Nolan's Game Thread
masqueradeball:
Journey
You are trying to get from here to there. There's a pool of dice in the middle of the table called “How Far Have we Come.” The goal of the game is to dice from various other places (most notably your character sheet) into the “How Far” pile. There needs to be an opposing pile... hmm... How Far Have we Come competes with How Far we Have to Go.
I'm thinking that the game will end like Moses in the desert... the whole question is whether or not you even glimpse the promised land... So there's the journey, and you might get there or you might not and the end game you roll these two dice pools against each other (every dice off will put dice in one pool or the other) to see if you get there in the end.
City
This is obviously the destination, but how can it have more teeth than that? I'm thinking that characters will come up with conceptions of the city, which is like this mythical never-never land within the setting. This Dream of the City will be a score that characters have that they'll use to overcome hardships, as well as an actual description of what the city is.
As the characters travel they might find the City becoming more meaningful/meaningless as they encounter communities and build things of their own that either fulfill or undermine their dream.
So: The City is basically Heaven (in a simple wish-fulfillment kind of way) and the characters use their ideas of heaven to keep motivated in moving forward, but finding happiness on the road actually undermines this dream. Also, they'll meet people who have different ideas of the city, and they'll compete with themselves about what the ideal is. So, major thrust in the game: What is your characters ideal world, how does their pursuit of this ideal change it, and how does it interact with other people's ideals, and how does finding practical happiness/hardship increase or diminish.
Desert
This is where the characters are traveling through. The desert will be a huge part of the game. Everything that's not the characters is a feature of the desert. Going with the concept of moving around dice, the desert will be represented as a bunch of index cards that you set down with descriptions of things the characters might confront... there would be two things: negative thingies (called something) and “positive thingies” (oasis) that are mechanically negative because they give the characters reasons to settle on their ideals and give up the pursuit of the city. How the cards are generated, what dice go on them and what order they're dealt with, idk.
Edge
This is where the characters have to live if they want to keep moving. They will come into contact with societies and situations they must survive them, but they can't settle anywhere... to much success needs to hurt people somehow. Everything that the characters do they want to do by the slimmest possible margin... They'll want to do on the EDGE. This gives me kind of a cool idea for a die mechanic... You (the player) contributes dice of (Color A), while the desert contributes (Color B, Color C). You roll all three dice and you want your dice to come up between the other two... how the hell this would work with moving dice around into the various piles... idk. I'll come back to the specifics of the mechanics later. Anyway... Edge, its the place where you want to stay in order to keep moving towards the City.
Skin
I really like the idea of doing something with skin color and perception and making this a factor in the game. Maybe an assessment of why the characters are moving and the obstacle they have interacting with other people. This would be good. Good stuff.
So here's the premise: Your skin has changed color somehow, exiling you from your homeland, and putting you into a morass of outcasts and misfits, but you (with the other PC's) decide to leave your miserable existence and go off in search of the city. Despite being an outcaste you have all these preconceived notions of what other people are like based off of there skin color, and these things compete with dealing with people directly. This is another source of conflict. Maybe skin colors and dice colors can be related and your character's changing perceptions of the people in the game world can actually change how the dice behave?
As for actual Skin colors, I'm thinking the PC's are “bleached” and have a sort of bone-white complexion and all of the other people come in bright and fantastic colors... With there being a number of fantasy skin-color races equal to the number of players.
Brendan C.:
Neat! I really like the push pull you set up there between success and failure, how you want to succeed, but by the slimmest margin possible.
Hopefully I'll have better suggestions tomorrow when I'm less fried, but what if you had each player maybe describe, in a sentence or two, his or her original tribe? What color the tribesmen's skin was, and what the tribe's vision of the City might have been? Potentially, even, how the individual's idea of the City differs from his or her tribe's, thereby setting that player out even more? And as for coming to see others differently in terms of skin color, what if the outcasts might inadvertently bleach the skin of those they come into contact with? Making them even more likely to be pariahs?
Cool. Looking forward to reading more.
masqueradeball:
yeah, thats the direction that i'm going in, to have the players collectively create the relationships between the various skin colors and the city.
Jason Pitre:
Very neat concept and I am a big fan of the success by narrow margins aspect.
With regards to the settlements, I could see the narrow margins approach as particularly valid. On the social roll encountering them, a failure gets you run out of town. A narrow success gets you some supplies and encouragement to keep on traveling. A great success leads to the settlement inviting you to stay and rest for a while until they can provide you supplies. The key is to get assistance yet not friendship with those settlements. At least, that was the idea that came to mind when reading your synopsis? Is that similar to your plans?
masqueradeball:
Spot on assessment of how I want things to work. Still tinkering. Some other gaming got in the way of a longer write up, but there's always tomorrow.
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