[Game Chef 2011] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric
JeffR:
Initial Thoughts:
So, the basic idea here is a game in which each player's character sheet ends up being a (Shakespearean-style) Sonnet. There are two possible approaches here: one in the game ends at the same time the sonnet is complete, and on in which that's only the first phase of the campaign. Since we've only got 3,000 words to work with, which is barely more than my two-page Little Game Chef games tended to use, I'm going to go with the first.
Ideas on how to do this:
At start of game, players generate 6 cards with rhyming words on back and frontEach stanza starts with a line authored by a different player? If fixed # of players=4, can be left, right, across. If not, can be your own, left, right. Could be that way even with fixed at 4; starting with own might help with ownership.Players pick the cards knowing only the top word.Some kind of in-game benefit from clever use of language in the lines as written. Possibly as a form of currency gained when the line is written, possibly as a stat-like bonus for the character.Either way, this can be tracked in two currencies/stat tracks: a 'low' (for things like puns and innuendo) and a 'high' (for things like metaphor and alliteration)This will be self-adjudicated, claimed by the author on an 'honor system'.Will have to choose between a highly-ritualized gameplay style in which all characters reach the heroic couplet (which will be mechanically different in some way) simultaneously and a more 'freestyle' one in which the sonnets can roll out at different paces and finishing them triggers something (endgame?)
Leaning strongly towards GM-less. The ingredients will define my setting and constrain the major conflicts, I guess.
Remember: Sonnets are persuasive poems, not descriptive ones.
somori:
Sounds like a great idea Jeff. Can you expand on your last line though? I'm not sure what you mean by the difference between persuasive and descriptive poems.
A descriptive sonnet would make more sense in this context too as a "character sheet" describes a character's history and possible futures.
JeffR:
Well, that's as much a statement of fact about Shakespeare's sonnets as an agenda, but it is an agenda as well: making them persuasive is going to keep them focused, and give a better guide when writing the heroic couplet at the end.
Letting the ingredients simmer right now. I want to integrate them fairly deeply with the non-sonnet-writing elements of the game, and avoid writing a generic system with an ingredients-based sample setting.
JeffR:
First Ingredients thoughts
Leave Daughter aside for now, and concentrate on mechanics:
Nature:easy to do in mechanics; possibly the values already present on the character sheet as they influence scenes.
Forsworn: Oaths as a pre-scene bidding mechanic, with consequences for breaking them.
Exile: Something that happens to at least on character between the beginning and end of a scene. Self-balancing, since it lets the exiled character spend more time on crafting their next line.
JeffR:
Also just realized that I got the quote backward in the title of the thread. The game will have the three in the Stoppardian order.
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