RULESEvery turn begins when the GM posts an image of what has happened and the current state of events, the players respond by posting pictures of what their characters want/will try to make happen next turn, the GM takes this into consideration for the next turn. failure and success is completely up to the GM and there are no dice rolls or stats.
Only images are canon, never plain text, the GM can completely pretend to not know of any spoken or written language at all, likewise text by the GM is more helpful info than actually part of the game.
There will be various types of images, for stuff like combat classic 3d scenes will be used, for travel maps (whit Indiana Jones style red lines!), etc.
Conversation (this includes both talking, stuff like laughing/sneezing/other sounds, and silent communication whit facial expressions and glares only) is probably the thing most strictly governed by the rules as it involves text by necessity, and will be done in a format familiar to most players of computer games: a box whit a portrait of the characters expression on one side and text on the other, the portrait can be reused if you like but you are absolutely urged to make a new one for each unique facial expression, the portrait can be either full body or only the face (generally, you'll draw the full body when gestures or body language is especially important, and not otherwise), the box should still be an image file, feel free to use whatever colouration, fonts, distortion, glowystuff and whatever to gestalt the characters exact voice.
Talking is a free action, and players are free to converse by alternately posting new speech boxes whitoute GM intervention, this is the only ting players can do solely by themselves, and from that follows that each turn has only speechbox images, one action image for each character, and one GM image.
Each turn you are supposed to post a SINGLE image, HOWEVER an image whit many felds or parts is counted as one, and you can draw the character several times on the same image or any number of other tricks to get the information content of several images into this single one.
All my talk might have made you worried you need to be able to draw to play this, that is not the case, it'll just help a lot, stick figures made in paint whit the mouse are perfectly acceptable, however please put some effort into it even if you fail skill wise, and if you cant draw please note this is an excellent opportunity to LEARN. (after all, that's half the reason I starting this)
about the art form, ANY visual medium is allowed. Stick figures whit the mouse in paint? fine! Photo realistic oil paintings? Fine! pixel art? fine! ASCII art? Fine, as long as it does not contain actual language text! Machinima? fine! dressing up as your character and taking a photo? fine! a colague of a bunch of random goggled photos? Fine!
Character sheets are supposed to be a detailed image of the character, whit the full name to the side, doing an activity archetypical to the character. The character will assume to be exactly as it would appear to be according to stereotypes based on the portrait, in short, the book will be judged by the cover. (note that it's my stereotypes that count, meaning gender and race do not have any relevance to anything at all, and that you cant have a non-evil human character. :p )
EXAMPLESSheets: minimum (no example yet) -
Very Good -
So good it would unbalance the game if somone did something like this but luckily nobody will
Author
Topic: A Book to be Judged by the Cover - a visual RPG (Read 17364 times)