Darla & David's Game Thread
Darla Shockley:
AKA D&D's Game Thread.
Anyway.
My partner and I are working on a distributed game, where each session is played by two players. Every player has a Traveller character, and a City. In each session, one player uses his City, and the other plays a Traveller visiting that City. Each player has sessions with various other players at different times (so a single Traveller will visit many Cities, but there is no need to organize a large group at once). It will be no problem to add new players at any time, or to intermix with other “groups”. We want to design a game that is friendly to online play.
One of the main issues with this approach, is that it will be difficult to tell coherent stories when play is so fragmented. We envision that each Traveller, and each City, will have its own coherent story, and of course these stories will be intertwined. Towards this goal, we are giving each Traveller several motifs related to cities (such as “Old Buildings” or “Prostitutes”). Then the City player can get some sort of bonus for incorporating those motifs. That adds some coherent themes or touchpoints to the Traveller's story, and has the added advantage of helping the City player flesh out his City in an interesting and unexpected way. The City will also have similar motifs (but related to Travellers, like “Childhood Trauma”).
We are obviously using the City ingredient. We've considered these cities being desert cities, but we're not really sure how much that actually adds, and haven't really worked in any of the other ingredients yet.
David Shockley:
Recently I moved to Germany, where I don't speak the local language at all. My only play of rpg's has been online, with a friend from back in the US, and with Darla. I've wanted a game I could play online, with my friend, and separately (We only have one computer) with Darla. But have it all be part of the same game. I had no idea how to make that sensible, until Game Chef posted its theme of Journey.
Ben Lehman:
Hey! This is really need. I like the idea of widely distributed games, where not every player must show up at every time. I'm really interested in how you handle that social aspect.
Jason Pitre:
Very neat. One idea that might work out is if each character gathered important locations and cities gathered important people just to further the interaction of city and traveller.
What would the participants generally be doing during the course of a session? Exploring?
dmckenna:
Neat. Really like the asynchronous thing you've got going on. Have you thought about each player being responsible for both a City and a Character? I'm thinking that maybe that each player's wanderer is from that player's city. This way you have each character coming along and adding to the story of the city while simultaneously writing their own story. The game finally ends when each of the wanderers return home, only because of all the things that have changed while they were gone it isn't the home they left behind (the whole you can't go back trope).
I think that this way you create kind of a chain story for each city and a more personal story for the wanderer. If you make the wanderers very powerful, or otherwise influential, their visits in each city could have huge influence.
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