Hans's game thread

[Hans Chung-Otterson]

City-Desert-Skin.

I want to make a game about uninhabited, left-behind, broken parts of a city. Like Detroit.

Also it's 1-player and involves city-management (like, the city is your character, not like SimCity) and fiction-creation, so at the end of the game you have some fiction you've created and written down as part of the process of the game.

[Baxil]

Intriguing!  How do you plan to weave RPG aspects into a one-player game?  (It's obviously doable, but most of my experience with one-player RPGs is via "solo adventure"-style writeups, with pre-written information serving a limited GM function, choose-your-own-adventure style.)

[Hans Chung-Otterson]

Intriguing!  How do you plan to weave RPG aspects into a one-player game?  (It's obviously doable, but most of my experience with one-player RPGs is via "solo adventure"-style writeups, with pre-written information serving a limited GM function, choose-your-own-adventure style.)

Short answer: I'm not sure!

Longer: The city is your "character," and you follow game processes to create the city, a map, and some people. The city starts out with a certain disposition/emotion, and you can manipulate the city in certain ways to change that, which will automatically change things the people do/ their disposition. So like, you want the people to do certain things, but you can't make them do them directly--you have to manipulate the city. It's sort of like a puzzle, but there's no one solution, just different endings based on your choices.

Sound vague? Yeah, I'm working on it.

Also: coins-as-otherkind dice. flip two coins, 2heads=one result, 1head1tail=one result, 2tails=one result. Coins because they're readily available and metal, like the post-industrial city.

[Jason Pitre]

I could actually see twin-cities as being appropriate in some cases.  Detroit-Windsor for instance, are two distinct cities which are still joined at the hip.  That could include two players potentially and make the endeavour a tad more social. 

Interesting if challenging idea.

[Hans Chung-Otterson]

I could actually see twin-cities as being appropriate in some cases.  Detroit-Windsor for instance, are two distinct cities which are still joined at the hip.  That could include two players potentially and make the endeavour a tad more social. 

Interesting if challenging idea.

The "city" idea has gotten away from real-world. This is a city that is fully industrial wasteland. People live alone, they've never met another person, and have all their needs met through what are basically industrial, oily, smoky, loud, shuddering matter printers. There is no internet, no communication technology. Only pencil and paper, and no addresses. What would people be like in such a world? What would drive people in such a situation to seek each other, or even believe in each others' existence? What is this city, this living corpse? Playing the game will answer these questions, or provide you with possible answers.

5 characters: The city (main character), the Kid, the Old One, the Prime, and the Mid-Lifer.

you follow a process in the game, creating the city & its map, and the characters, and their reasons for staying in their concrete shells or seeking life outside them. You want to manipulate the characters directly, making choices for them, but you can't: you can only manipulate the city (it has a disposition, like: sorrowful, or: desperate), which will automatically make each character react in some way. So you're a step removed from manipulating the characters, but making them do what you want is the way to "win" the game. There's a win condition and an end condition, whichever comes first happens.