Donjon Idea

[Wulf]

Andrew Graham (and anyone else grom my group), clear off now...

Everyone else, Hi! :-)

I'm working on some ideas for Donjon, and a few other similarly new and narrative games (specifically Sorcerer, Trollbabe and CAH), having tired of trying to force narrativism into our group via 'conventional' games. Hero Wars is narrative, but the players still think RuneQuest. Buffy the Vampire Slayer COULD be narrative, but not if the referee keeps countering every Plot Point with one of his own (seemingly to prevent losing control). So... Donjon...

I want to create a world where player control makes sense, and I had an idea. Anyone read the 'Warlock in spite of himself' books? Christopher Stasheff, I think the author's name. A world where psionically activated plants create whatever the settlers (a bunch of SCA types from Earth) believe in, until they have forgotten that the goblins, fairies and magic spells they use aren't REAL.

I want to create a similar idea, where the characters will encounter a dung... sorry, donjon, in which they find a door at which (or behind it, if they get through by conventional means) they will lose narrative control, as a voice tells them "Defensive Field Activated"...

Now, I've never actually played Donjon yet (still fathoming out some of the rules), so I'm not too sure of how to do this (or even if it's such a great ida). What do the assembled cognocenti think? Will it work? Should I introduce the idea straight away, or leave it for a few sessions?

Wulf

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Actually, I might try the opposite idea if I were you. (Taking narrative control away from a group of Donjon players might get your throat slit.)

Donjon can work without the narrative control mechanic - it's actually a fun little fantasy RPG that way. Maybe you could run a game where the players enter a donjon with a "holo-room" of sorts. Call it what you like, but once they move past that door, narrative control kicks in.

[Wulf]

The thing is, though, in any narrative-driven game before, my group has shown great reluctance to experiment. They're very much a "What happens next?" group - in fact, one of them is want to complain "Who's running this game anyway?" when anyone else DOES show a bit of imagination.

So, I thought an IN CHARACTER explanation for narrative control might spur them on a bit... And I don't intend to take it away anywhere outside the defended enclaves - sort of psi-shielded 'bomb shelters'. The non humans (wonder why they don't get classes, only races? lack of imagination...) can't get in at all.

So, if they want to, they can ignore the enclaves entirely, treat them as just a part of the scenery ("Ah, must be magical defences") or start investigating the origins of their world.

But I've not actually TRIED it yet...

Wulf

[jdagna]

Actually, I've been tempted to spring Donjon on my regular group of players as a dream sequence.  The narrative control players get could work perfectly in a dream, where all sorts of really ridiculous things are accepted by the subconscious mind.  And since dreams vary from silly to serious to horrific, you could get any setting on the dial you wanted.

Anyway, taking away narrative control would be relatively easy - just make all successes relate to dice, not facts.  You'd have to know your group well enough before you did it.  With some of the people I play with, getting them to use narrative control in the first place would be difficult - if I took it away, I'd be encouraging something I wouldn't want in Donjon.  With groups who use the narrative control, they might just get annoyed.