rpanons | Hear the voice of thanatos

Hear the voice of thanatos

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Let's make this a thing. Just general ideas of non-jamjar going on.

One time I had an idea for a game that was based on this idea of people coming to the setting in exchange for a wish. A world altering wish. There'd be some complicated but fun implications to it because this wouldn't be an endgame-result, but something that could happen in game time. They could effectively warp their own world into a brand new AU. Other people could app characters from this AU or play from original canon that still exists parallel to the AU. Imagine if you would, a villain going for this wish and the heroes arriving to this same game in order to use their own wishes to try and cancel out the villain's. Of course, in order to make sure character don't just get their wishes and go home, the NPC granting the wishes would word lawyer all the wishes and they'd often backfire.

Another idea would be based on the "Riverworld" concept. It's a series of novels, but I've seen only the film. But basically in the film, everyone wakes up in this world that is the afterlife, but it's effectively an all new life where people from across history are just sort of stuck together in a world where there's no structure or society save for the one that they build. They are 'trapped' in this world in the sense that they have moved on from their past life and there's nothing to go back to, but the world is entirely open to be explored and developed. I thought the movie had a great concept, but it was kind of lamely executed and focused on some weird stuff that I don't recall. But it would make for a very interesting cross-canon survivor style game. (If I ran this game, I'd probably enforce a variety in canons and implement some kind of character cap for each fandom so the setting feels more natural.)

What's your idea?

world hopping via portal realm!

I would really love a world-hopping game, and the Wood Between the Worlds would be an interesting concept to play with.

New characters could get a pair of "rings" somehow - or perhaps something similar and less complicated, like a ring that goes both ways, or just a charm that you hold for non-human characters - and use that to world-hop.

If someone wanted their character not to be able to return right away, you could easily have them get lost in the woods and lose track of their home pond.

The only real problem with that is attempting to get cr - so maybe each character can only get rings/whatever if someone enters their world first? I don't know.

I think you'd have to limit access to the amount of worlds in the beginning and unlock as the game progresses. The problem with that is having an excess of worlds, though, with characters spread too thin and forming IC cliques. Mind, IC cliques aren't avoidable, but having everyone in different places wouldn't help.

That could be avoided if characters don't have a choice in world hopping (i.e. everyone spends x amount of time in one world for reasons out of their control). I think it would be interesting if there was an underlying plot directing WHY worlds are chosen (as opposed to 'just because'.)

Maybe a different kind of portals, like books in a library? If books were only portals sometimes you'd have to find the portal books hidden among all the regular books, and every once in a while you could close one portal while opening a new one. Keep a certain number of portals open at all times but keep them changing.

This would work with a room of mirrors/gallery full of paintings/giant mansion full of locked rooms, etc, I just like books.

Riverworld basically is the original jamjar, so I think an idea like that would still be a jamjar... just one with a more open and explorable world than most games. I'm not saying that it's not a neat concept, but it's not really earth-shattering and new. There have been several open world survival games and several afterlife games already.

And the first idea sounds kind of fun, but I imagine that the wish-AU stuff would be a lot more relevant to characters from popular canons with many characters.

I want to see an inverted jamjar! People get dragged to whatever world and they discover it's possible to go home...for a price. Either they have to kill enough people, lose all of their memories slowly one by one, go batshit insane and live through it long enough, etc. It wouldn't be a bad mechanic for a horror game, especially for people who want to play out trauma but don't necessarily want a long term character.

the term "inverted jamjar" makes me think of everyone trying to get into a special location, rather than trying to leave it

That wouldn't be a bad idea either!

That would work. There could be a locked-up portal with several means of getting in, same thing.

I just want to see more AU games. Preferably ones that don't have school settings. AUs are such a fun way to bridge canon/medium divides and put a new spin on characters... I'm not sure why they have such a bad reputation. People will point to bad OOC genderswap AUs and such, but those are usually canon AUs within jamjar games, not characters in AU-only games.

AU games aren't bad, but they are certainly harder. Unless they're set on a mostly normal Earth, it requires a lot of research into understanding the game. More than just a jamjar, because you can honestly learn as you go in most jamjars, but in an AU game you have to have it all figured out when you start. And then of course the entire application process is harder because you have to write a history that complements their personality within the constraints of the AU world.

I actually enjoy doing this, but it's not everyone's song and dance.

That said, I'd like to see a good AU game without a school setting with a large world to go around and explore. When I first started RPing, all RPs were set in open worlds and you could go wherever the hell you want. Communicators weren't just lazy conveniences, but vital because you might be talking to someone hundreds of miles away. The best excuse for hiatusing your character was just that they were traveling from X to Y and that takes time. Since entering panfandom, I've always been bummed that travel has been taken out of the equation and everyone is always in the same area, even with AUs. I'd like a game where there is no central hub save for one where characters, for whatever IC reasons, decide to converge at.

I like AU games where characters can use the open world for their backstory, but where most of the in-game action is centered on a specific place for plot reasons. That's really the only way to have an open world game that's not dependent on communication devices (which aren't appropriate for all settings). I prefer face-to-face threads and that's hard if most of the characters aren't in the same place. But if characters need to travel somewhere else for a scene, they should be able to do so. As long as the mod has enough control to ensure consistency, open worlds can be fantastic.

In trying to make every game "easy" and accessible to every type of player and every type of character, we've ended up with a lot of very similar, very formulaic games.

I do enjoy my face-to-face stuff a lot. Which is why, honestly, communicators seem pointless in games where everyone is in one place. Even moreso in game where there's no generic NPCs. But I like the idea of people being all over the place. There can be a central hub, sure, but it's a little boring if over half the player characters are all there at once. When there's no central hub, it's easier for factions to form and people to have to pick loyalties. If 80% of the game is in one place, then it's going to be Us vs. Them where Them is just the NPCs.

I do wish that there were more games without communicators... I mean, sometimes they're a lot of fun, but there's no reason why they have to be the "default."

You can also build good factions by having some of them defined by the mods ahead of time.

I was discussing with a friend the idea, it would probably make a better DR than an actual rp (unless it was fleshed out more) but that was ONLY communicator based.

there's an episode of Outer Limits where a group of 6 people are all isolate as a fail safe, because the world powers know aliens are about to make contact. and one of them must push a button to stop a nuclear bomb going off every 2 hours or so, so that if the aliens are bad and take over we can just blow them and us up. So most of the episode is the 6 people have really indepth conversation over video chats (And then they slowly vanish off the grid, and then things go awful because Outer Limits)

Of course you could also do something silly with this, like how 90% of us only interact with people over our own "communication devices" (plurk, facebook, whatever.

I'm not entirely sure what constitutes a non-jamjar but I would love to see single fandom games be a thing again. A lot of them died out quickly because they had the stupid premises but they were fun while they lasted, and the few that did last were really great. There's something rewarding about spending two years with a group of 10 or so people building your characters and setting.

A single-fandom game would constitute one kind of non-jamjar, yes. On a similar but broader note, I'd like to see more games around that are intentionally focused on particular types of characters where the type isn't "characters from a particular medium". If anything, I'd like to see more genre-focused games.

I think the only hard part of games for only certain character types is that the lack of diversity makes it harder to stir things up. Like if you had a game designed solely for shonen heroes? Unless there was some other way to generate conflict, or the mods were super active in plotting.

More genre focused games would be nice but it seems like they either die really quickly for some reason, or just turn into slice of life like everything else. It would be nice to have some that stayed on task.

It'd really depend on the genre in question. A game for just shonen heroes would either be boring or burn the mods out, but a game designed for noir characters/spy characters/sci-fi techies/etc would probably be a lot more sustatinable, because there's a lot more those characters can do that's lower key.

I was in a really small single fandom slice-of-life game a long time ago, but it died out quickly because the group was so small.

I have probably been in about twenty or thirty single fandom games and only 2 or 3 lasted for any substantial amount of time. The ones that did stick weren't generic slice of life. You can go for a long time with a small group, you just have to get the right small group.

Yeah, the single fandom games I've done that have lasted have been plot-heavy AUs (either transporting the characters and much of the plot into a different setting, or some kind of what-if scenario. You can get some remarkably complicated plots out of only five people.

I like the wish idea. It gives them motivation. You'd need to figure out exactly what the terms are, maybe make them different depending on the character. You can't exactly say "you must stay here one year" and have it work out in RP terms.

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Hear the voice of thanatos

Non-Jamjar Ideas

http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Wood_Between_the_Worlds

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