Done as an exercise:
Reese Beulay, Roadway Prophet
Parent: Hermes
Nature: Fanatic
Author: Bryant
White Wolf put up the Scion demo the other week; I just got around to downloading it. Scion is the one where you play the children of gods in the modern world; it’s not the World of Darkness. They’re going for a Mage: The Hero Defined feel, and not coming up much short as far as I can tell from reading the demo.
The system is standard Storyteller, tweaked for heroism. Successes are 7 or more on a ten sider, rather than 8 or more. PCs have a Legend rating, and penalties can’t bring your die pool beneath your Legend rating. And, of course, there are stunt rules.
I count six different kinds of special powers you get out of being a hero. Epic attributes are a lot like Aberrant’s Mega-attributes; they give autosuccesses and provide variable benefits related to the attribute. Nothing else is really explained in the demo. I’m a bit concerned that there’s too much complexity there, but we’ll see.
Combat is pretty heavily revamped. It’s reminiscent of Feng Shui, in that every action takes a number of ticks. If we’re on tick 3, and I take a Speed 3 action, I’ll act again on tick 6. There are no rounds, however; you just keep going until the fight’s over.
For example characters, we’ve got a jetsetting gunslinger child of Aphrodite, a former US Marshal investigative type who’s the son of Horus, a cardiac surgeon child of Tezcatlipoca, a teen auto mechanic whose dad is Thor, a necromantic embalmer from New Orleans who’s the daughter of Baron Samedi, and a photographer/martial artist child of Susan-o. That happens to be one Scion from the six pantheons outlined in the main rulebook.
I’m sorta medium amped for this. Street date is a couple of weeks from now.
EMI’s going to sell all their music online without DRM. It’ll be available through iTunes first; it’ll also cost 30 cents more for a track without DRM, but the quality will be twice as high. If you want to keep the old price, you’ll still be able to get DRM’d tracks for a buck.
Albums will be DRM-free at the same old price. You’ll be able to convert your DRM’d tracks to non-DRM tracks for 30 cents per track.
This is pretty good. Philosophically, I don’t want to pay more for music without the DRM, but since the quality is better I won’t mentally grumble too much. And since I buy most of my music by the album anyway? No big deal.
I should be able to convert full albums to DRM-less at no charge, though.
This is not actual game text, which would want to be substantially more evocative.
Inside the Egg is set in a dystopian future, in the style of V for Vendetta, Matrix, or when you get right down to it we’re all stealing from Brave New World. (Not the superhero game.) The central paradigm of the government is the Egg; at an unspecified time in the past, something awful happened, and only the pure security of the World Egg can keep us safe.
There are no corners in the Egg. There’s no place to hide evil things. It’s pure in color, so you can’t avoid scrutiny from your fellow man. It is the perfect, safe shape. Architecture emulates the Egg. Everything does.
There’s a drug that keeps everyone happy by the simple expedient of grinding away their memories. This, in fact, is why PCs begin with nothing written down on their character sheet. While the player may know what they want their PC to be like, the characters themselves are tabula rasas.
The progress of a campaign is the progress of the characters towards self-realization. As time goes by, they learn more and more about themselves by virtue of rebellion against the Egg. By definition and mechanics, the arc of a character is complete at the moment that they themselves have realized completely one of their three aspects (Mind, Body, and Soul, as per the character sheet.)
This is the Inside the Egg character sheet. When a campaign starts, it’s exactly this blank. No name, no stats, just an empty sheet. By the time a campaign ends, it’ll be nearly full.
Chris Lehrich is writing a series on designing fantasy cultures. Two chapters up so far, plus an introduction. Read and enjoy.
“I love it when a plan comes together.”
Vincent has a new forum. While I wasn’t looking, he’s started thinking a lot about immersion. This is awesome stuff.
Required reading: Breakdown of RPG Players. There are a lot of theories about what people want out of gaming, and then there’s actual market research. I could rant about this more, but I already have.
Preamble and rant done. Okay.
It’s easy to reward Storytellers; you give them more narrative control. Primetime Adventures is a great example of this kind of mechanic; when someone does cool stuff, they get chips which can be cashed in for more control. Nice little positive feedback mechanism there. You narrate well, and in exchange you get more narrative control: you’re rewarded for doing well at something you like by getting more chances to do well.
Same goes for Power Gamers. Or for Gamists, if you will. You kill things, you get more powerful. That’s about as direct a link as you get.
I will ignore Thinkers for now. Maybe later.
How do you give that kind of reward to someone who likes immersive play? You’re looking for some kind of tangible way to make their desired style of play better, or easier, or some such. But there’s very little obstruction to immersive play to start with, given a sympathetic group.
I guess you could start out with a less immersive structure. Say… something where everyone shares a common pool of characters, and control of a specific character varies from scene to scene, like the NPCs in The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, but more so. And as you accomplish goals, you get more and more control of a specific character, presumably one of your choice.
I’m not sure what an immersive success looks like, given that it’s a completely subjective thing. It’s hard to tell whether or not someone’s being immersive unless you’re that person. You could be complex and hinge the mechanic on character choices that are clearly not in the character’s best interests, but sometimes immersive decisions are in the character’s best interests.
But maybe you don’t need immersive successes; maybe more traditional game successes could have that sort of reward? No reason why not.
Similarly, perhaps you could keep the one-player/one-character rule, but hold back control of the character from the player until they “earned” it. This might work well in conjunction with a dystopian world — something where the State owns your life until you’re rebel enough to take it back.
I kind of like that. I should look at Game Chef before it’s too late, which it almost is. But…
MEMORY
DRUG
PALACE
CURRENCY
Yeah, I could work with that.
Any other thoughts? If you’re immersive, what do you want in terms of mechanical rewards?
You knew a career criminal by the name of Nolan. First name unknown; she never used it, not even with her close friends, which not all of you are. She used to work for the Outfit, running a club in Central City, but that was five or six years ago before she ran into trouble with one of their middle manager types. For the last while, she’s been an independent, doing jobs here and there.
Right now, you’re in Iota City, a small time city a ways west of the Tri Cities, which are a distance west from Central City. A couple of you live there, and a couple of you are pausing there for a while. Nolan died there, a week ago, in the back room of the Thinker’s place. She was shot. It happens, in this business.
There was going to be a job. The Thinker planned it, as per usual. It wasn’t working for the Outfit, but it was something the Outfit was very interested in, maybe because of Nolan; she was going to use part of her part of the proceeds to pay them off, and now they’re expecting it. So it needs to be done even with her dead; and besides, there’s still enough money in it to make both you and them happy.
So there’s still going to be a job. It’s a four-person thing. The Thinker doesn’t usually come on these, but he’s going to have to this time. It’s a risky thing. That’s why nobody bigger has done it. It’s a lucrative thing. Everyone has to start somewhere, and for some of you, this is your start.
If it works out, you’ll have what they call magic money. Money enough, and time.
I don’t really care about the Oscars anymore, thanks to Forrest Gump. However, I’m still capable of getting curious about the winners, and if Best Foreign Picture didn’t go to Pan’s Labyrinth, a small part of me wants to know why.
In this case, The Lives of Others just happened to be a better movie. Not by a huge margin, but I have no complaints about the Academy’s decision in this case.
It’s about two intertwining lives; that of Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent, and that of Georg Dreyman, a playwright. One watches the other; the other performs, unknowingly, for the one. The third actor in the drama, Christa-Maria Sieland, is a pivot point for everyone else in the movie. Her choices create the context in which the others…
Fail to meet, because they don’t ever really. But it’s her actions which bring Wiesler to reconsider his life as a watcher, and which bring Dreyman to idealism and subversion.
Despite the humanistic, nearly redemptive ending, I have to think of this movie as a tragedy. You have — well, five interlocking wheels of motivation, albeit the three mentioned are the major ones, which drive inevitably towards a tragic ending. There’s a coda, after the Wall falls, but it isn’t anything other than bittersweet.