The Whatever-It-Is-Mike-Comes-Up-With Thread
devlin1:
I don't know what I'm doing with the ingredients yet, but this is where I'm gonna work a few things out.
Here are my threads, for reference:
http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=7229.msg75764#msg75764http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=28006.0http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=18815.0http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=18406.msg194132#msg194132
For some reason, my mind keeps coming back to a space station in a degrading orbit. The PCs are aboard and have to do something -- and escape, presumably -- before it's destroyed. One of them is some sort of shapeshifting alien, but nobody -- including the players -- knows who. As the game proceeds, players get points or token or check off boxes or something; whoever has the most of those at the end, or at a certain point, is the mimic.
jackson_tegu:
MMmmmmm, yeah, a retrospectively AHA! kinda thing. Cool.
C. Edwards:
Are you still working with your original idea? If so, is there any player versus player conflict involved with being or not being the mimic?
devlin1:
Quote from: C. Edwards on April 08, 2012, 11:31:32 PM
Are you still working with your original idea? If so, is there any player versus player conflict involved with being or not being the mimic?
I haven't actually begun working on it -- I've been laid up with first a cold and then a sinus infection, and not really feeling up to focusing on anything in particular -- but neither have I had another idea, so yeah, I guess that original idea is still a going concern.
Anyway -- yes, there'd be some PVP at some point, once the mimic's identity is revealed. I see it working on two or three acts. In the first act (or two), everyone would be engaged in working toward some common goal, but often separately. For example, if I'm sticking with the degrading-orbit-space-station idea, let's say the station's lab contains some alien artifact or brain or something (humanity is at war with aliens, yadda yadda), and it's mankind's last best hope to defeat the alien menace. Maybe the station's under attack, or maybe it's having problems due to some other cause -- either way, everyone's trying to keep the station in orbit long enough for either a) scientists/xenoneurologists/xenoarchaeologists/etc. to study the MacGuffin and learn critical information from it, or b) a ship to show up and get the MacGuffin to Earth or somewhere safer.
So everyone's working together to keep the station in orbit or fight off aliens (or both) or whatever. When you take action and fail, you earn Mimic Points, or whatever they're called. Whoever has the most Mimic Points at the start of the final act is the mimic. In other words, they weren't "failing" -- they were sabotaging the efforts of the others. If you're the mimic, in the final act your priority very explicitly becomes "Deny the humans the MacGuffin." And, incidentally, now your failures are genuine failures, but you'd be at a significant mechanical advantage somehow. Because alien!
(What would determine the act breaks? I dunno. Maybe it's in the fiction that the station's computer is working on a way to refine its ability to detect alien lifeforms. At the end of Act I, it determines that one of the PCs is an alien. At the end of Act II, it determines which PC is an alien. But again, how we'd get to those break points in terms of the mechanics is still a mystery.)
I see this working with a GM (which would make it the first Game Chef game I've made that wasn't GM-less), so when it comes down to PVP, whatever the mechanics are, they should still work the same. That's prescriptive, not descriptive -- the mechanics will have to be such that when it comes to PVP, they still work fine.
Jason Pitre:
Ohhh, that is _very_ compelling. Are you invisioning the inclusion of some kind of Trust mechanic, a-la Mountain Witch? Is it possible for the humans to win?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page