So, I've got this great idea for a game. I'm just having trouble translating idea into game. Or idea into mechanics, or structure.

The game is called Boulevard.
The basis is: You are a presuming, pretentious punk. You are an aggressive, militant kid who has all these edgy, oh-so-important issues you cling to. You are living on your own, in the shitty part of town, and you hate everybody.

The game is about fighting for Causes you don't really understand, in a world you are afraid to believe in. It's also about being a fucking hellraiser and damning the world. It's about being punk, in the most tragic and naive sense of the word.

Salt Lake City Punk! is a major inspiration source. The kids are savage punks, and they are self-destructive. They burn hard, and eventually they burn out.

Fight Club is also a major inspiration source. People are pulled from their mundane worlds into something raw, primal, and awakening. They don't really know what it is that they are fighting for, but they like it - and they want more of it. The movement becomes dizzying and nausiating, until the leader collapses under his own confusion.

***************************************************************

That much is all background. Apologies for my lack of brevity.
(I think every time I re-state that background, though, it becomes a little more clear to me. So that's good.)

Anyways, I've been reading Invisible Monsters, by Chuck Palahniuk. Brilliant read, but a few pages in I shot up and said, "This is how Boulevard should play."

Basically, they start with everything aflame. Literally.
A house is burning down around the characters. Someone lies shot and bleeding, and someone else is holding a shotgun.
And everyone in this scene wants it to be about them. They want the attention.
The pain, the blood, the fire... it's all secondary to their little issues with each other.

And then we pan out. The scene ends.
And we are told that this will not read like a novel. It will read like a fashion magazine.
Everything airbrushed a certain way.
Nothing is in the right order.
You start a story here, but you finish it on page 78.
Everywhere you turn, some half naked woman trying to sell you perfume.
(I'm not kidding. It literally says this. Read it.)

And then the book procedes to jump backward. then forward.
Then all over the place.

Everything is out of chronological order, but oddly enough follows this weird IDEOLOGICAL order.
Everything makes sense in how it is so jarringly cut-and-pasted.

And, this is what Boulevard should play like.
You start with the death of the character. You start with when all shit hits the fan, and that character's world collapses.
Maybe this is the character's physical death.
Maybe this is an arrest. The day he or she breaks down in tears and calls mom. Maybe he or she gives up and commits suicide.
Maybe he or she just stops being punk, and gets a real day job and cleans up.
Whatever it is, it is tragic and it is world-shaking.
It doesn't have to be aiming a shotgun at your best friend, while the house burns down around you... but that's definitely an option.

You define the tragic, pitiful ending. And then you jump backward to contextualize it.
You play non-sequential scenes. You fuck around with order.
You tell a story about when the character was 17, then you jump to when she was 24, and tell a story that has an oddly parallel structure.

You tell the story in a chaotic fashion, but the chaos comes together in this weird pattern.

The character sheet is a TIMELINE.
You record your "death". Somehow, this will mechanically affect the character.
You mark down where your Causes started, and where they died. When you open a scene, you simply mark where on your timeline it takes place.

So maybe in scene #11 you have already lost faith in Feminism, but have gained a Cause of Marxist Communism.
And then in scene #12 you have jumped back chronologically, to when you still believed in Feminism and marxist theory was all greek to you.

Sign me up. Can I play this yet? Why the hell not? ;)

This needs some kind of mechanic for Slapping You Down. These kids feel slapped down at every turn. Society slaps them down. Their parents slap them down. The cops slap them down. And when this happens, you should earn some kind of reward, so the player starts to look forward to his character getting the shit slapped out of him, figuratively or literally.

At first I thought these kids didn't care, then I thought about it and realized that they act like they do because they care a lot. They're just disenfranchised so they act out. How's that for some armchair pop psychology? "Fuck you, world! (for not loving me)."

This needs some kind of mechanic to make the player desperate. These kids are desperate. They have no place else to go. They're not burning out; they're burning up. They're turning their anger outward half the time and inward the other half of the time. They're bored because they don't have anything meaningful to do, but they really want to do something meaningful so they make up causes. Each character has a Cause, probably totally misguided. "Stop the war! Stop the violence! Or I'll kill you!"

Thanks for the comments, Adam! They are totally bang on.

At first I thought these kids didn't care, then I thought about it and realized that they act like they do because they care a lot. They're just disenfranchised so they act out. How's that for some armchair pop psychology? "Fuck you, world! (for not loving me)."

This needs some kind of mechanic for Slapping You Down. These kids feel slapped down at every turn. Society slaps them down. Their parents slap them down. The cops slap them down. And when this happens, you should earn some kind of reward, so the player starts to look forward to his character getting the shit slapped out of him, figuratively or literally.

This needs some kind of mechanic to make the player desperate. These kids are desperate. They have no place else to go. They're not burning out; they're burning up. They're turning their anger outward half the time and inward the other half of the time. They're bored because they don't have anything meaningful to do, but they really want to do something meaningful so they make up causes. Each character has a Cause, probably totally misguided. "Stop the war! Stop the violence! Or I'll kill you!"

Sign me up. Can I play this yet? Why the hell not? ;)

Hi!
  This is a cool idea. Some things come to mind:
1) Maybe you can give each player a set number of tokens (I was thinking 4, Establishing scene, Rising conflict, climax, anticlimax). When players have something to say, the spend a token. But the token goes to the bank, no one else gets it, its a dwindling reesource.
2) To pump up the urgencey, Maybe use the cap to steal a token or "kill" a token? And maybe instead of always getting just one Cap, You get one Cap for each token you have pent?
  I think that there is other cool ideas. Like what if the Player (not the character) has a key phrase tha tells you when the Scene is closing? Not as just some kind of gimmiick, but as a way to have a thread that ties the scenes together since they are not chronological.
  Anyways, sounds like you are on the right track, good luck man!

Hey Joe,

Very evocative stuff. Have you thought about how long this plays out at all? Is it intended to be open ended, or at some point does all the context run out and you're splat? The reason I ask is because what I'd really like to see from it is that initial moment, where the character is fucked? It's open ended. It's the breakdown where maybe they lose out completely, but maybe they're redeemed, and all the context that went before it results in a some mechanical force that let's you figure out how it ends. Sort of My life with Master's epilogue, but frontloaded.

-Tim

Very evocative stuff.

Have you thought about how long this plays out at all?

Is it intended to be open ended, or at some point does all the context run out and you're splat?

The reason I ask is because what I'd really like to see from it is that initial moment, where the character is fucked? It's open ended. It's the breakdown where maybe they lose out completely, but maybe they're redeemed, and all the context that went before it results in some mechanical force that let's you figure out how it ends. Sort of My life with Master's epilogue, but frontloaded.

Hey Joe,

Yep, you've got it exactly. In practice I think you may want to consider some sort of diminishing currency to handle that sense of urgency you're talking about. Obliquely, say you've got tokens, and each scene will cost a certain number of tokens to play out. How the scene resolves will determine whether the tokens become a force for the player in the end scene, or the opposition. When you're out of tokens, it's time to find out if the character's life has amounted to anything and you compare, or roll. It doesn't even have to mean the character survives, it could strictly mean that there's a validity to the struggle as opposed to all being cursing in the wind. I'd say it's actually important to let that come about during play, and that the final endgame mechanics gives some narrational authority based on the outcome of that test.

-Tim

When you're out of tokens, it's time to find out if the character's life has amounted to anything and you compare, or roll. It doesn't even have to mean the character survives, it could strictly mean that there's a validity to the struggle as opposed to all being cursing in the wind.

joepub wrote:
Oh yes!
I very much like this.
Except... Does it have to be limited to endgame - the proving of validity?
Or can it... somehow... be a constant doubt and constant concern, that keeps resurfacing?

Also, second thought/concern - Will this make players concerned about having "productive scenes", and scenes where people are ALWAYS trying to prove their validity? Because I definitely want scenes of blind self-destruction.

Hm.
Random tangent sidenote: The movie Slaughterhouse 5 (based on the Vonnegut book which I haven't yet read) captures scene framing in Boulevard to a "T".
Watch it, and watch how the scenes flip between modern day, alien abduction and WWII based entirely on thematic parallels.
It's wonderful.

Also... there's a scene where the wife TOTALS her cadillac...
Then it flashes back to a birthday scene where her family gives her the car.
Then it flashes back forward to the car-totalling scene, where she finally crashes it and dies.

WOW. So perfect.

It might be time to go into the think tank and do some development, maybe set yourself a 24hr deadline to get a bare bones game put together. You've got some reinforcement that the material seems sound, go do something neat with it and bring it back to us.

I'd suggest that fortune weigh in heavily during the end, so that you can't be certain whether or not it's a 'happy' ending or not no matter what you've managed to accrue during the game. I'm thinking in this case of the way that in say Sorcerer a small pool still has a legit chance of beating out a large pool in spite of the large pool's advantage.

Hey Joe,

I'm not sure I'm getting your distinction about fortune effecting the player but not the character and I'm furthered confused by your statement that the character's fate is sealed and only effected by player choice. I think you're talking strictly about the first/last scene conditions here, but could you give me an example of how you see play going that highlights those intents? Basically though, when someone talks about wanting to keep the urgency high, or keep players in suspense, I almost always think of fortune first. Fortune is predictable only in the largest statistical sense, and so it's useful for injecting conditions that are unexpected. That can obviously be a positive or a negative depending on your intent, but in this case let me reiterate my Sorcerer example. Have you played Sorcerer? Basically in Sorcerer you're rolling opposed pools of dice and the high die wins. While a larger pool has a distinct advantage there's almost always a reasonable chance of upset from the smaller, and in practice this means you're always sweating the rolls. It keeps the suspense high because you can't guarantee success. You can have a tangible effect, but no guarantee. Compare this with My life with Master, where the epilogue conditions are set in stone, but the suspense is maintained by fortune through the fight against the master. You might have only a round or two, but depending on how those scenes turn out you may have more. If you happen to be gunning for a particular ending that can keep the tension quite high. I have a feeling though that you're aware of this, so I wonder if maybe I'm missing the point altogether?

-Tim

I'm not sure I'm getting your distinction about fortune effecting the player but not the character and I'm furthered confused by your statement that the character's fate is sealed and only effected by player choice. I think you're talking strictly about the first/last scene conditions here, but could you give me an example of how you see play going that highlights those intents?

Hey Joe,

I see the distinction you're drawing, but without something more concrete as to how you're envisioning play I don't know that I have anything meaningful to say about it. Both of your options effect the player, they just impose different restrictions, and by the same token they both effect the character. I don't see a disjointed timeline as doing anything meaningful to decouple the character/player relationship. You certainly could decouple them, but in and of itself a non-linear timeline doesn't do so. I do think that a non-linear timeline gives you plenty of interesting fodder to play with, and that mechanics beyond "use a non-linear timeline" sound useful if that's a focus of the game. So, what about your distinction makes you go, "Ohh.... that would be neat"? What do you see the people at the table doing and how do you see it changing the way they approach/play/enjoy the game?

-Tim

Joe, I'm really excited about this game.

Joshua, thanks dude. Sometimes its good to just get a stamp of approval.

Joshua, and anyone else besides Tim,
do you have a perspective on the disjointed-timeline-seperates-player-and-character thing?

Basically, to resum it:

This game utilizes a disjointed timeline. You play scenes in a very back-and-forth order.
That means that there is a seperation of player and character - you can affect the player by altering WHERE on the timeline their scenes take place. That doesn't affect the character, it affects the player.
Alternately, you can say "this event happens to the character at point 37 on the timeline". Unless the player has a scene at Point 37 on the timeline, there is no effect to player.

Is that only a perceived perception? Is it USEFUL in any way?

I foresee no issue with jumping around on a timeline.

Maybe distinct places on that timeline give you different bonuses: At the beginning, you're rolling lots of Piss and Vinegar dice and only a few Burn dice, but as the timeline goes to the right, the Burn dice accrue and the Piss and Vinegar diminish.

You use Piss and Vinegar to accomplish your goals — stop the war, run a self-perpetuating commune, make your band famous — and Burn dice give you control over the rest of the world — they're your getting arrested, having the commune break up, signing with Sony/EMI. When those thing happen, you get Burn dice. When you roll them, they count as successes, but with a cost.

Hi!
  I think the players (especially as a creative force) should have total say on the order of their scenes. I think what effect a scene has on a player should be what it ment to the character when it was all done.
  Like say, Player A declares, "I wanna do scene 3 next" And they play it out and he sets it up to be a tragic love affair between his Marxist anti-corp and her Nihilist Greenpeacer and when the scene is over, the player thinks its an epic romance for the ages but the Character thinks it was just another lay with a vapid hippy.
  But, I don't forsee a prob with non-sequential play. I don't see a prob with knowing the ending before you know the beginning and I do see lots of opportunities to make the game play the way you want it to!
  Sounds cool man, rock on!

But, I don't forsee a prob with non-sequential play. I don't see a prob with knowing the ending before you know the beginning

I foresee no issue with jumping around on a timeline.

There are two types of cards in the game ... some which are the components of your sandwiches (bread, peanut butter, jelly) and some which are meta-cards (flies to ruin other people's sandwiches, ants to steal ingredients).

You play an ingredient card, it starts a sandwich. Immediately, people are thinking "I'd rather play a meta-card than an ingredient, because I can get stuffplusslow down my opposition." But they're pretty much screwed, because there are way more ingredients than metas in the deck. So occasionally they get a meta, but mostly people are just playing ingredients.

When you complete a sandwich you remove the cards from the deck, and keep them as a stacked sandwich. Sorta like tricks in Bridge.

But ...but... when you play a meta card, it goes back in the deck.

So there are three phases of the game:

First, the ingredients are prolific, and metas are rare. Sandwiches are built. Conflict is sporadic. As more sandwiches are built we shift inevitably into ...

Second, the ingredients are getting scarcer, and metas are therefore more common. Sandwiches are sabotaged left and right. Conflict is rampant. As sandwiches manage to get completed (often by the most rapid, brutal sequences) we shift inevitably into ...

Third, the ingredients are all but depleted. The metas are now virtually useless, because there are not enough ingredients to give them power. The game slides gently to a halt.

Now ain't that slick? Doesn't that make you want to design a two-resource game?

I think the resource is based on where you are on the resource, so there's maybe no say in what you have at what point in the timeline?

Here's what I think you get from your temporal hopparoundery:

• You get to establish some goals for the character.
• You pretty much have to play tragedy. Tragedy is good.
• I can see long-term play taking spots in the character's life.
• Look at historical fiction. Would you read a story about Patrick Henry, even though you know that he's denounced and dies a broken man after the Revolution? That's why I want to read the story.

The Conan stories were written out of chronological order. They didn't suffer from it at all.

I think maybe you have to play the death first. Then you figure out if it was worth it.

Here's what I think you get from your temporal hopparoundery:

• You get to establish some goals for the character.
• You pretty much have to play tragedy. Tragedy is good.
• I can see long-term play taking spots in the character's life.
• Look at historical fiction. Would you read a story about Patrick Henry, even though you know that he's denounced and dies a broken man after the Revolution? That's why I want to read the story.

The Conan stories were written out of chronological order. They didn't suffer from it at all.

I think maybe you have to play the death first. Then you figure out if it was worth it.

Hey Joe,

joepub wrote:

Tim Alexander suggested that the game is largely figuring out if it was worth it, as well.
The thing is though, Tim suggested that resources be collected... and at endgame you make a big roll to see if it was.
At least, I think that's what he was suggesting.
I don't like THAT so much - the idea that what "justifies it all" is a big test at the end.

I think that the "figuring out if it was worth it" is done through the narration, and not mechanically.

So, why using non-sequential jumping?

DinDenver just made an awesome point to me in IM: Maybe the characters life progresses one way, but the theme progresses another.
That's part of it.

The other is that non-sequential jumping allows you to add meaning as you go on... which means you aren't just making kick-ass scenes, you are making kick-ass scenes that re-enforce other ones.

Ex.
Jonny is high as a kite, speeding along in his car. He rounds the corner, crashes the car - totally wraps it around a telephone call. His girlfriend, who was with him and high as well, dies.

Jump back to another scene. Jonny is losing his virginity to another girl, in this car.

Jump back to another scene. Jonny is receiving the car as a gift from his father. His father is this rich lawyer who only connects to his son through buying stuff. This is his attempt to reach out. Jonny is ungrateful, and his father feels so. fucking. defeated.

Or... another example...

Ex.
Mark's death scene is him getting jailed for murder.

Jump back to him peacefully protesting against an oil company's illegal practices.

Jump forward to him chucking a molotov cocktail at a big warehouse.

Jump backward to him losing faith in non-violent protest. He's drunk and sobbing, and his best friend got arrested earlier. "It's all for nothing. If all I'm doing is talking, they have the option not to listen."

This seems totally fun to me.

I think it's time to throw together some mechanics and get some playtest.

I think it's time to throw together some mechanics and get some playtest.

It might be time to go into the think tank and do some development, maybe set yourself a 24hr deadline to get a bare bones game put together. You've got some reinforcement that the material seems sound, go do something neat with it and bring it back to us.

Man, I totally missed this. The idea of mechanics that specifically address non-sequential scene framing sounds absolutely awesome. I think a key will be making sure that whatever you do with that, it remains closely tied with the "punks travelling through their fucked up lives, desperate for meaning" aesthetic. Slaughterhouse 5, for example, has a very different feel for me -- the idea of being unstuck from time results in the opposite of desperation, in a sort of resignation.

One possibility is to make sure that every point in the timeline can, at any point in the game, have its meaning completely reversed. So okay, we decided that here is where he crashes the car and kills his best friend -- sounds pretty bad, huh? Now even when we're playing his earlier scenes with his best friend, maybe we're already sad about how it's going to turn out, maybe we start getting all saccharine and even a little resigned to his friend's fate. That's no good. Those early scenes should be the battleground for establishing the meaning of the later scenes.

Maybe somehow we can do something in this previous scene that will save his friend, that will make somebody else die in the crash instead. Or that will make it so his friend was totally doing it with his girl on the side so he deserved it, damnit. Or just do anything so that you can never look at the timeline -- even at the final, crash-and-burn scene -- and believe that's really how it all went down.

The only concrete suggestion I have in this regard is that when a scene is Thematically Linked (whatever you decide that means) with another scene, that means that resources gained in the current scene can be spent to either outright-revise or instead reopen that other, completed scene. This encourages people to build up coherent Themes as a way of managing resources and affecting each other's stories. Especially if you want to have players play out their protagonists largely in solo scenes, this is a good way to reward players for participating in scenes that don't relate to their own characters -- because if they do so thematically enough it will get them what they want elsewhere.

Thinking of Donnie Darko, I cannot help but add the suggestion that one thing that you could do in any "earlier" scene (story-earlier, not game-earlier) is kill your character off, negating all his future fuck-ups (and non-fuck-ups). So instead of your best friend dying in that car crash, it was you. So you never burned down the liquor store, and you never punched that cop, and you never gave that great speech in the middle of the school assembly about how "it's all a bunch of fuckin' lies" that made Carol fall in love with you.

But maybe your best friend did. Maybe he got so fucked up after you died in that crash that he started having issues of his own.

Thinking of Donnie Darko, I cannot help but add the suggestion that one thing that you could do in any "earlier" scene (story-earlier, not game-earlier) is kill your character off, negating all his future fuck-ups (and non-fuck-ups). So instead of your best friend dying in that car crash, it was you. So you never burned down the liquor store, and you never punched that cop, and you never gave that great speech in the middle of the school assembly about how "it's all a bunch of fuckin' lies" that made Carol fall in love with you.

But maybe your best friend did. Maybe he got so fucked up after you died in that crash that he started having issues of his own.

One possibility is to make sure that every point in the timeline can, at any point in the game, have its meaning completely reversed. So okay, we decided that here is where he crashes the car and kills his best friend -- sounds pretty bad, huh? Now even when we're playing his earlier scenes with his best friend, maybe we're already sad about how it's going to turn out, maybe we start getting all saccharine and even a little resigned to his friend's fate. That's no good. Those early scenes should be the battleground for establishing the meaning of the later scenes.

Maybe somehow we can do something in this previous scene that will save his friend, that will make somebody else die in the crash instead. Or that will make it so his friend was totally doing it with his girl on the side so he deserved it, damnit. Or just do anything so that you can never look at the timeline -- even at the final, crash-and-burn scene -- and believe that's really how it all went down.

The only concrete suggestion I have in this regard is that when a scene is Thematically Linked (whatever you decide that means) with another scene, that means that resources gained in the current scene can be spent to either outright-revise or instead reopen that other, completed scene. This encourages people to build up coherent Themes as a way of managing resources and affecting each other's stories. Especially if you want to have players play out their protagonists largely in solo scenes, this is a good way to reward players for participating in scenes that don't relate to their own characters -- because if they do so thematically enough it will get them what they want elsewhere.