SubscribeThe first official edition of Final Invasion will be coming along shortly – very possibly tomorrow – but before then, I wanted to pause and noodle about a game design thing.
My current project SNOW NOIZ is in alpha testing. I will be running a test myself at Origins (Thursday if I recall correctly) and hopefully off-site during Origins-week. Then I need to buckle down to final editting and layout if it’s going to get released on 08.08.08 as planned.
But that’s not the point of this post. Actually, this post is about a game that I’m going to write with the Indigo Jester this summer.
Let me give some background. Indigo is done with school for the summer on Friday. Magenta has gotten additional hours and as a result will be working in the office (as opposed to at home) more. Fuscia is already in day care two days a week. This means Indigo will be going to the office with Magenta for several hours a week. (And yes, the ‘office’ knows what they are getting into.)
So. I wanted to help find ways to occupy Indigo during his office time. He’s expressed interest in writing a game – so that brings us back to “the game I’m going to write with the Indigo Jester this summer”.
Unsurprisingly, Indigo is heavily influenced by the marketing of the world around him. When I asked him what kind of game he wanted to write, he said “something like Funkeys where you can go to different worlds, and I want to be able to have Pokemon as pets”.
Me, I’m more influenced by … well the marketing of the world around me. I’m currently inspired by the asian-inspired superteams that Morrison is playing with in the DC universe and a collection of the original Metal Men series and reality TV.
So – here’s what I’m thinking. The setting is “(Golden) Gate Land” the place where young wannabe’s go for thier shot at fame. One or more of the many networks based in Gate Land agree to sponsor the youngsters, setting them up with a amalgam pet, a selection of super powers, and a Morrison-inspired name.
They then get sent on missions which are broadcast to the voracious public.
Mechanically, the player has a fist-full of fame points which they can spend for success or horde to invest in legend (a permanent resource). I see a bunch of dice on the table of various sizes. When rolled, you track two things – coolness which refreshes fame and success which well leads to success. I’m toying with the idea of fame points, powers, name segments providing shifts which increase dice sizes. And I’m struggling with how to track the difference between success and coolness (I figure the two should be somewhat independent).
One thought I have is let d20’s not actually play into the success mechanic, but instead represent network mini-camera’s that follow the PCs around. At the start of the mission, you roll to see which networks are watching at that point. Then dice that match a network number translate into coolness.
I want PCs to always have a chance to succeed up until they are out of fame points. And then they can sacrifice themselves for success – which takes them out of the session, but of course can/should lead to legend.
The tag line: “Fame is Fleeting… Legend is Forever.”
Thoughts?
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foomf (SteveH)
/ June 3, 2008Just read through SNOW NOIZ…
The rules themselves have some typoes and such – did you want those identified?
I had trouble with the abstraction layer. You shoehorned things into the music paradigm so hard that it makes my ears bleed. How the “chords” translate into play is just so abstract that it’s like Vancian magic or the early Final Fantasy fights – things happen which resolve in your favor or not, but while they look pretty it’s not at all clear what you are doing. In other words, the explanations show how the mechanics work but not why you would want to play with them.
Eight frets … interesting but with the conceptual linkage to guitar, most of the effective “chords” are unplayable and make no sense. Besides, chords are formed across STRINGS; most guitars are either six or twelve strings (and with 12 strings, they are tuned in pairs). (Yes, I am nerdgassing here.)
It’s either too much, or too little, tied into music at this stage, IMO.