensional plane full of cubicles and paperwork. Although you'll want to switch who plays the tour guide after each tour, this helpful brochure will suppose the reader is willing to become the tour guide. Congrats, and welcome to the business! Each tour will take some previously agreed amount of time: anywhere between five minutes or thirty minutes will be good. Adjust according to how much free time you have on your hands!

Each tour is a trip to an exotic location, time, dimensional plane, genre, whatever! Perhaps the tour guide and the tourists are there via some powerful hologram-producing device, or maybe they have actually traveled through some paradoxical time-space wormhole.

Tourists and tour guides can pretend to be "normal" citizens of the place and era in question (possibly with props and costumes) or they choose to dress and act like their usual, lazy, bored, annoying selves (with the help of their faux Hawaiian shirts and smelly cigars). Tourists will regularly want to take on the job of tour guide so that they might purchase souvenirs from the company store, which will remind them of the various worlds they visited under other tour guides. For each tourist a tour guide escorts, they gain one token of store credit per tour.

The tour guide decides the particular world the tourists are traveling to, arranges for food and housing while they are there, and makes sure the group won't end up being eaten by eight-eyed tarantula tigers. Most of these paltry concerns won't even need to be addressed in play. Mostly, deciding the tour is the process of creating a light itinerary of the trip, and the locations, scenes and events that the tourists will experience. This is not an ironbound schedule, but instead a useful list for quick improvisation. The items should include the most flavorful and thrilling possible, as the goal is to give the tourists the same passion and thrill that the tour guide feels for the world/genre.

He'll also play the roles of any individuals the tourists attempt to communicate with, from bored reenactment actors playing the army of the evil Dark Lord (for when time travel or the real thing just isn't feasible), to actual historical personas in time-traveling tours ("What do you mean I save the world in ten years from a flying yak of doom? I'm a goat herder!") to playing particularly nasty indigenous wildlife (see the eight-eyed tarantula tigers above). Whether or not the tour group can directly interact with the environment and the creatures in it, or if the various people they meet can't notice them, or if they can, should be established before the tour starts. He should also introduce the particular universe or setting, any particular genre concerns that they should be mindful of.

In reality, a player of a tour guide must strive to make the tour as real to the occupants as possible. Now, don't go freaky with this (some people have problems with real pointy knives being pointed at them), but try to use every gimmick in reach. Describe the environment, the smells, the sights, the sounds. Really ham it up as you play some particularly dramatic historical event out. Draw pictures of the landscapes. Play music and wildlife noises in the background. Splash water on their face when they are on the banks of a frothing river.

That said, when a tourist gets bored, they may make a loud YAWN noise (like this: "Yaaaaawwwwwnnnnn....!") to signify their boredom. Considering that tourists are supposedly paying something for these damn tours, a tour guide should take this as a sign he has begun to lose control of his audience. The last tourist to YAWN (after all other tourists have done so) becomes so fidgety and annoyed that he "accidentally" wreaks some terrible catastrophe on the tour: perhaps he knocks over and shatters the Holy Grail, tells the Dark Lord that the damn midget has his jewelry, accidentally trips the pilot Ace Skywing on way to the cockpit (thus knocking him before the battle he is supposed to have won, single-handedly). This ability to thoroughly fuck with the tour guide's plans always exists, even when the tour group supposedly can't interact with anyone else. Laws of physics snap like string under the giant meat cleaver of a properly bored tourist. The player of the tourist who does this gets to narrate what happens, and even a few long range results (especially in a time traveling tour). Once this has happened, a tour guide must deal with the consequences. Sometimes, this will require some rolled eyes and hurriedly moving onto the next stop on the tour, in other cases, there may be some changes wrought on the sequence of events that they must spend the rest of the tour trying to fix the mistake.

If at any time a tourist makes a YAWN, a tour guide has ten seconds to move on in the tour, to finish the tour right there, or to continue going in their supposedly boring monologue. After ten seconds, the other tourists may YAWN, possibly all at once. Note, that if the tour guide moves on and ends the current monologue, the previous YAWNS don't count anymore.

After several tours have been completed, those tourists who have acted as tour guides may purchase imaginary souvenirs from the company store with their accumulated credit. As they spend each credit, they must describe what particular souvenir they purchase: a bronze embossed figure of the Dark Lord's castle; a snowball globe with a replica of space station inside, a life-size copy of the laser-powered sword that one hero what's-his-name used. A list of these imaginary souvenirs should be kept for posterity, and as a record of the tour guides that bring the most memorable vacations.

Ideas for tourists: disagreeable spouses, sex-obsessed teenagers, parents who can't control their damn children, children of parents who can't control them, cynical and morose retirees, excitable pets and their equally excitable owners. Think Doctor Doolittle, the Poseidon Adventure, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Skew Askew series. Tourists (and the tour guides, perhaps) should be caricatures of real people, not real people with real emotions. Otherwise, why would they ever try escaping real life?

This satire game is, oddly enough, actually meant to be played as I describe.

[Resonantg]

Interesting idea.  It needs some hammering out to make it potentially a really neat concept.  But I keep getting the nagging feeling this is more of a source book for another system.  could just be my dinner though being grumpy with me.  Regardless though, the concept could be fun with refinement.  

One twist I guess I could see of this is that your group could be similar to what my parents used to do to travel the world: Sponsor tours, get people to go with them and "chaperone them".  They practically got to go for free, did a lot of neat stuff, and went with a lot of friends, relatives and new people.  A gaming version of this could steal from such sources as say "Westworld" (Super theme parks), "Total Recall" (would you like to take an 'Ego Trip'?) or "Predator" (Sci Fi big game hunting) and even "City Slickers (a group of friends looking for the next adventure).

The hard part would be figuring out what the players did in the "real world" that facilitated thir adventures.  

I like the idea of the rotating "Tour Guide".  Sort of like in "City Slickers" you have one character think "oh this is a neat adventure, let's try it."  and next week or whenever the adventure is over, you have "between vacation" time and another player became the Tour Guide and picked the adventure.  This could be fun in that regard.

This kind of game could go from "LARP" to "scavenger hunt at the library" or traditional RPG if you so chose.  I agree about the "realism overload".  You probably don't want to dress up and arm yourself as an African Pigmy to illustrate the realism of an african jungle safari.  Let alone poison darts.

The yawn feature doesn't work for me though.  It could lead to party strife and fisticuffs depending on how sensitive the tourguides are to criticism.  In a way, it's similar to "channel flipping", which to some men this is essential, but could drive others nuts.  ;c)

If expanded beyond just satire (which it could be stellar at) you could also expand the serious side and have a real interesting twist or two.  In any case, I think this game has some curious merit to the idea, but just needs more development.

Two tails!  ;c)