[Death Team] First Timers First Idea

[SkuToV]

Hi,

I'm completely and utterly new to these forums. I found out about them from the perosn working on Raid Earth and I came up with my own idea for an RPG.

Anyone who watched Doctor Who on saturday 16th June '07 will see that I've based it around the idea from that episode but I'll quickly describe it for those who didn't:

It's the year 50 trillion. Most of the Galaxies have burned out and the majority of the Human Race have been wiped out due to an epidemic involving a popular drug that has spread hrough a majority of plabets that have been colonised except a few. One of those few has begun a projest to attempt to survive past the time when the last of the stars burn out. This project is called Utopia.

On the planets where the human race has survived a modified form of the condition has taken root in the genetics of a majority of the inhabitants. They have turned into canibalistic savages called the Tal'cept who attempt to kill all of the remaining "pure" Humans. The Humans have taken root in Huge silo's that are building immense Spacecraft to get the remaining Humans to Utopia safely. The Gaurds have to venture outisdide to aquire resources such as water and food but the Inhabitats are pretty much safe.

You take on the roll of a squadron sergeant of the humans or the leader of a small clan of Tal'cept in this RPG and your goal is to either protect the silo and keep the refugees safe untill the spaceship is complete if you are human, or to become the most powerful clan on the planet if you are Tal'cept.

Thats the background I've got for it so far and I'm currently doing some reasearch into what style of gameplay would fit best. I'm completely open to any suggestions and I would love somoe Professional/experienced/newbie help on this.

Thanks!

   SkuToV

[Callan S.]

Hi SkuTov,

What drew you to the episode? Like if it's the guards being put in situations where they may have to chose over their life or the potential future of humanity? I'm just asking cause that helps with what mechanics you want to start using. You don't want to write a chess game for that sort of issue, for example (welllll, perhaps it might work or even be wicked, but we can talk about that once we know the hotspot that your interested in)

[SkuToV]

I really just liked the idea of having to fight for the srvival. If you've ever played necromunda from Games workshop that was the style of gameplay I'm lookin for.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello! And welcome.

One of the long-standing criticisms of fight-for-survival situations, in role-playing, is that given most designs, failure to survive means inability to keep playing, both for individual players and for the group as a whole.

The result is a lot of colorful apparent threats to survival, but no actually reliable struggle - i.e., conflicts which be lost.

In your vision of your game, which way would it go? Would the player-characters be constantly threatened, but, in practice, assured of success? Or would they be actually able to die, (a) individually in the context of a group success, and/or (b) as a group endeavor?

To flip it around, as well, in many older games character death is common, and Total Party Kill not unheard-of. In practice, the solution was to pump new, rather dubiously-justified new characters into the situation, sometimes right there on the spot (which is where Paranoia draws a lot of its parody value from). As you can see, especially if it happens all the time, this technique has the same effect in the long run as preserving characters from death in the first place.

The reason I bring it up is to qualify my question: if you were to stick with the real chances for player-character death and even total-group failure to survive, then how will you make that viable for fun, group, interactive play? I think there are lots of good answers, but the traditional approach isn't one of them. What do you think would be a good answer for your vision of this game?

One last issue concerns the causes of death ... I think the main reason that many people objected to frequent character death and Total Party Kills is that the causes of the deaths were hardly ever understandable in terms of the imagined situation or consequential in terms of later choices in play. Or to put it casually, "That was, like, totally random, man! That sucks!" If character death is to occur frequently or at least be likely frequently in the game you're designing (not saying it is, just if), then how do you envision player-characters dying?

Best, Ron

[SkuToV]

I'm working on a rough version of the game mechanicas at the moment and I've had the idea that each character has a Health value that can decrease over time with beeing chot at, hamin knives stabbe in them ect. When a characters Health reaches a certain point the character will loose concioucness and will have to wait untill the nect scenario to fight again. If the Health vlaue is cuased to plummet well below that value then the character will die and will cease to exist.

My idea is to have each player represent the leader of a small group of characters where the player is in controll of the entire group. This would mean that the players can loose a member of the group but still continue to fight.

Thanks for the critiscm and support. I'll take any ideas and comments into account while I'm writing and editing the text.

[Sydney Freedberg]

I really like the idea of each player handling a community of people all struggling to survive. My group tried this a last year -- our high concept was "Battlestar Galactica in a dungeon" -- using The Shadow of Yesterday, but while it was great fun, the TSOY system really focused us on soap opera rather than survival. So what mechanics you use are critical.

I'd also give each player a main character and a couple of supporting characters (kind of like Ars Magica)  who can be "promoted" if the main character dies. That avoids the Star Trek phenomenon of the same people who run the ship always being the ones who go out on the risky missions, which is a bit silly. More important, if you do character design right -- i.e. it's not possible to make each character equally good at everything -- the characters are few enough, and each has sufficiently unique and irreplaceable abilities, that the death of one still hurts.

I'd also suggest giving the whole group some kind of "hit points," not just individual characters. It'd be especially fun to have some mechanism to let someone else "take the hit" for you, so you can decide, say, whether to let your main character be badly wounded by some mishap, or let a supporting character die, or let ten nameless members of your group bite it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

When I ran three rounds of the Ronnies contests in late 2005, one of the categories led to several contestant games based on survivalist settings and systems. I think you'll find it interesting to check them out. The following links are my comments on each game, but they contain internal links to the original entries as well.

[Attack of the Giant Rats] Ronnies feedback
[The End of the World] Ronnies feedback
[Disaster!] Ronnies feedback
[eXpendables] Ronnies entry examination (original entry version) (see also further development in the Wild Hunt Studios forum)
[Holodomor] Ronnies feedback (warning: not fantasy/SF in content)

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Damn! I knew there I was missing one of them, and then I remembered it: Adrift. The commentary thread is [Adrift] Going beyond "parlor narration".

Best, Ron

(editing this in) And another!! Last Breath. Man, there were a lot of games in those contests ...

[SkuToV]

heh, thanks guys. I'm planning to impose a sort of "look out sir" system where if the leader is shot then one of the players other characters near him can dive infront and take the bullet.

Has anyone played any of the games by Games Workshop as I'm planning to use minutares from them in the game.