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Hey.  I'm pretty new at this, I have a couple ideas in mind.  They should eventually be connected to each other.

Philosophy
I want a game about boundaries, hiding behind them, breaking them, contemplating them, being hurt by them.

Story
With the help of a shaman/psychotherapist/witch-doctor, the characters explore the world around them, their own memories, and they came from.  There will be a trickster involved, as a result, not everything is true.  Now will everything be false.

World-crafting
There will be the world we know.  There will also be the spirit world; where crows gossip, trees flirt, and flowers spout obscenities.  As the game progresses, the world blossoms, or maybe decays as the characters grow and learn more about themselves.

Mechanic-things
I will be interested in making a story-telling game with a gm role only slightly more dominant than the players.  The characters will establish axioms (rules) and truths (facts) about the world, or some form of syntactical force that defines their character's world. 

Will fill with more things soon.

Compelling.

Desiderata,

Do you need a GM at all?

Maybe there are just specific roles for each player: The Doctor (who also plays the material world), The Trickster (who also plays the spirit world), The Explorer (who is the main character), The Others (a player in charge of both memories and specific NPCs). Would a distributed set of roles work, or is there a specific thing you want a central GM figure to be doing?

I support mcdaldno. If you want to give the player some of the GM's power (like estabilishing the truths and axioms) maybe you should consider make them all semi-GM's.

I guess it's quite enjoyable to co-create in-game reality. That's great idea. I'm just curious where's the boundary of this creation? How much can players change/establish by using truths and axioms? Is it limited to the spirit world, or "our" world is also dependent to their rules?

Quote from: mcdaldno on April 08, 2012, 08:34:11 PM
Do you need a GM at all?

Maybe there are just specific roles for each player: The Doctor (who also plays the material world), The Trickster (who also plays the spirit world), The Explorer (who is the main character), The Others (a player in charge of both memories and specific NPCs). Would a distributed set of roles work, or is there a specific thing you want a central GM figure to be doing?

At this point in my process, I suspect I would like one.  As I dig deeper into it, that might be subject to change.  The GM is the witchdoctor; he's a medium and guide in the beginning, the doctor's role is to help the players orient/disorient themselves in a world that's largely influenced by their own perception of reality.  So on a basic level, the doctor is an in-game facilitator and arbiter or choice, whether or not that's in the character's favor or not.

There are no structured roles for the players in the beginning.  There is the doctor and the player's characters.  The roles should be about that simple. 

I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to mechanically use the trickster.  The trickster is an agent of opposing force in the game.  He might not be the antagonist, he's simply an another party.  He can be anybody and anybody at any time, he can tells lies and truths. 

Quote from: osaka on April 08, 2012, 11:59:53 PM
I support mcdaldno. If you want to give the player some of the GM's power (like estabilishing the truths and axioms) maybe you should consider make them all semi-GM's.

I guess it's quite enjoyable to co-create in-game reality. That's great idea. I'm just curious where's the boundary of this creation? How much can players change/establish by using truths and axioms? Is it limited to the spirit world, or "our" world is also dependent to their rules?

I want these axioms to be directly based off of the way these respective characters relate to themselves and reality.  It's still kind of hazy, and I'm not sure how I'll adequately express or manifest these yet.  One of the first things the characters will do (perhaps it's even within character creation), will be to state two axioms (one order-based, one entropic) and as the characters change, these rules change.  I have no idea how I'm going to do this, by the way.

Oh, caveat.  So the players all got pulled into the spirit world at some point in time.  Hence why there's a witch doctor wandering around talking to the characters.  Such world is directly influenced by the nature of these individuals.  Ideally, this game will be more focused upon feelings and fear instead of exploring some surrealist-dreamscape.

The Trickster

Tricksters are multivalent creatures.  They have the semblance of consistency sometimes, other times they're predictable.  Sometimes they have motivations, other times their intention is so confusing that they could be interpreted as aimless creatures. 

"Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself...He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both.  He possesses no values, moral or social... yet through his actions all values come into being." Paul Radin

The trickster's role in this game is to be the transgressor.  He might be one of us for the slightest of moments or might never make a tangible appearance, but he exists throughout this game.  He's always watching throughout this game. His role is as clear and important as the player's, it might just be his own beguiling trickery might just be why we might think that we can't notice him.

Whether he's the antagonist within the game, that's extremely debatable.  Rather, it would be more accurate to see him as the advocate of a specific perspective and set of ideals (if we can make sense of them) contrary to the rest of the game.  He might be the representation of cosmic order that strikes at the worst or best times. 

Regardless, as the characters in this game explore themselves, their memories, and the world at hand, the trickster is there: he's a multi-dimensional wanderer, everywhere and nowhere at once.  Sometimes one can throw out a question into the wind and an answer might just throw itself in your face.  Other times, it's the questioning force behind that doubt. 

Answering his whims and apparent madness could unleash a force of nature or as easily suppress one.  It's questionable whether even he's aware of his own power of inquiry.  His role is to destabilize and question everything, including himself, often at the expense of others.

At this point I'm kinda stuck.  I have the philosophical and ideological structures pretty down.  I'm struggling with how to make this into these ideas into a moving, fluid story.

This is the idea I have so far, super-boiled down.

They appear in the spirit world.  The shaman orients them.  Their axioms are established.  They flex the axioms; the trickster comes and fucks with them.  They start working with the axioms, the trickery, and the inner reflections begin.  Then some antagonist force becomes more serious; they need to hurry, their resources are either dwindling or getting more powerful.  Then they're pushed to desperation, and the reality and the world they have established begins crumbling around them, and as the world catharsizes, so do they.  They have room to do one more thing, one last action.