Untitled DrWho Project
mrteapot:
Quote from: Troy_Costisick on April 10, 2012, 04:37:40 AM
I'll just plug one of my favorite games real fast: Inspectres. It is Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off. Maybe that can provide some inspiration.
If I were making the game, this would be my starting point as well. But I'm interested in seeing what Dan comes up with.
Dan Maruschak:
My current plan is to have the GM prep several things. First, they'll prep the "mystery", which is going to be something along the lines of "what does it look like on the surface?" (e.g. vampires), "what's the sci-fi twist?" (e.g. aliens that need to consume the iron from vertebrate blood), and "what's the crisis?" (e.g. aliens begin conquest of earth). Second, they'll prep a bunch of colorful details about the setting and about the people and aliens involved. Scene-framing will be mostly a player choice, but there will be some procedure during the GM prep that puts a list of elements onto a player-facing list, and player's will get some sort of in-game benefit for framing scenes that include that element. The GM's job will be to introduce elements of the mystery and elements of their colorful prep (since not everything the GM introduces will be "plot significant", players won't feel obligated to latch onto every detail the GM throws at them), and the things on the player-facing list will be places or situations that will facilitate the GM doing that job (so the player-facing list might have something like "the theater", and when the player frames a scene at the theater it will make it organic for the GM to introduce the colorful "theater manager" NPC he's created, or the Chinese magician character that's an element of the mystery).
I think play will be broken down into a few phases that have slightly different mechanics. Right now I'm thinking three phases, the beginning, middle, and end. The boundary between the beginning and the middle is the "The True Mystery is Revealed" step (e.g. it's not vampires, it's blood-drinking aliens!) and the boundary between the middle and the end is "The Threat is Revealed" step (e.g. we need to stop them before they open a space-bridge to their homeworld and begin their invasion!). In the first two phases players won't be mechanically interacting with the mystery, but doing something else like building relationships or something (this is the part that's still fuzziest for me), risking horror, injury, or danger to the people they know. In the end phase they'll be able to do something directly in the mechanics to avert the crisis. The GM will be limited in what kind of fiction they can introduce. So, for example, in one phase they might be able to do violence to characters off-screen, but they may only be allowed to threaten a befriended character on-screen where a PC has an opportunity to avert it (like I said, this part is still gelling).
I've never played InSpectres, but I'm familiar with it. I think I want to go in more of a GM-prepped "mystery" direction (of the "not fair" type, where basically the story isn't about a character/audience deducing clues, but about following characters as a situation is slowly revealed) rather than an on-the-fly approach. The play of the game won't really be "will they figure it out?", but more about what happens to the characters along the way: are they filled with wonder, horrified, alienated, enlightened, etc.? My main mechanical touchpoint is the playtest I did of Boarsdraft a while back. There were some things I thought were interesting in that game and some places where I thought it needed work. Unfortunately the designer of that game isn't going to take it in the direction I think it needs to go, so I'm trying to go in that direction myself with this game. It's part of my larger area of interest in the idea of having strongly structured plots as a platform for exploring characters, as opposed to the more common Forge-derived approach of having strongly defined characters which ram into each other to produce emergent plot.
Troy_Costisick:
So what would make this game the kind of game you only play once?
Dan Maruschak:
The "last chance" theme isn't strongly represented in the design (yet?), although my goal is for each session to map to a single story (i.e. one episode of the modern format, or a 4- or 6-episode arc in the classic half-hour-with-cliffhangers format) and character creation will be very light-weight so it should be playable as a one-shot.
Dan Maruschak:
I'm still struggling with a character system. One of the ideas I'm trying to incorporate into the game comes from some of the commentary tracks I've listened to. I forget who said it, but the idea was that people tend to overstate the differences in characterization between different regenerations of The Doctor, and that most of the actors could play "their" Doctor even with a script written for a different regeneration. The most obvious place to see this on-screen is in The Five Doctors, where Peter Davidson does all of the Gallifrey political stuff that was originally supposed to be for Tom Baker. Different regenerations emphasize different aspects of The Doctor, but it's rarely a completely new personality. Sure, Colin Baker's Doctor is notably arrogant, but they're all arrogant in their own ways. I'm not sure how I want to translate that into play yet.
Right now I'm leaning toward something like Poison'd, where a character will roll one of their stats against another one of their stats to determine their result, so something like: When The Chronomaster tries to convince someone to do things his way, roll Kindness vs. Arrogance.
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