Topic: Monster, welcoming critiques, ideas and better ideas for a title
Started by: bayonder
Started on: 7/18/2010
Board: First Thoughts
On 7/18/2010 at 6:46pm, bayonder wrote:
Monster, welcoming critiques, ideas and better ideas for a title
This is a game mainly inspired by Paul Czeges roleplaying game "My Life With Master", and along those lines I'm looking to make a game about "The desperate struggle to be decidedly human in the face of monsterizing forces...". The distinction being that while MLwM mainly seemed centered around monsterizing forces that are external, I'm more interested in monsterizing forces that are internal. The struggle would simply be within the characters themselves and they would be connected by the story rather than being passing ships in the night that simple revolve around the master, the characters would all struggle between a dark Need (much like the master) that drives them to act in a monsterous fashion while at the same time having a more noble Want(somewhat less like the master) that would try to keep the character on track and human in spirit. At the climax of each characters story they would reach some sort of deciding point where they tip either one way or the other into monsterousness or humanity (or possibly escape or continue the struggle some other way), very similiar to the end game of MLwM, my main difference would be that while the masters defeat is treated as inevitable in this end game there would be a very real possibility of Losing the fight with the dark forces that hold the character in sway. The one other thematic inspiration is Don't Rest Your Head, especially the downward Madness spiral that players often fall victim to.
So any thoughts, questions, ideas or holes in the ideas I already have that anyone can think of are welcome. I warn you I may rip off good ideas you send my way wholesale but I give credit where it is do, or when I remember :P. Also please pardon my horrible inability to use punctuation, normaly I have spelling and grammar check.
On 7/19/2010 at 5:56am, Noon wrote:
Re: Monster, welcoming critiques, ideas and better ideas for a title
Hello,
You seem to be making good and evil something that exists and the game also manages utterly ie, the want determines what being human is, and if I'm reading you right, there being an actual chance of losing the fight with the dark forces being inherent in the game itself, rather than being left up to the player and his portrayal.
It's kind of like watching a narrativist game get solidified into the concrete morality of a simulationist game.
I don't know much about my life with master, but while it might try to say the master is evil (I dunno, does it?) does it set up for what 'is good'? Does it say what a character will be to be good? Or is it really they resist the master, but that doesn't actually by default make them good or evil for resisting him. Just men?
I'm trying to say it sounds like your building something where right and wrong have been decided in advance by yourself, as author of the game?
Further, that there's a real, built into the game chance of falling to 'evil', rather than the player simply being left to play out the character.
It kind of reminds me of when robocop can't shoot the OCP executive because he has a rule in his head. But in that case he wants to, it's just this rule freezes his body. What your talking about is like if the rule actually makes him...not want to kill the OCP executive. The rule changes his very want itself.
To me, at that point, the rule is the character, not robocop.
Anyway, it was nice to bring up robocop in an example...lol
On 7/24/2010 at 5:00pm, bayonder wrote:
RE: Re: Monster, welcoming critiques, ideas and better ideas for a title
Callan wrote: You seem to be making good and evil something that exists and the game also manages utterly ie, the want determines what being human is, and if I'm reading you right, there being an actual chance of losing the fight with the dark forces being inherent in the game itself, rather than being left up to the player and his portrayal.
The want simply determines what is most noble about this flawed character despite his dark side, it's not a hard and fast definition of what makes him human, simply the best part of his human side. The Want would be something that hinders the character from finishing his role in the narrative in a clean and often brutal manner, but it has more long term benefits, the main one being that holding to it despite how it hurts your chances of reaching your goals will make it easier to resist your dark side in the end. The Need on the other hand is something that has more immediate benefits but in the end may lead to the characters fall into darkness and by definition is something that hurts those around him in often horrific ways, in the end the characters success in conquering his dark side will be greatly affected by his actions up to that point in the narrative.
Callan wrote: I'm trying to say it sounds like your building something where right and wrong have been decided in advance by yourself, as author of the game?
Actually the main themes and struggles would be decided by the players, the campaign would be collaboratively created by the players much like the master is created MLwM. The players would work together to decide the overall campaign they want (detectives hunting a serial killer, assassins trying to overthrow a government dictator), The players would create there characters one by one, each one having some sort of connection to the character made previously (whether a friendly or antagonistic one) until it is brought full circle by the last character connecting himself in some way to the first. All the major characters would be players, both the "Good Guys" and "Bad Guys" (even though terms like that are a bit moot in a game like this) and the character generation process would lead to the entire group being connected in a round robin kind of way that has great potential for dramatic entanglements.
Example: The players decide they want to do a detective drama. the first character creates a detective with the local PD, He believes in defending the innocent at all costs (want) but he has a tendency to overstep his authority and become too brutal in his administration of "justice" (need). The next player decides he will play the part of a serial killer being hunted by the detective, He lives in a run down neighborhood and blames the local drug ring for the neighborhoods present state, he wants to make his home a better place (want) but he becomes so lost in his desire to punish those responsible that he has developed a ritualistic and brutal way of removing them from the neighborhood. etc
Last of all, falling to darkness wouldn't really be losing, it would simply be another way the narrative could turn out, I've always thought game with a win or lose outcome are boring. In the end the game is more about the interesting potential for redemption and damnation than striving for one or the other, and neither implies anything more than a change in heart, so the serial killer may well find redemption when he allows the detective to take his life so that he will stop killing.
On 7/25/2010 at 1:45am, Noon wrote:
RE: Re: Monster, welcoming critiques, ideas and better ideas for a title
The want simply determines what is most noble about this flawed character despite his dark side, it's not a hard and fast definition of what makes him human, simply the best part of his human side.
What defines the best part of your human side does not define your humanity? Your free to define the crappier parts?
The Want would be something that hinders the character from finishing his role in the narrative in a clean and often brutal manner, but it has more long term benefits, the main one being that holding to it despite how it hurts your chances of reaching your goals will make it easier to resist your dark side in the end. The Need on the other hand is something that has more immediate benefits but in the end may lead to the characters fall into darkness and by definition is something that hurts those around him in often horrific ways, in the end the characters success in conquering his dark side will be greatly affected by his actions up to that point in the narrative.
It'll be greatly affected by how much he adheres to someones interpretation of the want. Whoever interprets that want and is not the player is effectively playing the character by proxy.
Were most likely going to run into a perceptual issue - people at factory default think when they judge what is 'good', they treat it as if what they think is actually the galactic definition for good, rather than just their own defintion. Here, if someone judges what following the want 'requires' your probably falling into the same error - you'll be thinking 'of course want X requires action Y - that's how it's done', when it's just your opinion it requires Y, your own preference. And as much as your imposing your own preference, you'd be playing out the character via proxy.
Or you can go ahead and think that if the want is 'Always kind to old people', you know what that means at some galactic standard level and thus when the player has his character does something that clearly goes against the galactic standard on it, he's clearly failing to meet the want.
When really he's failing to meet your own personal standard on the want. Ie, he's not playing his/your character right.
It's a horrible moment when suddenly going from 'what is the truth' to 'oh, it was just my opinion I'm expressing, not some absolute truth and there is no absolute truth on the matter I'm aware of'. So horrible people tend to just keep adhering to the idea that they KNOW what being kind to old people means at an absolute level. Here's something worth reading on the matter. He's talking about attributing experience to physical books, but the same goes for attributing experience to just a few words, like how a want is defined.
We have a physical object before us, one that encodes a semantic object. The tendency is to attribute the clarity and stability of the former to the latter, to conflate the semantic content with the material vehicle–to weld our experience of reading to the thing we hold in our hands. Let’s call this the Illusion of Semantic Objectivity. We seem to have a hardwired tendency to think of our reading experience as a kind of thing, and to use the logic of things to structure our subsequent reasoning about books and readings.