I wonder how much fun it would be to play a game where no one must (or can) invent setting features.  You play your characters and choose what they encounter from pregenerated options.  The pregenerated options could come with different mechanical impacts, affecting the characters' ability to reach a happy/successful ending.

Random example:
Each character has Health 10.  When you get to Health 0 you die.
Each character is stuck in the bottom Level of a 10 level prison.  When you work up to and escape the top Level, you get your happy ending.
Most of the pregenerated options are mixed bags, mechanically:
- hatch to the infirmary: +1 Health (good!), +1 Level (bad!)
- distracting, violent, small riot: -1 Level (good!), -1 Health (bad!)
Many of the cards would be mechanically redundant, but aesthetically different.  Cards featuring key NPCs could prompt some fun roleplayed speech, while cards of scary physical spaces could prompt some fun roleplayed straining.  They'd need more detail than my examples above; maybe one long sentence or three short ones.

To make it an interesting game for group play, the options could be on cards, and every player could have a secret hand of randomly-drawn cards.  Some cards would affect all the characters; others, only one character.

I could see the mechanical odds working in either of two positions:
1) Getting everyone out alive is easy.  Play the game for the story, and kill off characters if you find it fun.
2) Getting everyone out is challenging and requires coordinated, strategic card-playing.  It might be like playing Pandemic with a layer of imaginative color.

I think my personal happy zone is in-between; where you can do some odds-maximizing, but it doesn't require too much thought or grant complete control. 

Are there any RPGs that work like this?

Would I need a 3rd variable besides Health and Level to avoid winding up with an obvious right solution a la Tic Tac Toe?

Anyone inspired with ideas for interesting cards for the group?
Brainstorm:
- Split up on the ladder - you lose 1 level; the player to your right gains one level.
- Dangle a rope down the pipe - every player within 1 level of you joins you on your Level; you lose 1 Health from the exhaustion of pulling them all up

I think that the number of cards in a player's hand would qualify as a third variable. Maybe you could include cards that allow players to draw, discard, or exchange cards in their hands?
Example:
Trap Door- A hatch or a collapsing floor opens up beneath you causing you to fall down and land in an unexplored room down below. -1 health, +1 level, draw two cards.

You may also include cards that allow players to save themselves from falling.
Catlike Reflexes- You do not lose life from falling.
Grab the Ledge- You grab onto something to avoid falling. You do not gain levels, but you must spend one life to pull yourself up.

2) Getting everyone out is challenging and requires coordinated, strategic card-playing.  It might be like playing Pandemic with a layer of imaginative color.

I like the idea of cards both providing and limiting choices, and would go for a mechanic that models present consequences of past actions. So, choices that players make now to get up a level or gain a health will limit their choices at some point in the future (for example, by restricting the pool of available cards, changing the effects of cards played later, etc).

It does sound more like a board game than an rpg.

Well, here was my thought: let's say I have 10 cards in my hand.  Let's say these 10 cards represent 4 distinct mechanical options.  So, I pick the "-1 Level, -1 Health" option. 

But then I have two different cards that do that!  One of them is "stab someone; guards slowed down by stopping his bleeding; the guy you stabbed broke your jaw with a punch".  The other is "after not eating for 3 days, you're skinny enough to slip behind the red-hot boiler and get to the forgotten maintenance ladder". 

I'll chose one or the other in response to previously established fiction.  If my guy's a badass and we seem to be carfting a violent story, I'll play the first card.  If my guy's a shat-upon survivor and we're doing a Shawshank thing, I'll play the second card.

And then my choice of violence vs sneaking will inform the next player's choice, and so on.

Does it seem like that moment of aesthetic choice would be meaningfully fun, or trivial?

Hmmm, to me, it depends on whether the principle is 'it WILL inform the next players choice' or the principle is 'it is fun to have ones choice influenced by previous fiction, so as much as people do fun things when they can, its likely will happen as that'

And sometimes someone wont consider prior fiction in making their choice.

And that's okay because when choices are influenced by prior fiction, that's a fun bonus that just adds to the activity. This, rather than B: it being required and your bad if you don't take prior fiction into account and it's the hardcorez, and...in the end nobody is being influenced by fiction for that is for any anything to do with fun. They are just doing it to avoid the stick.

To me it seems alot of gamers do B, where it's more important that the activity gravitates heavily on fiction than the activity actually being fun (the idea of simply enjoying play at a board game/card game is treated as anathema (see the 'hardcore' in the gamism essay).

Anyway, I do go on.

I think it will influence the descriptor used (I can see the boiler and the broken jaw coming up latter, atleast in my own imagination), and as I understand it the player will have a hand of cards - I think at times it'll influence what card someone chooses. Simply because it's fun to do that sometimes (to make choices based around the spoken fiction, rather than just the numbers).

So yeah, when not forced I think it'll be fun and work when at times it dips into that fiction play level.

Can I have a whinge about how blood red sands hands a tool for forcing B in, to anyone inclined to make gameplay like that? Aww, go on, I'll just...oh, okay, I'll clam up now (heh, just making a side note and satirising myself a little along the way...)

That card example sounds good, sounds like you have great ideas in your head (or great ideas about to come into your head)! Good luck, David! :)

Oh, yeah, definitely no stick involved!

A hardcore gamist approach is certainly allowed, but it probably wouldn't be much fun, as the game is both strategically simple and heavily influenced by luck of the draw.  So hardcore folks would hopefully self-select out.

Hmm, maybe it'd be more transparent if I just removed all strategy and generated level/health outcomes with random die rolls?  So the only activity of play is to decide which narration to use?  That's probably a purer expression of my main intent... but seems less motivating.  "Get out alive" is a tangible goal in a way that "construct an aesthetically satisfying narrative" isn't.  Unless you get fanmail for picking a narration that everyone thinks is particularly apt...?

Along those lines, something I had thought of after encountering the blood red sands rules was to actually have a secondary goal to winning, which is optional BUT if you can both win and complete the goal, well, you look cooler, of course! The second goal is that with each use of the cards you would gain, say, 10 believability points. But if people think your action doesn't fit the prior fiction, they can call out and it reduces the number of believability points you get. Probably relative to the number of people who call out.

So you either have some end goal amount of believability score to meet the secondary goal, or just try to win and try to have more believability than everyone else as a secondary goal. Which I think is better than the blood red sands/traditional model, because I think winning often very much goes against what one is willing to believe can happen.

And just on the cards where you mentioned two different descriptions - could players make up their own as well (not the numbers involved, but the fictional description of events)? I'm not saying that as if it makes the card descriptions redundant - those descriptions being there and a choice of two is very important as it gets over the very problem we talked about of when you can't make something up. But for the times when something does pop to mind, can you make up your own description of why the games numbers are changing?

That makes a lot of sense.  Everyone's trying to win, but who can do so with the greatest finesse?  This could be measured in plausibility (testing logical skills and maybe knowledge of prisons), vividness (testing description and portrayal skills), drama (testing narrative skill in crafting affecting human situations), excitement, laughs, genre fidelity, or any number of aesthetic criteria.  Maybe allowing the group to pick one before play would be a nice way to customize!  The emo crowd can give points for drama, the immersives can give points for vividness, the action movie fans can go for excitement or laughs, etc.

Callan wrote:
And just on the cards where you mentioned two different descriptions - could players make up their own as well (not the numbers involved, but the fictional description of events)?

Well, I don't know the right words to describe it, but the scoring system I described is butressed - ie, you get with 10 points with each mechanics use, and can only go down if someone basically calls out about it. That means being better at describing anything wont gain you anything. You can only lose from the 10 by, in someones mind, being jarringly out of sync with the prior fiction. In terms of this secondary goal perhaps alot of the time everyone would have the exact same score at the end. So it'd be a matter of trying not to miss out on being equal. You want to win and also equal out on this.

This probably needs some slow but steady catch up method for someone if they screwed up at some point - so as to give them a chance to get to equal at the end/give uncertainty to play (ie, they don't screw up and then go "Well, that's it, can't catch up now"). Perhaps they get 11 points each time until the catch up with the lead person (where they become equal with that person).

This is how I think my early and beyond roleplay went - ie, you could simply go and be entirely abstract in your rules usage and blow the shit out of stuff, but it wouldn't be as cool. So you wanted to win and manage your coolness to it's full potential.

I'm not sure about choosing genre - I think overall I'd just have the game instruct the player to shoot for some sort of genre and leave it at that. Basically the notion of genre is there so players know imagining is part of this gig. I dunno - to me, the feeling of one person going for a emo genre and another for a macho action I find kinda exciting and makes me smile, as long as the two other players get that a missmash is pretty cool. Genre hybriding is amusing to me and fun - the juxtaposition of them against each other is even a source of inspiration to me. But perhaps that's just me? I dunno, I find it fun.

David wrote:
I wonder how much fun it would be to play a game where no one must (or can) invent setting features.  You play your characters and choose what they encounter from pregenerated options.  The pregenerated options could come with different mechanical impacts, affecting the characters' ability to reach a happy/successful ending.