a game wherein you regularly slip between being a patient/prisoner
in a dark, scary mental hospital and being on the "outside" as members
of a team that hunts the criminally insane.  which is the reality and which is the
delusion? 

Perhaps on certain roll results (like all 6's), the whole game shifts
from the one "reality" to the other, and thus it can happen many times
in one session at unexpected moments.  Your PC sheet perhaps has two sets of stats,
one for the patient and one for the hunter. 

As a patient, you have a list of "issues" that you need to resolve, and somehow your successes as the hunter helps you work through the list, moving up towards the Biggie at the top.  Resolving the biggie
maybe allows your two halves to recombine?  Hrmm... brain buzzing... 
I see lots of "issues"-driven personal scenes a la Prime Time Adventures,
but with the "team on a hunt" for physical, spiritual and/or emotional
demons, a la Dogs.  In the mental hospital, you've got scenes with your "therapist,"
scenes where you're eluding the 'guys in white', scenes where you interact
with other "loons" (but are they?) revealing stuff about yourself or about
them or about the hospital.

As a hunter, you've got scenes right out of Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter,
maybe combined with X-files or Dogs, if you use the supernatural/spiritual in your
game.  Each "side" of your personality can help/hinder the other's
progress.  You don't know which is the reality - if either - til the end.  The
other players play their own characters plus inhabit the roles of the other loons
and NPCs you interview (as a hunter).  As a hunter, when you catch the psycho, maybe
you find out that it is you (the patient), or something uncomfortably reflecting
yourself. 

Maybe your list of 3-5 "issues" (as a patient) correspond directly with
your list of 3-5 "goals" as a hunter.

The goals could be physical/emotional/spiritual manifestations of the issues you're
working through.
So as you tackle #5 (for example) on the hunter list, it helps you resolve issue
#5 on your patient list.
And vice versa.

So, like in Silence of the Lambs where Clarice's talking to Hannibal in the
loony bin provided her the info she needed to get further in her case.

Or, in reverse, getting past the physical challenge of the gang of thugs in the
dark alley (as a hunter) helps you overcome the "confidence" issue on
your patient list.  ??  Just thinking aloud.  hrmm..

as you check off the challenges/issues, you get closer to the final showdown - the
issue at the top.
whether you succeed/fail at that one determines whether you "escape."
are you the hunter escaping the delusions, or are you the patient escaping the loony
bin?

hrmm..  sounded like an interesting concept at first, but now I dunno how you'd
make a campaign out of it or whatever.  lots of loose inspiration.  don't know what to do
with it.  ah well... sorry for ranting

Hello, and welcome!

Does it need to be a "campaign?" Why not have a given specific issue a hand, e.g. in The Silence of the Lambs, Jame Gumb is killing women and has eluded capture. In which case, the game is played to see what happens for that issue, and when it's done, it's done. Not a one-session game, nor a long/infinite game either. One might then be faced with the difficult question, failed grotesquely in that case, of whether and how to play another story with the same main characters and to make it good after all.

Here's my question: can the outsider hero fail? In all the source fiction, it's axiomatic that the problem (the serial killer on the loose, for instance) is going to be stopped by the hero. It's as fixed as knowing that the amateur detective will in fact expose the murderer in an Agatha Christie novel. How were you thinking about the chance to fail?

Sadly, if you merely make it contingent on dice rolls, then long experience shows us that groups will find ways to accord with the source material by ignoring or dancing around the dice results. Is there a way to include elements of success and failure to the extent an outcome that is truly in jeopardy? And if the outcome is "the hero is found dead with a steak knife through her chest, the on-the-loose killer is still on the loose, and the imprisoned psycho sits and broods," then can game-play be constructed such that this too is satisfying and fun to do?

Best, Ron

Interesting!

Perhaps, to try to answer Ron's question, you can only win one way or the other. If the hero on the outside catches the criminal, the loon on the inside never resolves their issues. If the hero on the outside dies, then the loon on the inside gets a clean bill of health and sees the light of day? If you were to go this way, I think it'd go a little bit differently with your goal/issue correlation. If the loon makes progress on a particular issue, the hero has complications with a goal, or vice versa.

That way, there's a satisfying end one way or the other. It doesn't have to be a happy ending.. I mean, maybe the loon isn't actually sane, or the hero loses everything in succeeding in his goals. But one way or the other, there's a win, and some satisfaction.

thanks for the input

a)  Ron - No, I wouldn't think it "needs" to be a campaign.  But a series of sessions might do it.  Would have to play-test to see  what duration of stasis in these roles, dealing with these issues works.
However, I'd guess that making it a campaign would be more fun - like your recurring serial crime drama.

b)  Wolfen - If the hunter catches the criminal, why would the patient be unable to resolve their issues?  It would seem that if the hunter is able to "make progress," his/her other half should as well.  It would be the hunter's personal growth that allows them to better solve cases, and one would assume that growth transfers to the patient side as well.

[interrupt---- ewww...new thought - what if you had a game where players paired up and they were playing different personalities of the same character? It could be both competitive AND cooperative at different times.  The players could "fight" for control of the character at different times and... -------]

Back to what I was saying..  I think the idea would be that you either really are a patient or really are a hunter, and in either case, you have issues that are manifesting themselves as these delusions/dreams/split personality/whatever.  So, you are being torn in two - affecting your progress in either role, until you can resolve some of the issues and move forward.  However, since I can't think of many folks who would see strictly LARPing therapy sessions as fun, I figure the chase/adventure/danger/drama can be heightened by making the mental ward an antagonistic place with only a few sanctuaries of peace/safety.  This could be a highly fictional place out of a horror and/or sci-fi movie, I suppose, if that helps with the buy-in of such a situation.  And on the outside, the hunter's role is filled with the investigations, clues-following, puzzle solving, social interviews, and physical chases & confrontations.  Again broken up by little moments of respite and aid.

c)  As for having a fun game even if your character (the hero) dies..  well, I'm not sure I see the issue you're presenting.  I can't think of any game I've played where the players were going to be thrilled that they're PCs got stabbed and killed.  Generally, unless your game is really just a group story-writing session, you're going to be invested in the success of the character who you are embodying.  Having a PC die in even a d20 game can still be satisfying if he lived a great life and you sacrificed him for the greater good and all that.  But noone plays Dogs in the Vineyard expecting or wanting to be gutted by a demon three scenes later.  So I must be missing your question.

It's not so much that he dies, its whether he can fail? What is the expectation for this game - that he'll win out in the end? As Ron put it, alot of source fiction has just this very assumption.

In all the source fiction, it's axiomatic that the problem (the serial killer on the loose, for instance) is going to be stopped by the hero. It's as fixed as knowing that the amateur detective will in fact expose the murderer in an Agatha Christie novel.

Why might it work as I said, where the loon and the hunter are thematically working against each other?

Well, it goes back to what you said right here:

I think the idea would be that you either really are a patient or really are a hunter, and in either case, you have issues that are manifesting themselves as these delusions/dreams/split personality/whatever.

I'm put in mind of 12 Monkeys.

I don't see the fun in playing as a mental patient.
However a character could be forced to jump between two inconsistent realities usually mundane reality and a sci-fi / magical world.
In both worlds the character is given tasks they must accomplish in the other world, either because it's critical to the world they're leaving or simply to disprove the other worlds existence.

The GM would decide ahead of time which world is real, but the player would have no way of knowing until very late in the adventure.

Naturally regardless of which world they currently occupy the character would be regarded with disbelief every time they mentioned the other world.

It could be interesting to run a werewolf game where each form has it's own personality and only remembers the other as a vague dream.  However both forms have important goals that can only be accomplished by the other.  Let the players run with that for a while then reveal that the character is crazy and only one reality actually exists.  (or simply imply that at every opportunity but give contradictory clues as to which is real)

Let's hold up a second. "Cra2," it sounds as if you're getting somewhere. So I want to make sure we're talking about your game and not about others' preferences. Let me know if I'm stating it right so far.

1. I make up both a mental patient/prisoner, as well as someone like a cop or investigator who's dealing with some awful case.

Question about #1: is it absolute given that only one side will turn out to be real? Lance's post raises this issue, and I can see the game working either way. I sort of favor the notion that there's a small chance that both the hunter and the psycho-prisoner are real, but it seems like you're going for a one-way answer. Which is OK if that's what you like most.

2. Play occurs from one or the other "side's" point of view (hell, maybe the game term for a "side" is "POV!"), and shifts from one to the other based on mechanical cues. I like it either way: I play both sides, or I and another player play respective sides. It depends on your vision of which is best.

3. When you're the hunter, you're dealing with a target who's (a) committing terrible crimes and (b) a dangerous foe who will probably fixate on you soon. Very naturalistic in some ways, even if you do have magical trappings involved. Tension and danger mount, as well as the continued attempt to protect innocents. It seems to me as if the target-psycho is actually a big deal during play, and it'd be interesting to see rules for generating and playing that part of the story.

4. When you're the locked-up psycho, you're dealing with issues of some kind, but it's not clear to me how that looks in play, or rather, what we do during this phase of play. Do I have right that you're aiming at sort of a Cuckoo's Nest thing, where the prison/asylum is a source of surreal terror which destroys rather than helps?

Let's leave out the whole character-death thing entirely, except maybe as a climactic issue. That didn't seem to gel with what you had in mind, so it doesn't matter. (We can talk about constructive, fun character death in some other thread, some other time.)

I'm looking forward to seeing what you'll do with this. No one, to date, has yet created a game that truly serves the whole psycho-killer-thriller genre well, despite numerous tries.

Best, Ron

I'm going to throw out a suggest about how to tie the two POV's together -- take it or leave it as you wish.

What if the mental patient and the criminal were the same?  Then switching between the asylum scenes and the hunt scenes would allow both stories to be developed in a connected fashion, and there's a clear reason why one affects the other (asylum scenes will reveal the motivations and actions in the hunt scenes that aren't directly seen by the investigator).  This might not gel with your vision, in which case discard it.  But it might be worth pondering.

In any case, one thing that might help is that in the genre the investigators themselves often have issues (think Se7en, the Cell, etc).  Their therapy, then, is the pursuit of the criminal.  While the criminals coping with the asylum might be a form a therapy.

James

Guys! Really, let the original poster talk. Several posts are way too close to designing his game for him, when it's his vision/preference that matters. Never mind what we would or might like, for a bit anyway. Let's all wait for his next post.

Best, Ron

This seems quite a personal and focused game, were you anticipating multiple players being the hunter/loon, or just a single one? I suspect it would be interesting if it was just one, inverting the usual GM/players split, with four people chucking this contradictory world at the player, naturally because they have different expectations.
It can certainly be interesting with more than one main player as well, but I think there is a certain compelling feel in putting the player trying to solve mysteries/understand their character's issues literally in the middle of the story.