First off, pleased to join the community.

Second: A recent 24 Hour RPG I did (I've done two successful and one failed), tHe bLood tRip (as I've dubbed it--long story, involves "Naked Lunch" as inspiration; it'll be up soon), has an idea I find pretty rockin'.

The game uses ability scores, and the split is between "physical" and "ephemeral" scores; one for interacting with the "real" world and the other with the surreal "Purity Planes." Ephemeral scores are "Affect," "Mutability," "Stability," and "Esotere"--along with skills, they show how a character can influence the world around him while retaining his own identity.

I thought it was clever whilst working on it, but after watching "Fullmetal Alchemist" I realized how crazy-diverse that set o' scores could be. You could use it for magic, for Matrix-esque "take that, reality!" stuff, hell, even for gods at a high enough scale.

And then I realized someone might've beaten me to it.

Any of you encountered something like this before?

Heya,

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Underworld kind of works on that premise. The surface is the "real world" and the farther and farther you travel underground the more and more mystical/ethereal it all becomes. But I don't think it uses the stat division in just the way you're describing.

Peace,

-Troy

I've written something in a similar vein, but probably not close enough to be a challenge.

My idea is that reality as we know it, the universe that is, is an aberration in a sea of unreality and infinite probability. Some people have the ability to contact and use this underlying unreality to affect reality. The problem is that any use of unreality can threaten the entire fabric of reality, and so there is a police force of sorts who try to stop this from happening. The PCs are associated with this force.

As PCs use unreality to combat others who might destroy reality, so they loose their ability to function in the real world. Mechanically, there's a irreversible transfer of stats from real to unreal and skills diminish too as the character becomes more and more a being of pure and infinite probability.

I've playtested but not yet published.

A..ha. oddly enough, another factor in tHe bLood tRip is that, as one needs powerful hallucinagens to mentally survive the Purity Planes, one is slowly destroyed--basically, you get entropy points instead of experience points.

That one is kind of weird, but the basic concepts are pretty different--I've failed to mention how thuroughly messed up the tech levels and cultures are in that world, so it's not "under this world is etc." It's another case of similar ideas happening at the same time without either being aware. Sort of like Pokemon/Digimon/Monster Rancher happening about the same time with all three ignorant of the others' activities.