Struggling with a new game idea

[Jake Richmond]

Tonight I finally had the chance to transcribe the ideas for the game I've been thinking about for a few months. It's a love story set against a war, where the character likely die in the end. You can, if you are interested, download the short document here: http://www.atarashigames.com/Secret_Folder/The Year We All Died.doc Feedback would certainly be appreciated.

Here are my concerns:

1. The game is diceless and has no conflict resolution system. Does it actually need one? Or is enough to just provide the framework for telling the story? I certainly know that I can play this as a game, but will anybody else be able to?

2. After a really good game I often find that I want to comment on it and add to it, and often the way I want to do this is by continuing to interact with other players characters through email or what not. I've rarely actually done tat, but I think it's a neat idea. So my concept for this game was that all or most of it ould be played remotely , and that at least some of it must be. By remotly I mean over the phone, through email, text messaging, hand written letters or any other non face to face communication form. My hope is that this will facilitate interesting roleplaying and allow players to explore the romantic relationship angle in an interesting way. My fear though is that splitting the game between face to face role-playing and remote roleplaying or even just limiting it to remote roleplaying might be harming the game. Should I open this up more as a traditional rpg with more face to face roleplaying?

3. The game has a beginning a middle and an end. You start as a pair of characters just entering a relationship, you survive through a war that tears apart your whole worl and you end the game by either finding a new place in your devestated world or by dying. Is this too scripted? I want to craft the game to create a very specific experience, but at the same time I want the players to have the freedome to take the game where they want it to go.

Any advice or feedback would be really helpful.





Thanks,

Jake

[Christopher Ashe]

Jake,

It seems to me what you have here is a gaming campaign, not really an actual game. I guess that's the fastest way to tell you my opinion, but I will certainly elaborate. Now, almost everyone I know who's ever written a game began exactly this way, with a campaign and maybe a home rules system. Without much of a rules mechanic and the particular structure of this scenario, I would tell you that you do not have an actual game here. If you are considering turning this idea into a full-on RPG, you might want to consider branching out from your basic concepts and moving toward a more open idea.

What I understand from this idea is that the focus deals with personal relationships in extraordinary or conflicted circumstances, via the sort of Voices From a Distant Star anime feel or something of the like. This is a perfectly good angle to portray, but as the writer you may want to choose how to implement it to create a full game. From your current setup I could take this idea and run a campaign on any feasible system, d20, GURPS, seven13 (shameless plug there), or otherwise, because here it seems to be the theme that is the focus. What you do not want to do is lock the players down into this progression as the overall basis for a game should you plan to market it. It's definitely a nice one-night or even multi-session angle, but the Act structure does not well-suit what I see as the "point" of tabletop role-play. To me gaming is all about freedom. I would be far more interested in a story such as this one in a video game than I would a tabletop RPG. If I were to play in this scenario, I personally would be inclined to deviate from the initial theme and focus on other aspects of what were going on in the setting. If I as the player was forced to focus on the direct scenario, I would likely become bored with it.

If all you plan to do is use this as an email/text based scenario, then you are good to go. I think it would work fine for that. Also, I think you are fine for that angle in not having a resolution mechanic. With this type of basis just for a game you should probably have a decent angle, but this is not so much a role-playing game proper I suppose as it is a campaign. There are themes and ideas inherent here that do have merit for a larger scope game, but that would in fact require a resolution mechanic and a broader look at the tone, events and setting elements inherent to this story.

I hop I've helped - I tend to ramble a whole lot and get away with myself easily.

- Ashe

[Jake Richmond]

Thanks for the  reply. I wrote the last post very early in the morning so it doesn't capture all that I want it to. I guess what I wanted to know was whether this could work as a standalone game where the focus was playing through a sequence of events. Not a traditional game, but a set of guidelines for setting scenes and moving through a story. I guess your answer to that is that is that the idea seems like it would make an okay setting for another game system, but does not stand as a game itself. That wasn't what I wa hoping to hear, but I gues I'm not really suprised either.

So let me ask this.I have a setting and story. I want to package that setting and story as a roleplaying experience. This is different from many other games in that when you play the game you are playing a specific story and setting. You still create the characters. You still get to dictate what happens. But the story has a beginning, a middle and an end. A place where you start and  a conclusion to work toward. The game is about building and experiencing the story and immersion in the characters . Given that's what I want to do, what do you suggest?


Jake

[Simon C]

It sounds like you're trying to do some similar things to what I'm trying with my game "Through the Ansible", about exploring a new world.  I think it's absolutely a feasable concept.  What's important is to settle on answers for a few questions:

How do you decide who has the right to decide what's "true" in the game fiction?  This can be as simple as saying "If you say it's true, it is." Or you can go the route of most other games and involve dice rolling to determine who gets to say what's true, you can break up different responsibilities to different players ("You get to say what's true about your character's actions, I get to say what's true about everything else" is a common one, but probably best avoided for your game) Some games have a resource that you expend to make "true" statements about the game fiction - Universalis is a good example.

How do you decide when the game ends? I think you get more satisfying play from a game that's clearly moving towards an end, as your Act stucture does.  You need a mechanical way of timing that.  This can be as simple as saying "any player can declare the act finished", or as complex as you like.  In "Through the Ansible" I gave each player keywords that they could expend to move the game towards its conclusion, by using them in their narration.

How do you enforce what the game is about? How do you make sure the players are engaging with the game in the "correct" way.  This is the hardest one to answer for games with few rules.  I don't have any good suggestions for this.  I used the "keywords" in Through the Ansible to keep everyone in more or less the same territory, but I don't know how well that works in actual play.

Good luck with your game.  It's absolutely viable.  Have fun!

[Jake Richmond]

Thanks Simon. These are all helpful points to consider.

How do you decide who has the right to decide what's "true" in the game fiction?

I've been going with the assumption that anything stated actually happens, and if there is a disagreement then the players need to hash it out between themselves. I recognize that this is a little too "perfect world", but I've been more interested about other aspects of the game to develop this part more. My last games (Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch) used a fairly heavy handed dice mechanic to resolve conflicts, and a cooperative scene building tool to create scenes. I'd like to get away from the dice entirely but focus more on cooperative scene/story/world building. As I said, this isn't a part of the game I've give a lot of thought yet. Thanks for pointing it out as an area to focus on.

How do you decide when the game ends? I think you get more satisfying play from a game that's clearly moving towards an end, as your Act stucture does.  You need a mechanical way of timing that.

My idea here is that play is divided between a set of acts, and to move from one act to another certain things must happen. The first act is where the  players get to know each other, so the first act is all about going on dates. During this act the players also need to start establishing the war as a background element,and they'll want to flesh out their town. Once the players feel like they've done this they'll be ready to move to the second act. The second, third and fourth act all have their prerequisetes for completion as well. Players can't move from the third act to the fourth until they've established how the war is destorying their lives, their friends and their town. Additionally, the weaponized character must reveal his secret to the other character. I do have more "conditions" for moving from act to act in mind. I'm thinking of them as guidelines. If players do all these things then they'll be ready to move to the next part of the story. If players like the part of the story they are in now they can stay there as long as they need to.

The whole game ends with the characters meeting their final fate. Whether they live happily ever after or die tragic deaths is up to the players.I feel like the goal here should be to have both players working to create an ending that is both tragic and meaningful. I like the idea of playing a game where one of the goals is to bring your story to a satisfying and meaningful conclusion. The trick I guess is to make the players aware of this and have them recognize this as one of the games goals.

How do you enforce what the game is about?

That's agood question.If the game is about trying to hold your relationship together while your whole world ends, how do I get players to accept and embrace that? I have ideas about using the presentation of the physical product itself and it's non-rules content to steer players in this direction, but what I'd like is for this to be clear from the text itself. I want players to read the game and say "thats the kind of experience I want to create" rather then saying "this is cool, but instead of being in love we'll play a bad ass squad of mech pilots" or "We'll do this, but at the end our country wins the war and everyone survives". There's nothing wrong with a player adapting a game to their needs, but what I want to do here is create a very specific experience that players will actually want to play. Of course that experience doesn't have to be exactly as I describe it in the game. Instead of Japanese teenagers watching as their world ends you could play an Iraqi couple who join a militia after the United States invades their country. The point of the game is the same though. You play two people in love who cling to their relationship as their entire world is destroyed around them.

So how to enforce that? I'll give that more thought.

[Simon C]

It strikes me that a cool pacing mechanic that would also tie the game themes togeth would be key phrases or elements of colour that serve as a timer for moving the game forward, so in Act One, say, each player has two or three "News Reports" which they can work into the story.  This could be as simple as mentioning a newspaper blowing past with the headline "WAR!", or overhearing some newscasters discussing the impending conflict, or it could be a fully written up news article.  Once every player has used their three news reports, Act One is over.  Act Two could require players to lose two or three things.  So maybe they lose their best friend, who's recruited to go to the front, or they lose their family home to bombing.  Once they've described losing the set number of things, move on to Act Three, and so on.

[Jake Richmond]

Thats neat. I had originally thought that as the war progresses you would slowly lose communication options. So you could start out communicatng with the other players in any way you wanted, but maybe in the second act you would lose internet communication, and inthe third act phone communication. I scrapped the idea as too demanding, but I do think that something like what you are describing would work.

[Jake Richmond]

I've done some more work on the 1st draft of The Year We All Died. I feel like I'm ready to compile everything I've written and start working on  second draft. You can read the new stuff here: http://www.s8.createphpbb.com/atarashigamesfo/viewtopic.php?p=126&mforum=atarashigamesfo#126

Comments and feedback would be vey much appreciated! They certainly were last time.


Thanks,


jake

[Alan]

Hi Jake,

I haven't had a chance to look at your draft yet, but I wanted to throw out a concept. One theory of story structure I really like says that a complete story will have four throughlines: one overal throughline of events everyone is dealing with, one main character throughline of personal concerns, one impact character throughline, and one relationship throughline between the MC and IC.

I think you can totally make a roleplaying game work by scripting the overall throughline and leaving the relationship throughline, with maybe bits of the MC and IC, for the players to create.

I also think this can be done in even a one session game. I'm thinking specifically of how Shab al Hiri Roach sets up a set number of college events for the players to play within. You might list a number of key events along the overal story of the effect of war on society: prosperity before, politicians promoting fear, righteous declaration of war, the cost of war, loss and devastation, the day the war ends, recovery, the children. I got carried away, but get the idea.

Also if you haven't already, look at It was a Mutual Decision, Shooting the Moon, and Breaking the Ice for relationship mechanics.

[Jake Richmond]

Sorry it's taken me a few days to respond Alan. I've been living it up at Go Play! NW

I haven't had a chance to look at your draft yet, but I wanted to throw out a concept. One theory of story structure I really like says that a complete story will have four throughlines: one overal throughline of events everyone is dealing with, one main character throughline of personal concerns, one impact character throughline, and one relationship throughline between the MC and IC.

I think you can totally make a roleplaying game work by scripting the overall throughline and leaving the relationship throughline, with maybe bits of the MC and IC, for the players to create.

I think this is where I'm heading. What i want to do with this game is becomeing more and moe clear to me, and what you're describing is close to what I've been thinking.

Also if you haven't already, look at It was a Mutual Decision, Shooting the Moon, and Breaking the Ice for relationship mechanics.

Bought and studied. Big fan of all tthree.

[neko ewen]

Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot to add. The additions you posted and the mechanics with Hopes I think fills in most if not all of the minor level of mechanical stuff the game needed. And I absolutely love how that stuff is written as a lover addressing the reader ("If you choose to sacrifice me, I will die").

I'm sure not everyone spotted the Saishuu Heiki Kanojo influence, but I wanted to add that SaiKano is considered to be part of a genre called "sekai-kei" ("world-type"). It's sort of hard to explain (and there is little if any info on it in English), and it's one of those terms invented on the internet that's ill-defined. Other major works in the genre include Voices of a Distant Star, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu, Boogiepop Phantom, and of course Evangelion. According to the Japanese Wikipedia article on the subject, the essence of kekai-kei is a boy and a girl whose connection is interrupted by something that endangers if not outright ends the world they live in.

[Jake Richmond]

Thanks Neko. I've been scraping around for other works similar to Voices and Saikano, but I was having trouble defining what it was that I wanted. I knew that what I was liknig and "borrowing" from those two works was something very specific that I wasn't seeing elsewhere. That list is very helpful, and now I have a genre name to work with.

[Jake Richmond]

A quick google search for sekai-kei turned up this:

"There's only "me," "you," and "the world" (everyone else)."

That's great. That's everything I was trying to say tied up in one nice little statement.

[Alan]

A quick google search for sekai-kei turned up this:

"There's only "me," "you," and "the world" (everyone else)."

That's great. That's everything I was trying to say tied up in one nice little statement.

What about "Us"?

[Jake Richmond]

What about "Us"?

Well, the way I see it there's "you", "I" and "the world", and the point of the game is exploring the "you" and the "I" and creating the"us" together.