RPG Idea

[MikeLT]

Hi, name is Michael

I have been working on an rpg for a short while, but it has been put on hold thanks to an idea I had. Im not sure if anything like this has been done before, but I am looking for some feedback and ideas to help me push this along.

The RPG wold be set up with the players as actors. The actors have individual skills, and attributes, and they take part in movies and shows which is moved along by the GM, otherwise called the director.

The actors would have attibutes named after different movie genres such as action, drama, and so on. They would also have skills which are tied to the attributes. They also have access to actor perks which function like feats in the d20 system.

Now in my opinion, the advantage of this type of game is that the players or actors, can particiapate in different types of genres using the same stats. They can raise stats, gain powers, and use them all as they switch between a modern crime drama to a victorian horror movie. <----- just an example.

Im still woking on some basic mechanics, so leave some feedback and tell me what you think.

Thanks!

[Ken]

Hi-

This sounds like it has some very fun potential. I could see some interesting mechanics involving re-takes and stunt people here.

What do you see as being the character goals? Do the characters know they are actors? Why play characters playing characters; why not just play the "movie characters" instead of actors? Is there a benefit, or some game value that gets forwarded here by playing actors?

Sounds neat so far.

Ken

[MikeLT]

Hi Ken! Thanks for adding

Well I had an idea.

Instead of the players acting out the movie, what if they suddenly found themselves in the movie. Such as the players starting to film a fantasy movie, and then they all find themselves surrounded by a large group of elves. Only the players would be aware, and everyone else cast to be in the movie would still appear, but they would be the characters with no real world connecion to the actor.

Which brought me to othe points.

What if they werent the only ones this happened to? What if it happened to another actor who decided to us this to his advantage, and become somewhat of a villain?

What would happen if the players died while in the world? Would they simply dissaper, or would they die in this world, and the next?

What if the players were cast to play villians? Would they commit horrible acts to save themselves, or would they try to right the wrong in the world.

Im not asking anyone to answer these questions, just a few things I thought about.

P.S. Sorry for any typos...bought a new keyboard and its driving me nuts

[Vulpinoid]

I once played a really great game with a similar concept.

Here's the premise.
1. Everyone plays a famous action star (they may be known as a hero, a villain, or even both in different movies). The stars have a range of core statistics. [Eg Arnold Swarzenegger]
2. Each action star may choose six roles they have been in. Each role applies a different template of statistic augmentations. [Eg. The Terminator role gives Arnie a different range of bonuses to Conan the Barbarian, and Kintergarten Cop gives a different perspective again].
3. Different scenes are considered to take place in different movie paradigms, and if an actor is playing the right role for the scene they get other bonuses [Eg. If the scene is designated as Conan, but Arnie happens to be in "Conan Mode" he doesn't get the extra bonus, if he shows up in a scene from Bram Stoker's Dracula, he gets a penalty because he didn't even appear in that movie.]

The basic aim is a reality jumping adventure between movies, where characters try to earn fan points and become more famous. If a character is "killed", they randomly end up in one of their other bodies under the premise that "action heroes never die". Of course death will lead to a loss of fan points and characters who run out of fans will end up forgotten [which counts as permanent death].

The fun comes in when characters are completely out of their element. Gary Oldman as Dracula showing up in the Fifth Element, or Sigourney Weaver showing up as Ripley during Conan the Barbarian.

The other fun comes when two actors end up portraying enemies Keanu Reeves as harker versus Gary Oldman as Dracula, or when two actors show up as the same character Richard Roxburgh showing up as the Dracula from Van Helsing and appearing in the same scene as Keanu and Gary Oldman...

It gets complicated quick, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.

V
Things get fun when 

[Bossy]

Gary Oldman as Dracula showing up in the Fifth Element

Oldman has already a role in the Fifth Element . But nothing prevents an actor to play two roles or more in the same movie. Did anyone mention Peter Sellers?

The idea of actors getting sucked into a movie is quite a good one (the film editor is going to take his revenge because he's always behind the director and the actors in the credits). I suggest Last Action Hero as an inspiration, the pitch is very appropriate.

I could picture actor-characters having to list the movies where they played, their genre(s) and the kind of role they held and possibly if they won an Oscar for it. However the system should be quite flexible and open-ended because movie genres can be quite multi-dimentional, orthogonal and overlapping. For instance consider the following list of genres: Heroic Fantasy, Wuxia, Thriller, James Bond (a genre in itself, isn't it?), Historical Fictions, War Movies, Comedy, British Comedy, Horror, Pseudo-Mystical (think Shyamalan), Weird (think Lynch), Independent, Political Pamphlets (think Moore), Animation and, uh, "Adult"... Well, I think, it's quite a challenge to keep the diversity of genres while keeping a simple and straightforward system.

[MikeLT]

Well, I think, it's quite a challenge to keep the diversity of genres while keeping a simple and straightforward system.

Well I think it can be done by using generic skills, and by having perks that either support the skills, or give access to different powers or abilities.

What I have in mind is something along the lines of supplements that will go into detail for each type of genre. These supplements can add more skills, perks, etc, that will help the players achieve what they need to while in a particular movie.

Here is the draft of my intoduction...might help get an idea.

Lights, camera, action
   Suddenly everything fades away as you become the character that you were born to play. Reality slips away as everything you know becomes a faint memory of your short lived past. You suddenly find yourself standing amongst the buildings and scenery that you thought to be a set, and the world around you comes to life as the extras that once stood around hoping for mere seconds on the screen, become real beings set in a world that others have created.
   You have been given an extraordinary gift; you have been given the power to affect the lives of millions of beings. At first everything will feel like a dream, but over time, those feelings will slip away and you will come to realize that this isn't a part of any lucid fantasy, this is life. This is your life.
   Within the realm of what you have come to know as the real world, everything will continue as normal, your body will remain, your thoughts, and actions will continue, but your soul will be carried away to farthest realm of everyone's imagination and deepest fantasies.
   You're not sure how this transformation happened, but as hard as you try, you will come to accept the fact that undoing what has happened is near to impossible. The only chance you have to escape it is to finish what you have started, and to stay alive until the director finally mutters the soul filling words...cut!

[Bossy]

Well there was an RPG I can't recall the name (but I know it was indie and free) where characters belonged to a class, say Warrior, Priest, Thief or Mage. There were no skills, the chances of success were based upon how much the attempted action matched the characteer's class. In this way Thieves were better at doing thievery, Priests better at doing priestly things, etc.

This kind of system is viable if the setting is rich enough in clichés, which yours seems to be. A fight movie actor (say Chuck Norris or Jet Li) would be good at fighting but bad at talking, a comedy actor would be good at talking but bad at stealth, a Fantasy actor (Jeremy Irons) could fight with a sword and cast spells, etc.

That's a suggestion. I feel that skill-based system would not help players for the immersion since the whole point of actors is that they do not know how to do things but they know how to pretend...

[MikeLT]

So with that type of system I imagine a narative type of gameplay, such as player A, the action star wants to punch the bad guy...so he describes the type of action, and then rolls to determine success, or failure. The target difficulty is either set by the opposing character or by the director.

Just had an idea while I was typing....what if instead of skills...players invest into special abilities....kinda like a type of skill tree.

Just an idea.

Ohh...I met Jeremy Irons about 13 years ago while he was filiming Lolita...awesome guy!!

[xenopulse]

This is awesome! (and yes, the word is overused, but there you go

I was going, "mmhmm, okay, alright" until you wrote that pitch. The thing about escaping when the director says "cut"? That's pure gold. Because up to that moment, I was wondering what the characters would actually do in the movies. What's their motivation? What are they going for? And here you have it: you're caught in the movies and have to see them through in the hopes that it'll set you free.

I do think that you can have skills that carry over, but more than that, you need genre elements for the different movies. Like other posters indicated, and as you can see in Last Action Hero, some actions work better in action movies than in horror movies, for example. Maybe part of the fun of playing is to figure out what kind of movie you're in to begin with!

So good luck with that development. Once you've got some basic mechanics in place, I'd be happy to look them over and give more substantial feedback.

[masqueradeball]

Just a quick note, but Hong Kong Action Theatre uses a similar premise, with each of the characters playing actors. Each of the sessions/story arcs is a different movie, and player's actor-characters gained in their reputation for certain roles and their over all poplarity which would affect them in the next movie. You might want to check it out, thouh I'm pretty sure its out of print and might be hard to find.

[Vulpinoid]

Gary Oldman as Dracula showing up in the Fifth Element

Oldman has already a role in the Fifth Element . But nothing prevents an actor to play two roles or more in the same movie. Did anyone mention Peter Sellers?

So in this type of set up, Gary oldman would gain the bonus from having appeared in the movie for this scene, but he wouldn't get his Mr. Zorg bonuses, instead he'd get his Dracula bonuses...the player for Gary Oldman might even want to die in this situation so that he can re-incarnate as Mr. Zorg and have a full range of skills and abilities now suitable to the scene being played out.

A player has to make some interesting choices in this type of set up.

Oh, and in that game, key players had a transcended role. A role that could gain access to the skills from all of their other roles...Keanu Reeves got this when he took on the Neo persona, Arnie gained it from his role in Last Action Hero, Mel Gibson could pick up this effect in his role as a director of Apocalypto (drawing on the experience of his previous roles to help manipulate the scene).

It was a fun game to play and I've often considered writing it up as a more formalised system, the only problem would be the huge range of licensing issues with virtually all actions movies from across the world being involved.

V

[Bossy]

Hong Kong Action Theatre [...]

Ah. Hong Kong. A totally different movie industry... Next the Bollywood expansion pack!

I'm pretty sure you can get HKAT on DriveThruRPG. Never read it but critics are unanimous about it: Good.