First game design! In the game In Two Worlds, players play everyday, normal people who are, at random times, switched into a fantastic world where they are heroes (in different bodies). They return to normal life (at random times) without a moment lost to them.
My partner and I want the game to be about juggling both lives. We thought that players would have a pool of dice at the game's start. They would use the dice to fight monsters in the fantasy world, but then they must use the dice in the normal world just to do normal things (the shock of having visited another world might make it difficult to balance the checkbook).
Would a fixed dice pool (without chances of regaining dice after they are used) be the most effective way to manifest this idea of struggling to maintain both lives?

Welcome to The Forge!

Dice pools are really only one method for creating conflict resolution mechanics, and such mechanics, by themselves, aren't going to be more or less suited to a particular game idea than any other mechanic. What matters is how you use mechanics to convey certain information to the players. You're on the right track by suggesting the use of a dice pool to convey a sense of character's juggling their capabilities, but I think you need a bit more detail.

I'd be inclined to spice it up a bit, and give each character a number of seperate resources, which perhaps interact together in various ways and can be used in various other ways, and have half of them be more useful and/or easier to gain in one reality, and the other half more useful in the other reality. This would solve the immediate problem that I thought of when reading your post, which was: "who the hell wants to roleplay balancing a check-book?" I mean, from the concept of your game, it sounds like characters have this crazy and exciting life, and then a totally mundane one, and if I were playing, I'd just skip over any time spent in the mundane life.

These different resources could either be individual dice pools, or could add to a general dice pool, or could be resources that are affected only by the results of your dice pool rolls, depending on what sorts of stories you want your mechanics to tell.

But I think that one thing you'd definitely need is a time-management mechanic, to add suspense to the whole "random switch" thing. The simplest method I can think of right now would simply be "roll 1d10, and the result is how many real-time minutes will pass before the next switch, regardless of how much time passes in-game and what the character is doing." And obviously only the GM would know the result of the roll and would enforce it.

I'd very strongly suggest thinking up interesting and fun ways to allow players to "blend" the two worlds, improving their experience in one world by their performance in the other. But you have to make sure that the "ordinary lives" part isn't boring, and to do that, I think you have to drop everything ordinary about it. I wouldn't play "Doing the Dishes and Laundry: An RPG About Life!", so I would skip any parts of any game that looked like that.

Neat idea though, I'd be interested in seeing how you pull it off.

-Ben

Ben, thanks for your feedback!
1. We thought of maybe just playing "snippets" of normal life, just to contrast the fantasy world (my assumption being that the contrast makes things more interesting).
2. I like the idea of suspense with the switch to the other world; we thought of rolling the die and then setting a hidden timer.
3. The interesting thing about the normal side of the game would be this assumption: it would be difficult to be your normal, everyday self if you just beheaded the Lord of Bats two seconds ago...conversely, how do you run into battle without fear if your a dentist from Des Moines? Perhaps players could regain dice for their individual pool by "showing" traits of the character from the opposite world.

Lots to think about.....chris

I would be surprised if you were actually addressing a premise that a simple zero-sum-game resource system (such as you're describing) will help with. They don't really promote the "balance" you're talking about.

For instance, would you view someone who deliberately gets themselves put into an insane asylum in the real world, but is glorious King of the Fantasy Realm (because they spend all their dice there) to be someone who is really addressing the question of how to balance the two realms?

How about adopting a system similar to Sorcerer's humanity system?

Basically, you define the pool in-game as the sort of "Normality" of the character in the real world. The trick is, shifting to the Otherworld and performing heroic deeds requires "burning" the character's connection to the normal real world. Maybe doing "normal" stuff in the real world can help increase your Normality?

You could do Normality checks just like on Sorcerer. If your character's Normality ever drops to zero, he's lost all connection to normality in the real world. In the Otherworld, he's a conquering King and Hero, but here, in the real world, he's been diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined to a mental institute.

I may be weird, but that sounds like a pretty fun game to me.

-joshua

EDIT: Here's a thought - what if roleplaying in the real world weren't such a mundane experience? Seems to me that roleplaying a character who is slowly losing his connection to the world around him would be pretty intense, you know? In that scenario, trying to do "normal" stuff might even be something of a reward in and of itself.

Well, yeah, I guess that highlights my basic question about this game.

Are Otherworld and RealWorld supposed to be antithetical? Or is it a game of learning a lesson ("To fight for glory is a lesser thing than to fight for love") in Otherworld and then applying it in RealWorld ("I got so caught up in being a star member of the cheerleading squad that I forgot that it's my friends that really matter), and vice versa?