Darla & David's Game Thread
Darla Shockley:
Jason: honestly, we don't know exactly how play will go yet... we've been hashing that out today. We do know that Traveller characters will have a goal they are working towards (which is the reason they left home to begin with), and this will partly drive play in some way (we have some ideas how, but it's not solid yet). Also, the Traveller player will create ahead of time an idea for adversity for the City from outside the town (originally we conceived of this as something he sees on his way in, but now we're disagreeing on whether this is best--we will see where it ends up). We also want some adversity for the City from inside the City (for example, faction conflicts, etc.), and of course the Traveller player will play some GM roles here, but we're really not sure at all how that will work yet. As we work through this, we will post more specific stuff here and ask/hope for specific feedback.
dmckenna: yeah, we did plan for each player to have both a City and a Traveller (though not play them at the same time). We did not consider, though, that the player's character would be from his own City, and that's an awesome idea. I think this gives the player a lot more to draw on when he is playing his Traveller (without requiring some elaborate backstory or whatever), which is cool. We are definitely using it. I don't think a possible outcome will be for the character to go back home though--but I think we kind of do have the possibility for the "can't go home" trope in a way. One of the things we've added to our setting is this idea that the cities are in this terrible, terrible desert where time works kind of differently, and people pretty much never come back (and, for color, we may say that there are stories of people sticking their arms over the edge into the desert and bringing back nothing but bone, for example). So the Travellers need to have a really compelling reason that they went out there... one of our examples is a Traveller whose wife went out into the desert many years ago, and he decides to go after her. One possible outcome for this guy would be that he actually finds her, but she's really old and has settled down in another city with someone else (because time is slower in the desert, and she's been here for a long time). So, he gets his goal (which is kind of "home"), but it turns out to be something terrible, and he's left having gone through this horrible ordeal for nothing.
We do expect that the travellers will have huge influence on the cities... this is where the time moving slower idea came from. It makes more sense if huge events only happen every once in awhile in a city, so it might be 50 years between travellers arriving. We plan on the traveller being able to make permanent changes to the city, probably during an epilogue, based on the events from the session.
Darla Shockley:
One thing we've been thinking about which we could use feedback on is this: one way of sharing content across sessions is for characters to literally tell stories--stories from their past, or stories they've heard (characters being both Travellers and characters in Cities). Another way of incorporating this without literally having story-telling is flashbacks (though obviously then it's only your own stories, not stories you've heard). A cool thing about stories, to me, is that they evolve and change over time, so conceivably you will end up hearing different versions of the same fantastical story (probably more fantastical than how it actually went down in play).
However, we're both really worried about how this will break up the flow of play. Is there some way of making this interactive? Is it ok to break play up, like that, into a huge chunk where only one guy is talking, because the stories will be interesting (...we hope)? Is it a terrible idea and we should just stop thinking about it?
Renee:
Have you ever looked at De Profundis?
Essentially, it's a play-by-mail (or I guess you could do it by snail mail) game where players recount their experiences with Lovecraftian horrors via penpal-type correspondence (like Lovecraft's characters often did). It's been years since I've looked at it, but it's the sort of thing where players created information whole-cloth, and then other players drew upon that to fashion their stories. I could see doing something like that here; Travelers would write about (perhaps keep a public blog of?) their stories, and so that stuff could all be shared outside of the game proper, but perhaps drawn upon as a resource during gameplay itself?
How do people in the real world share their stories of travels these days? Via blogs, text, Facebook, etc. Maybe there's something to be culled from that.
dmckenna:
I think you're going to want to do a kind of journal type thing to keep track of the stories. Shotgun Diaries has players write a few sentences at the end of each day and one thing which they write is true. Maybe you can play with something like that, only the next visitor to the city decides which things are true and which things aren't. The Aspects in Fate games are also created from stories. You could do something like that too, maybe each visitor's story has a specific thing associated with it that becomes a permanent part of the city.
PeterBB:
I like where this is going!
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