Idealized play experience : another look at Heartbreakers

[noahtrammell]

  I could see the whole idea of 1 player having secrets working really well.  I'm minded of when the Grey Mouser wasn't sure if their travelling companion was a woman or a man.  The Fafhrd player would be responsible for the secret and might even want to oppose his partner finding out.  I have very few friends who RP, but the idea of a GM-less game that I could play with my brother sends shivers up my spine.

[JoyWriter]

Ok here's a super gut-reaction, and implications from that:

Two players show off with power, but not too each other, to the strange social metaphysical background that borders play. Like the punks who don't quite show off to each other, but they bust through ceilings in their mind, saying we are here, and we are strong! That brazen declaration that the strong one can be me, that I can take the world in my hand, that is a revolutionary statement, but a revolution occupied by total fantasy.

So as people scale up, and they go off the deep end, like a DC "mythic" crossover, does that lead to another type of response? Does that pure power condense into anything? Into "what shall we do with this world now"?

I hope so, I hope that the social; the stratified, cogged and interlinked, starts to appear, as a game board and not an obstacle. The pair making and remaking that world start to build peoples and cities and stuff.

This process sort of stabilises the setting and perhaps makes opportunities for the other players to do something, underneath all the events you have made: I wonder whether this is the 52 to your infinite crisis, with the little dudes getting to stand up for a moment or day. (Can you tell I'm in a comics mood?) Making a gap in your setting, pulling something out that makes it it's two-player self and cramming all the other players into that. Such players will not be playing the full world-changer dynamics that have been mentioned, but they can be something else, and there are players who will be interested in taking that role. They will instead play with all the secondary stuff, which to you is coloured by satisfaction at your past victories and epic-ness, but to them is just the baseline for the world.

So how does that fit with the whole punk thing that fired up the whole world? Well perhaps you can see it like generations, with subcultures that become the culture. In other words, when players get frustration of running in the constraints of your world, they fire that straight into the same system, and start again with their own private games, even while participating more restrainedly in yours.

In other words the game could be explicitly designed to work in generations, learning subtlety in one as you blow the roofs of in another. What do you think?

[Patrice]

Totally.

One thing that hit me as I was thinking to the "2-players then more" thing, is that the "then more" would be confined to rather secondary roles if the saga is still going. Take a look at it: you have 2 players who are co-GMing at the same time and a bunch of players who contend with just "playing" their characters within. Furthermore, these two players play their super-characters at the same time. Isn't that biased? What would keep the other players from being frustrated from the start?

This is an option. You have a pair of players sharing full GM power and standard players at the same time. This isn't satisfactory to me. Except if this multi-player option would disallow them to play their characters at the same time. Their characters would become NPCs during this multi-player phase. This is acceptable. Now, as you've coined it with the whole "generation" thing, this multi-player game would be a different Setting-based game. For the players of this second generation, the two original players ARE Setting, as well as everything they've designed on the way is. The second-generation group of players would play with a Setting-based Sim CA. They would play a different game entirely. I quite like this idea.

Yeah, Noah, I wish the game turns like this. That would rock.

[noahtrammell]

  If it even turns out anything like what we've been describing, I'm totally buying it.  Where are you planning on going with it publishing-wise?

[Patrice]

Haha,

It's been what? less then a week I've had this idea. It's not even written yet and I'm still pondering about the system. But hey, you'll be informed about its whereabouts anyway.

Thanks a lot!

[Ron Edwards]

It's time to close the thread here, as Patrice suggested a while back. It's his idea and thing to develop, so let's let him do it. No more posting, please.

Best, Ron