cyndane.mee.nu

So, I had an idea last night as I stared at the ceiling trying to sleep.

An idea that would my grand attempt to telling an interesting and odd story in a role playing game.

You know those shows where you've got the same actors from skit to skit playing different roles?  The game will run kinda like that.  The players would create their actor.  Each actor should have a personality quirk that would ideally show through whatever part they were playing in the skit.  Something that the "audience" could latch onto other than their name.  Something that the "audience" can go "Well, that's Henry, so he's going to be a smarmy jerk in this scene even if he's playing the paranormal investigator."

Gradually, the story will be revealed in the skits.  I don't expect the story to be revealed in the first few skits, but people should be able to eventually look back and see how I was hinting at it.  I just hope that people will find the story as interesting as I do.

My mechanics ideas are in the cut.

This morning's rant is brought to you by Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind, for the record.


So, for this game I need a system that can be very flexible, and after careful consideration, I've decided to go with BESM 3E.

Players will be given a pool of points to make their actor with.  This will be his base form that will carry from scene to scene.  For the first half of the game, the base form of the actor will not be improved on.  I have a very specific point in the game in mind before the actors will get points that can be spent on them.  And for the record, the actor's life outside of the skits will never be brought up.  For the purpose of this game, they don't exist outside of the show.

For every skit, I will hand out a pool of points with which to make their character's abilities in the new skit.  Some skits will get more points than other.  For example, in the high fantasy skit the actors will get a much larger pool of points than in the high school drama.  This will require quite a bit of cooperation between the players ("but I wanted to play the wizard") to figure out what roles they will perform in the next skit.  Players should also keep record of what they spent their points on for the various skits because it's entirely possible that we will revisit those scenes (at least we will be if things go as I plan).

This game will have a low penalty for death.  This is a show of sorts, so if the character dies in one skit, it was the character the actor was playing dying, not the actor himself.  He'll be back in the next skit.  The player will miss out on playing for the rest of that skit, but he is by no means out of the game entirely.

And for the record, I have the following skits planned already and am working on more: high school drama, high fantasy, Star Trek ripoff, and modern horror movie.

Posted by: Cyndane at 11:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 549 words, total size 3 kb.