[The Phenomenals] Getting a Hook

[knicknevin]

Hi, I've been kicking around a game concept for awhile, its pretty standard gamist with narrativist elements, most closely comparable to Inspectres I would say... anyway, the subject matter relates to a covert group who create all manner of phenomena, e.g. UFO sightings, ghostly apparitions, alien big cats, synchronicities, etc. Each 'Hoax' has 4 elements they have to provide with varying degrees of quality: a Location (using a Think trait), a Witness (using a Feel trait), physical Evidence (Have trait) and special effects derived from their own Powers (Be trait); a fifth trait, 'Do' covers all physical action. The style and tone are something like Jason King/ The Champions/ Austen Powers, so its all retro 60s and 70s, with the PCs mixing in the coolest, hippest circles.
  The real stumbling block I'm having with it is...why? At the moment, the 'place holder' for their motivation is that the Earth needs to be kept in a state of flux and these Hoaxes stop things from getting too certain or pinned down, but I'd like something a bit stronger. Do the PCs work on their own or are they employed by a secret organisation? Are magic and super-tech real or just inventions of the PCs and their kind? And why would it be important not to let the world get pinned down to a particular paradigm? Help please!

[Eric Provost]

Hiya Knicknevin,

It looks like you've got something really interesting going on there.  Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Jason King or the Champions, so I'm missing a bit of the flavor you're trying to present.  On the other hand, I was reminded of the surreal mid-series episodes of The Avengers.   And I super-dig The Avengers.

But um.... your question.  I've got a few ideas for how you could proceed and I'm sure you could get a few dozen more ideas with the other creative brains here, but I don't think it would be as productive as you'd like it to be.  I think it's one of those questions that you've kind of got to look for the inspiration from within yourself, because if someone else gets you jazzed up about an idea that's not 100% inspirational to you then you're not going to be producing the strongest game you could possibly produce.

I suggest that you consider to yourself two questions.  The first being "What answer would I like best when I sit down to play this game for my friends?"  and  "If someone were to propose running this game for me what answer would I like best?"

And as far as brainstorming to find new ideas to pick from, I suggest an old fashioned notepad and pen.  Just write down every single idea that comes into your head until one that really clicks comes out.  And while you're at it, watch/listen/read your inspirational source material.  That'll make the creative neurons fire.

Best of luck to you, and keep us up to date on how it's coming.

-Eric

[knicknevin]

Yeah, the background I'm leaning towards is the super-secret organisation, but one of the key factors to the game is that the players get to choose what kind of Hoax to perpetrate, so I don't want to stick the GM in the role of 'Mother', calling  up his agents and giving them a mission: the PCs have to have a large degree of autonomy, so there needs to be something in it to motivate them into going out and creating the fake phenomena... the mechanic I have in place at the moment is that it earns them Wonder, a sort of combination of XP and Fate/Luck points, but then that only works if you play this in a long campaign and I see this as being more a one-shot style game. There are some baddies in the game, divided between 'Deniers', who use various methods to cover up or discredit phenomena, and 'Believers', who try to offer explanations for the phenomena that fit into their paradigm (ranging from fringe science to the occult), so maybe promoting them to higher status? "The MIBs have been active in North London, find out what they are up to and mess it up". I also considered a geographical feature, e.g. "There's been a big dip in the Awe & Wonder Quotient in Soho, get there and find out what sort of Hoax will bring them back up to par again"

[TonyLB]

I'll go further than Eric, and offer that it might be a mistake to institutionalize any particular reason for doing this into the game.  Tell the players to each pick their own reason why they do this.  Make that reason central to play.

You want to do a central super-agency.  That's cool.  When I read it I thought of the ultra-loose confederation of taggers, who put graffiti all over the place, and recognize each others works by style.  "Dude, crop-circles in Thailand?  What the heck brings Slick Bubba all the way out here from Surrey?  I bet if I troll the bars that serve good lager I can track him down and get the 411."

And then, just as quickly, I thought about the movie "Out of Sight, Out of Mind," where the criminal is in many ways perpetrating his crime as the medium for a romance with the cop who's trying to stop him.  It would be cool to be doing all of these hoaxes because you had the hots for Scully.  Alien Abductions as a sort of twisted love letter to an investigator you've never met.

So there's my two cents:  This is such a wacky thing for people to be doing that the possible motivations are all good fun.  Do it for the money?  How wierd a job that would be.  Family tradition?  Okay, that's just hilarious and sick.  Doing it to escape the cops by distracting them?  That's... oh sheesh.

It just strikes me that taking the fun of deciding this away from the players would be an awful shame.

[knicknevin]

I like the idea of everyone having their own reason to do it, getting the players to provide trheir own motivations is good... especially the twisted idea that they might be doing it to attract the baddies/investigators to them... driving the PC underground so they communicate loosely, etc. One factor I perhaps didn't emphaisze, though I suppose it isn't vital, is that the PCs actually do possess one inexplicable power each, such as levitation, x-ray vision, invisiblity, healing hands, etc so it was really that side of things that I was having trouble 'explaining' in game terms, e.g. how do their powers work & where did they get them from? And if they are the genuine article, why fake things? Of course, the answer to the latter could be that its because they're the genuine article and they perpetrate the Hoaxes to lay a false trail... It would still feel nice if there was some kind of justification however, some absolute & common cause that the PCs could folllow, whatever their personal motivations might be.

[Clyde L. Rhoer]

I think it would be very interesting to explore the idea of, "how did I get my powers and where do they come from?" Each campaign could have a different answer, and even a different answer for each character even. Your game sounds like it has a large element of mystery, and mystery is best not revealed or defined until the end.

My experience in gamemastering mystery is to create things that you have no idea what they mean and trust that the players will eventually explain it to you, or lead to you creating the answer. I haven't done tons of mystery, but I haven't had this fail yet.

So what I'm trying to say is basically, "Me too" to Tony's post. Perhaps you might want to give examples of what "could" be going on, but not a definitive answer of what's "really" going on. It sounds like you have a few examples of what "could" be going on already. More than likely if you try to make a definitive answer, whatever you decide will be changed by many groups anyway.

-Clyde

[Kynn]

So something like a cross between the comics series 'Planetary' and 'The Invisibles'?

(I'm not saying this to shoot down your idea or call it unoriginal; rather, to help position it in ideaspace.)

[knicknevin]

Quite like The Invisbles, yes, that was one of the genre bases I had in mind, but much lighter, more comedic in tone... not sure about Planetary, never read it; thought that was about super-heroes?