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[AoshimaMichio]

Excuse me while I do a little recruitment drive here.

I need more players for rebooted Apocalypse How. In the game you utilize your money and company/organization in preparation for upcoming end of the world. What kind of apocalypse, you ask? Well, you get to decide that. Maybe others agree with your pick.

[piecewise]

I need some critters for an RtD about religious pilgrims in the post-apocalypse․ Anything from monsters to pack-animals to sapient mutants․ I'd greatly appreciate any ideas․

Any details? What sort of apocalypse, nuklear, magical, vague? What sort of feel for the game, dark and creepy, high-spirited heroics, bleak realism?

I was thinking incredibly vague apocalypse, with lots of mutation and weirdness. The feel of the game should be strange but plausible: it follows it's own internal logic even if the logic itself is crazy. For instance, huge versions of these things are used as pack animals in the verse (WARNING SPIDER) because those two little spikes on their back are excellent for tying packs to and they are easier to feed then other spiders, being omnivorous rather then carnivorous.
Edit: And I just learned they glue debris to themselves to distract predators, so they probably don't mind having packs strapped to them.

My Automorphica might do you right.  You can find it in the random generator thread of mine in my sig. A quick roll of the "Mythical creature" setting gave me a:

A giant Deer crossed with a monkfish that has 3 heads and transparent flesh.

OR

A mismatch Toad-Seal Chimera that can shoot ink from it's mouth, disrupt electronics and is immune to disease.


If that isn't what your looking for, I can always dig into the mechanics a bit and create you a custom made one.



















Unrelated, here are a few of game ideas I came up with but have no time to work on:


Unnamed 1:A transhumanist collectibles game. Sort of like Pokemon, but where the players themselves are the ones getting into fights, and the things they're collecting are synthetic organs and mechanical attachments.  Far future and semi-light hearted. Fights are to the death but technology allows instant resurrection so being murdered is a minor inconvenience. Try to be the best you can be with a chest stuffed full of extra hearts!

Heavy: A suggestion game where the players control a mech/power armor pilot in a "Reality Break" post Apocalypse. Travel as part of the world exploration corps and try to bring your particular brand of ancestor and tech worshiping civilization back to the untamed and nonsensical American frontier! I have partial map of this set up, and more written down, as well as specs for the power armor. Not much else though. Watch out for southern Arizona; I hear there are cities wandering around down there.

Unnamed 2: Players are doctors, nurses, or other crew on a Medical train, a sort of traveling hospital that moves around an otherwise very rural country, providing medical care to those who need it along the way. Much like the way Dentists and other doctors tended to make their rounds, traveling around a large area and helping whoever happened to need it when they showed up. 1800's or so tech level, low tech medicine, room for drama and darkness but also for idyllic landscapes and Ghibli style coziness.


 TALES OF A MODERN HIGH: A Dystopian game in which players use powerful disassociative and hallucinogenic drugs to battle against a government which controls the minds of the populace using unknown and transcendental methods that appear to defy reality. Abstract and dreamlike. Watch "Beyond The Black Rainbow".

[Fniff]

That is cool, piecewise. I'll take a gander at those generators of yours. Thanks to everyone else for your suggestions, too!

[Beirus]

So Unnamed 1 is sort of like an organic-based Medabots, Piecewise?

[piecewise]

So Unnamed 1 is sort of like an organic-based Medabots, Piecewise?

Never seen metabots, but maybe.

[DoctorMcTaalik]

This is a very rough explanation of an idea I had this morning. It takes obvious inspiration from both Clue and Mafia. I'm not going to elaborate on the actual setting I have in mind for the game, since it isn't relevant to the overall concept.

Clueless: A mystery, wrapped in an enigma, crammed into an RTD

Y'all wake up one day to find, lo and behold, somebody, we'll call him Mister Body, has been murdered. He was one of you, and now he's a corpse. One (or maybe more) among you is/are secretly playing as the murderer(s). Somebody, we'll call him the butler, has locked you all in. Or maybe you physically can't leave, depending on the actual setting. Regardless, you don't get out unless you take out the killer(s) before s/he eliminates you all.

Play begins in a centralized meeting room. This is the only well lit, open space on the game map; therefore, actions that happen within this room must be publicly posted on the main thread. However, the vast majority of actions will (presumably) take place throughout the rest of the building, as the players will be expected to investigate the circumstances of Body's death; therefore, most of the game will take place via PM's between myself and the players. They send me their actions, I send them their results and describe their surroundings. No player-player PM's allowed.

The players, if they have any sense whatsoever, will agree to return to the relative safety of the meeting room at certain (in-game) time intervals, to discuss their evidence. Of course, as this is still a roleplaying game, players may very well choose not to show up at all. Whether said players are simply hiding in a cupboard somewhere, in hopes of waiting things out, or if they happened to run into the killer, is up to the players to determine; there's no good way for them to divine the status of a missing player without finding a (possibly dead) body.

In order to encourage cooperation, I will be sure to scatter weapons (and other useful items) all around the map. Probably traps too. Certain players (the killer(s) in particular) may happen to start with such items in their inventory, as well.

Sound vaguely interesting?

[Megggas]

This is a very rough explanation of an idea I had this morning. It takes obvious inspiration from both Clue and Mafia. I'm not going to elaborate on the actual setting I have in mind for the game, since it isn't relevant to the overall concept.

Clueless: A mystery, wrapped in an enigma, crammed into an RTD

Y'all wake up one day to find, lo and behold, somebody, we'll call him Mister Body, has been murdered. He was one of you, and now he's a corpse. One (or maybe more) among you is/are secretly playing as the murderer(s). Somebody, we'll call him the butler, has locked you all in. Or maybe you physically can't leave, depending on the actual setting. Regardless, you don't get out unless you take out the killer(s) before s/he eliminates you all.

Play begins in a centralized meeting room. This is the only well lit, open space on the game map; therefore, actions that happen within this room must be publicly posted on the main thread. However, the vast majority of actions will (presumably) take place throughout the rest of the building, as the players will be expected to investigate the circumstances of Body's death; therefore, most of the game will take place via PM's between myself and the players. They send me their actions, I send them their results and describe their surroundings. No player-player PM's allowed.

The players, if they have any sense whatsoever, will agree to return to the relative safety of the meeting room at certain (in-game) time intervals, to discuss their evidence. Of course, as this is still a roleplaying game, players may very well choose not to show up at all. Whether said players are simply hiding in a cupboard somewhere, in hopes of waiting things out, or if they happened to run into the killer, is up to the players to determine; there's no good way for them to divine the status of a missing player without finding a (possibly dead) body.

In order to encourage cooperation, I will be sure to scatter weapons (and other useful items) all around the map. Probably traps too. Certain players (the killer(s) in particular) may happen to start with such items in their inventory, as well.

Sound vaguely interesting?

That sounds awesome!  Add me to the waitlist right now. 

[blazing glory]

Stuff

Sound vaguely interesting?

Yup.

[H4zardZ1]

Sounds like a over-flavored mafia.

[Harry Baldman]

I'd like to see a game where it's not played through PMs, and also everyone is the murderer. Play it more like Fiasco, with each player playing off one another to cause maximum disaster.

[ATHATH]

I like the idea of Unnamed 1.

[DoctorMcTaalik]

Sounds like a over-flavored mafia.

The premise is the same, but the mechanics are different. Mafia is a roleplay-lite forum game that centers around a rigid day-night system. Clueless, on the other hand, is first and foremost an RTD; players do what they want, when they want, and I roll dice to determine the results. If the killer gets a hold of a pair of scissors, there's no arbitrary mechanic preventing them from going on a rampage. Heck, a paranoid townie could start picking off her fellow players at random if she wanted, and hope for the best. Of course, as kills aren't a guaranteed success as in Mafia, she better hope that she doesn't fail a strength roll and end up dead herself.

I'd like to see a game where it's not played through PMs, and also everyone is the murderer. Play it more like Fiasco, with each player playing off one another to cause maximum disaster.

That sounds fun, but we're envisioning different games. My aim with Clueless is to create a suspenseful RTD, where players are limited to what information their player can gather; hence the unusual emphasis on private actions. I could remove the mafia-esque theme and make it a simple game about evading a serial-killer PC, but that would mean that the game would occur entirely through PM's, which isn't quite what I imagined either.

[monk12]

So rather like Trouble in Terrorist town, then; deducing the murderer and teaming up is the most effective strategy, but if you can make a build good enough to eliminate all possible suspects, hey, that works too! Do you have a mechanic in place for determining whether a dead player was the murderer, or does the game just end regardless of what everyone else is doing (likely unaware of anyone else's actions?)

The tricky thing with this much pm density is that things are less interesting to observe, just because players only have 1/n pieces of information to work with, and the audience doesn't even have that if nobody ever returns to the central room to exposit. If it were me, I'd give every player a "walkie talkie" or some setting-equivalent mechanic that allows them to remain in constant contact with the rest of the players, then pm their turns to them and require them to post what happens in the thread as they see fit (e.g lying, boasting, or dropping off the grid entirely if they want to be stealthy or if they lose/damage their communicators as part of their turn.) It gives everyone more input in the game, allows everyone more opportunity to engage in shenanigans, and perhaps most importantly it doesn't require people to spend their actions returning to a place and talking instead of gathering more clues/gear.


Incidentally, evading a serial killer PC does not require full on pm-mode if you assume the killer has some reason to know what everyone else is doing, whether it's ubiquitous technological surveillance or magical voodoo or whatever. Then everyone can play the game in public normally, with either the killer being supplied false public terms or playing entirely privately, only showing up as a sort of player controlled boss encounter.

[DoctorMcTaalik]

So rather like Trouble in Terrorist town, then; deducing the murderer and teaming up is the most effective strategy, but if you can make a build good enough to eliminate all possible suspects, hey, that works too! Do you have a mechanic in place for determining whether a dead player was the murderer, or does the game just end regardless of what everyone else is doing (likely unaware of anyone else's actions?)

The tricky thing with this much pm density is that things are less interesting to observe, just because players only have 1/n pieces of information to work with, and the audience doesn't even have that if nobody ever returns to the central room to exposit. If it were me, I'd give every player a "walkie talkie" or some setting-equivalent mechanic that allows them to remain in constant contact with the rest of the players, then pm their turns to them and require them to post what happens in the thread as they see fit (e.g lying, boasting, or dropping off the grid entirely if they want to be stealthy or if they lose/damage their communicators as part of their turn.) It gives everyone more input in the game, allows everyone more opportunity to engage in shenanigans, and perhaps most importantly it doesn't require people to spend their actions returning to a place and talking instead of gathering more clues/gear.


Incidentally, evading a serial killer PC does not require full on pm-mode if you assume the killer has some reason to know what everyone else is doing, whether it's ubiquitous technological surveillance or magical voodoo or whatever. Then everyone can play the game in public normally, with either the killer being supplied false public terms or playing entirely privately, only showing up as a sort of player controlled boss encounter.

Actually, now that you mention  it, a lot like TTT.

I'm not sure how, in game, the killer would be positively determined. I have a few ideas, but they all have their own flaws. I kind of want to keep the number of killers unknown, too; however, there aren't many ways to do this without having to arbitrarily end the game when the killers have all died. Perhaps for this first game, we'll just keep things simple.

I might just use that walkie talkie idea, though to keep things properly unbalanced I'll probably have to introduce limitations. Maybe their batteries are low, or they have a limited signal radius. Maybe they're just cheap as hell and prone to exploding.

[monk12]

So rather like Trouble in Terrorist town, then; deducing the murderer and teaming up is the most effective strategy, but if you can make a build good enough to eliminate all possible suspects, hey, that works too! Do you have a mechanic in place for determining whether a dead player was the murderer, or does the game just end regardless of what everyone else is doing (likely unaware of anyone else's actions?)

The tricky thing with this much pm density is that things are less interesting to observe, just because players only have 1/n pieces of information to work with, and the audience doesn't even have that if nobody ever returns to the central room to exposit. If it were me, I'd give every player a "walkie talkie" or some setting-equivalent mechanic that allows them to remain in constant contact with the rest of the players, then pm their turns to them and require them to post what happens in the thread as they see fit (e.g lying, boasting, or dropping off the grid entirely if they want to be stealthy or if they lose/damage their communicators as part of their turn.) It gives everyone more input in the game, allows everyone more opportunity to engage in shenanigans, and perhaps most importantly it doesn't require people to spend their actions returning to a place and talking instead of gathering more clues/gear.


Incidentally, evading a serial killer PC does not require full on pm-mode if you assume the killer has some reason to know what everyone else is doing, whether it's ubiquitous technological surveillance or magical voodoo or whatever. Then everyone can play the game in public normally, with either the killer being supplied false public terms or playing entirely privately, only showing up as a sort of player controlled boss encounter.

Actually, now that you mention  it, a lot like TTT.

I'm not sure how, in game, the killer would be positively determined. I have a few ideas, but they all have their own flaws. I kind of want to keep the number of killers unknown, too; however, there aren't many ways to do this without having to arbitrarily end the game when the killers have all died. Perhaps for this first game, we'll just keep things simple.

I might just use that walkie talkie idea, though to keep things properly unbalanced I'll probably have to introduce limitations. Maybe their batteries are low, or they have a limited signal radius. Maybe they're just cheap as hell and prone to exploding.

Definitely introduce limitations; it gives more plausible deniability for the players if they drop off the grid to do something nefarious and can come online with "oh sorry my comm needed a recharge, here's what totally happened last turn when I wasn't killing Player 2." If nothing else, various traps/techniques by the killer that can jam individual communicators until a situation is dealt with would be good.

As far as corpse IDing, the big reason for the game to maybe not immediately end would be to give a window for players to think they've caught the murderer(s) but really they haven't. Obviously this is tricky to do depending on your specific setting/scenario; perhaps some kind of situation where the players need to deal with a problem that can be solved by either correctly submitting dead/captured traitors or by taking a much longer roundabout method the traitors are trying to prevent (hence motive for the killings.) For instance, say the setting is futuristic terrorist hunting; everyone is trying to defuse a cyberpunk bomb in a subway, and the only way to do it is to sync up terrorist mindrips. The defuse override needs X mindrips (where X is the number of traitors, or perhaps traitors+1) and there are dead terrorists littering the environment. The long way to do it is to go out and gather up terrorist heads to shut it down, but if you can figure out who is the traitor in the group you can just use them; the catch is that mindripping is irreversible, so if you're innocent you're out of the game.

It's certainly not an easy problem, or even a necessary one for the game to work, but it could be neat.