Memento RPG

[Jake Norwood]

The Rashamon thread got me thinking about this. It's not a game I'm planning on developing, but rather a way of presenting scenes to players that intrigued me (so I think this is the place, right?).

This comes from the film Memento (with Guy Pierce; reccomended if you haven't seen it). Basically the main character is looking for the man that killed his wife, but he has a form of memory loss that keeps him from remembering anything that happened more than 5 or 10 minutes ago. He takes polaroids, writes notes, and tatoos himself with clues so that he can find the guy. Anyway, the whole movie is filmed chronologically backwards, starting with the death of the badguy, then backing up 5 minutes and moving until the first scene started, then backing up 10 minutes, and so on. Doing it this way allows the audience (or in an RPG, the players) to effectively not know their past. Of course, certain degrees of OOC knowledge is involved, as the "adventure" begins with the last scene and moves up to the first, where some "surprise" is in store for the players/amnesiatics.

I think this could be very doable for a short-term "campaign" (a one-shot to maybe  games), and could be very rewarding. The fun part is that it's very non-genre specific.

Thoughts? Comments?

Jake

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jake,

I've always wanted to do something like this at the scenario-level. That is, run each scenario sequentially internally, just as usual, but then, upon resolving it, cut back a few decades and run the scenario which produces the back-story for the previous (in-game future) events.

Thus the future, established through play, acts as a constraint on our choices in playing out what happened in the past. (These constraints are less limiting than one might think.)

I described it pretty briefly in the Over the Edge section of Sorcerer, but I've never heard of anyone trying it.

Best,
Ron

[joshua neff]

I've always wanted to try that, Ron. Not necessarily with Sorcerer--I think running a superhero narrative would be great like that. Set in the modern day, then go & run the "Golden Age". And anything established in the modern run about the past could be taken as "set in stone" (although it wouldn't have to be--superhero comic continuity has always been pretty slippery).

But for in-scenario play...I hadn't really thought about it before. (No wait, I probably thought about it right after I saw Memento. But I haven't thought about it since.)

[Matt Machell]

I described it pretty briefly in the Over the Edge section of Sorcerer, but I've never heard of anyone trying it.

Some of my friends recently ran a Cthulhu scenario that worked backwards this way, cutting back about 10 years for the "second" half of the scenario. Part of what they enjoyed was having to work around the constraints the existing story had put in place, it encouraged them to be more creative about actions etc.

This would seem to contradict my comment in the Rashamon thread, hmm. Perhaps the key is that although events are defined, the story isn't.



Matt

[Jake Norwood]

Thanks for all of your comments, but I'm really not talking about 2, 5, or 10 year increments...I mean minutes! Any thoughts on how to do it? Anyone done it?

Jake

[Jared A. Sorensen]

What you're proposing is some kind of backwards, scene-by-scene continuity. I think that would rock and would love to try it...

One thing you could do with this idea is give everyone a big-ass pool of tokens that they can use for metagame stuff. The idea is that in the forwards continuity, they'd have gained all the tokens at the end. Then you'd spend the tokens to REMOVE traits, skills and whatever...so that your character "unlearns" stuff. The goal would be to start with a "starting" character...

[Bailey]

What you're proposing is some kind of backwards, scene-by-scene continuity. I think that would rock and would love to try it...

One thing you could do with this idea is give everyone a big-ass pool of tokens that they can use for metagame stuff. The idea is that in the forwards continuity, they'd have gained all the tokens at the end. Then you'd spend the tokens to REMOVE traits, skills and whatever...so that your character "unlearns" stuff. The goal would be to start with a "starting" character...

I've played with this for quite a while and am still having trouble getting the thing to work.  It might work for a strict reverse continuity but how about handling things out of continuity.  Flashback and stuff.

[Tim Denee]

I think you'd definitely need some sort of visual aid (a chart or some such) to keep track of events. I found my mind constantly slipping whilst watching Memento; I'd forget the order of events, or what one thing means in relation to another.
Such confusion could lead to chaos in a RPG, (but then again, some people say shared narrative control creates chaos...)

[Walt Freitag]

My thoughts on how to do it...

With each jump back, you have to frame a new scene, then play the scene forward to where it reaches (and must reach) the beginning of the previously played scene. To be able to do both effectively, a system with lots of control handles over scene framing as well as events is needed. Also I don't see a GM being much help.

This leads me to suggest Universalis as the system to try such an experiment. Perhaps some special rules would be appropriate, such as making it free of charge to introduce, during the scene, an element that's required to be present by the end of the scene, or take away one that's required to become absent. Similarly, when framing the new eariler scene, maybe you don't start with a blank stage and pay to add elements; instead, you start with the previously played scene's beginning and pay to remove or modify elements (which then must get re-introduced or restored during the scene for free as per the previous rule).

- Walt

[Buddha Nature]

Well I can tell you my experience of this, though it is in the realm of campaigns not adventures...

Basically we played three or four D&D games in the same GM created world, but we bounced around in the timeline.  One campaign would be in "the present" then campaign two in the past, campaign three in the future, and campaign four in the way past.  It is neat to see how the world has changed due to the influence of your own character actions...

-Shane

[Mike Holmes]

This leads me to suggest Universalis as the system to try such an experiment. Perhaps some special rules would be appropriate,...

Yep, you'd probably also want to eliminate the charge for placing a scene in the past, as that would be the default.

But there's even a sort of precedent. In one game recently we had a flashback in a flashback (which at the time I thought briefly of outlawing because it was odd). Nothing as extensive as what's being proposed here, however. But it could definitely be done.

Mike