rpanons | Countdown to free!dom

Countdown to free!dom

Rundown:

rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

CONCERNS | RESOURCES

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Okay, so I was the one who proposed this idea on wankgate but I can't find it again. Basically, an ASOIAF-based AU game where whether you are nobility or peasants is completely randomised. I draw up the family trees and people app by writing up their character's personality, including what parts of their personality are informed by their history and which part of it is innate. After they're accepted and given a place, they can work out their AU history. All of this would be established before the game opened properly.

Thoughts?

I think I said it on wankgate too... I'd be 100% excited about an ASOIAF AU game even though I've never read/seen the series, but the random assignments are a big, big turnoff. I can't write a good, nuanced personality for a character without thinking about the way that their history (canon or AU) has influenced them.

One of the things I love about AU games is that I can keep a character's canon social position and job (or at least a setting-appropriate equivalent), instead of just throwing them into a jamjar where everyone is more or less socially equal and living off the goodwill of NPCs. AUs are fun because I have more control over my character's relationship with the game world, not less. Some of my characters are canonically leaders, or soldiers, or thieves, or priests, or scientists... what they do for a living and what their upbringing was like affects their values, their motivations and their flaws. Change the background too much, and I might as well be playing a completely different character. The nature vs. nurture debate will probably never be resolved, but I don't think there's a large "innate" component to personality (except maybe with regards to some mental disorders). Splitting personality into "innate" and "informed" traits strikes me as really unnatural.

I'm a big fan of the ASOIAF books and would jump on board an AU game set in-universe for it like it was the last life-boat on the Titanic.

But the randomized background thing sounds like a huge downer of an idea. I can imagine why it would be attractive to a prospective mod (not everyone can be a high lord or foreign nobility or what-have-you), but for a player it sounds deeply anti-fun. AUs are a hard enough sell for most people already, and taking away the freedom to adapt your character naturally to a new setting spoils a large part of what makes them great.

You could just cap nobility, though. Like only one noble per player.

Ideally, you want 3-5 major, clearly defined factions in a game, with subgroups of characters and families within those factions tied together by loyalty, blood ties or mutual goals. You want to maintain a certain balance of power, and you want to empower active and engaged players to come up with their own conflicts and plot ideas. And you want to discourage having too many "neutral" characters who are going to remain on the periphery of major plots. In a game with an ASOIAF setting, you also want a variety of social classes (at least based on what I've gleaned about the series from Wikipedia).

Yes, you can achieve a balance by randomly assigning characters... but random assignments rarely work even well for jamjars, and AU games have a whole host of extra concerns.

But you can also achieve balance by temporarily capping certain families/factions/social classes when they get too big. (I remember that The Sky Tides, one of the biggest and most active AU games on LJ, successfully did this.) It might be best to have the starting noble houses be mod-defined with limited slots, and have unlimited slots for commoners. You can hold players who want their characters to take major leadership roles or create new factions to somewhat more stringent AC standards - that helps prevent players from squatting on roles that are critical to the plot. There are a lot of ways to deal with a big, plotty setting that still give players enough autonomy to AU their characters and have fun.

Part of why I came up with the randomised system is that people were complaining (about other games) that too often the factions that characters were put into very quickly became 'the hero faction', 'the villain faction', the 'cute and sweet faction', etc. So this was partly to prevent that, as well as to encourage conflict within a house, or perhaps within ranks for peasants/non-nobility.

For personality that's based in history, many characters have personalities that are informed by something their parents did- given what I've come up with, I felt I would leave it to the players to decide if they want to set their characters having the same relationship with the child having developed the same way.

Does that make sense to you? Is there anything you find problematic?

Well, you could deal with some of that by defining the traits of major factions yourself and giving them some depth beyond "good" and "evil." Your worldbuilding has a huge effect on that. Faction A might be peaceful and democratic and sweet, but also inefficient and bureaucratic and socially repressive. Faction B might brutally invade its neighbors, but life for its citizens might be surprisingly egalitarian and they might have a passion for the arts. Faction C might be decrepit and floundering but on the brink of a major transition that can be lead by players - will it fall to a peasant takeover or a military coup, or will some charismatic noble seize power? As long as there's enough variety within the factions, players should be able to pick one that fits their character well enough... and then, as the game progresses, the factions can develop too.

I think ultimately the goal of a native AU history is to rework the major elements of the canon backstory into something that fits within the game's setting, not to make major changes to the character. Major changes to a character's background (like blood color swaps for Homestuck characters, for instance) can be fun, but they also come very close to turning that character into an unrecognizable OC.

Okay, I get what you mean. Psrt of the problem as I understood it was that players often chose factions filled with similar characters to theirs, leading to whole factions of the same kind of people like Ravenclaw and Slytherin (leaving aside that the actual houses were filled with strongly dissimilar people with one common character trait...) Their perception and decision has been less based on the faction description and more clique/preferred CR-based. Having both pros and cons to the houses can negate those.

I understand that, but I also find it easier to AU a character when I don't have to take other characters' histories and personalities into account, especially other characters that would likely be from different canons originally. So there will be much less work for septas (priestesses), guardsmen, basically anyone not born into a major family, I think. I also like your suggestions above.

So:
-1 major and/or noble role per player
-players can choose a noble house but not their character's place within it unless they specify that they want a major role (although they cannot choose a specific role: head of the family, matriarch, patriarch, boy-king, etc)
-caps for each house. I'll draw up the family trees beforehand, because that can be unequal; there are several houses that have few branches and one house has a huge family tree.
That's what we have so far.

Yeah, I've been in Harry Potter OC games and waaaaay too many players (and mods) take a very simplistic view of house alignments. And that makes things restrictive and boring - what if I want to play a character who does "evil" things for noble reasons, or a "good" character who makes tragic mistakes? Even the non-noble characters are probably going to align with one faction or another, so design them with enough variety and moral ambiguity to accommodate a nice range of personalities.

I'm okay with not being able to choose a noble character's specific rank in their household, or only being able to choose certain ones from a list of open roles (that's how The Sky Tides handled the issue of rank). Since AU games tend to be small and players can only have one noble character each, the noble houses will probably made up mostly of NPCs. And that's probably a good thing for keeping the game balanced.

So far, so good! I think a game like this could be a lot of fun!

if you are going full ASOIF on this game as well, i think you'll need to come up with some more stuff for non-nobles to do because there really aren't many normal peasant characters in the books

things like the night's watch or the septons would be good, but they are men-only which leaves a lack of things for the female non-noble characters to do really

Fixing the plot and the focal points of the game's setting so that it'd make sense for characters from a broad swath of social classes to interact would be the most important hurdles for an ASOIAF game to overcome. It honestly sounds like a huge lift to pull off, the more I think about it.

I'll probably take the background, the geography and such, but I'm thinking of just coming up with new houses because I'm darn sure there's going to be some bias from fans. I know I would love to play a Targaryen even if none of the characters I play would suit them. (side-note: if I do get this game off the ground I'm just going to mod, not play. Bit too much on my plate for that.)

I've been kicking around the idea of skewing gender roles a bit. It started off with the family trees and someone being randomly placed as the kid of one house marrying into another, and then I considered that I could conceivably assign a same-sex couple by chance. So I think I'm going to have some gender equality in those roles: Night's Watch could recruit both male and female criminals (plus volunteers I suppose), there could be a High Septa OR a High Septon, and so on.
(For the Night's Watch there might also have to be some sort of background dealing with rape, though. I'll think on that a little more.)

Non-nobility might be people like Varys' spies (though of course Varys himself won't be in the game), or servants in the castles. Mercenaries, travelling bards, courtesans... I'll work on that.

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2013-07-04 16:59 (UTC) - Expand

+1

(Anonymous) - 2013-07-04 18:48 (UTC) - Expand

OP

(Anonymous) - 2013-07-04 20:09 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2013-07-05 12:21 (UTC) - Expand

ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2013-07-05 18:41 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2013-07-05 18:55 (UTC) - Expand

da

(Anonymous) - 2013-07-05 21:00 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2013-07-08 11:43 (UTC) - Expand

This isn't a real idea

but I've always wanted to start an RP based on one of my favorite series because I think it would be an interesting game, but it's a pretty damn obscure canon and I doubt many people would be interested in something they'd never heard of.

Basically the story is that there's been a secret war waging on Earth between different factions of people with supernatural powers. The different groups are based on different kinds of powers- there's groups for Eastern and Western magic users, psychics, mythical creatures, etc. They've been hiding from the regular humans and battling for control in the shadows for thousands of years, but around the turn of the century the conflict really starts heating up. Whether they're moving towards an era of peace or the apocalypse; one way or the other, things will be decided soon.

Long story short, characters being brought in to the RP would be placed in a faction based on their powers/history and everyone fights. It could be either AU or jamjar; there's ALREADY canon alternate dimensions so there's tons of explanations I could use for people being brought in if I went that way. People seem to like these kinds of battle/heavy plot games sometimes, so I just think the setting offers itself perfectly to the premise. But, as I said, this is a pretty obscure franchise and I don't know if anyone would go for it.

If you know what series this is, you get a shiny gold star.

is it tcg based

y e p

although I never actually played the game myself, cause, you know, Japanese. but the manga is one of my favorite series.

what series is this? i'm interested

since anon already basically guessed it- Aquarian Age! Started out as a card game, got a cruddy anime version and a short manga called Juvenile Orion (which later got a crappy live-action movie version). There's some more info about it on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquarian_Age

ooh, i vaguely remember the cruddy anime. what's better, the manga?

*I* certainly think so! The story is tighter and I like the characters better. But I'll be honest; it IS a short series that was created solely as a tie-in to the Juvenile Orion expansion. It was supposed to pique interest in the card game, so it can occasionally read like a typical reverse-harem cliche and leaves a lot of unanswered questions. But I LOVE the characters and the unexplored potential of them and the world. It's only five volumes and can all be found online (though the first few chapters have a couple odd translations before they switched to the official scans). I highly recommend it!

[/sales pitch]

A planet, approximately earth-sized, tucked away in an artificial pocket between dimensions. A small team of multiversal explorers stumbled across it, and immediately knew they had made an exceptional find, because this planet was impossible: vast deserts bordering sharply on rain forests, volcanic wastelands ringed by frozen tundra. It was a patchwork planet assembled with no mind for the laws of geology or physics, as if some enormous hand had plucked out sections of various others and pressed them together, somehow leaving each section separate from the others.

Which, they soon discovered, was exactly what it was. It was created by the last members of a dying alien race, millions of years ago, as a monument to their former glory.

The planet clearly needed exploration: if this species was advanced enough to create something on this scale, who knows what kind of artifacts they might have left behind? There could be cures for all diseases, deadly weapons of war, new materials with incredible properties, unlimited energy sources...and that's without ever touching on the natural resources that these chunks of planet could contain. A treasure trove of riches, ripe for the taking.

But the small group of explorers who stumbled across this trove lacked the manpower and equipment to exploit it. Not only was there a huge amount of ground to cover, much of that ground was exceptionally dangerous. To that end, they founded the Ozymandias Pandimensional Surveyors Corporation, and approached governments, corporations, organizations, and individuals from all across the multiverse with an offer: commit manpower and resources to the exploration effort in exchange for a share of whatever is found. Given the riches involved, a more than fair offer.

(So yeah, so characters would be recruited, either directly or through their bosses, to take part in the mapping of this planet. Characters would live and work on a mobile floating platform, descending to the planet's surface to explore, scavenge, and bring back samples for analysis. Each month or so , whatever the plot interval is, the platform moves on to the next sector of the planet while a mining/excavation camp is set up in their wake. Each sector is full of unique dangers and wonders alike to be found. Would require imaginative and moti aged mods)

I would love a game like this!

You'd definitely need good mods for this, and the players would have to be motivated too, but if you could get that combination this would be awesome!

Seconding the above. You'd need some great mods and proactive players, but I LOVE this idea!

I'd look at this game while stroking my beard thoughtfully, if it were to come into being.

The description of this planet reminded me of Minecraft and I immediately became excited.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Countdown to free!dom

GAME IDEAS

Re: GAME IDEAS

Re: GAME IDEAS

+1

Re: +1

ayrt

OP

Re: OP

OP

Re: OP

Re: OP

+1

OP

Re: OP

+1

OP

(no subject)

ayrt

Re: ayrt

da

(no subject)

Re: GAME IDEAS

Re: GAME IDEAS

Re: GAME IDEAS

da

op

Re: op

Re: op

Re: GAME IDEAS

Re: GAME IDEAS

Re: GAME IDEAS

Re: GAME IDEAS

Re: GAME IDEAS