rpanons | nothing but backseat drivers in this clown car

nothing but backseat drivers in this clown car

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as the title says.

i have a fairly well fleshed-out idea for a smallish game in the vein of Cloud Atlas, involving serial reincarnation of the characters over multiple lifetimes. there'll be a connecting plot throughout the reincarnations (there's an objective outcome to shoot for) but it'll generally be submerged within episodic play around pivotal events, much as the book itself is.

i have Ambitions for how the game'll work that take advantage of heavy backtagging and timey-wimey ambiguity to allow people to keep playing in whatever episode they enjoy the most, building CR with characters across multiple lifetimes and using forgetting/"multiple timestream" dynamics to keep exactly as much of it as they want going forward. characters will have significant effects on the setting--i have in mind multiple different versions of each setting based on events that do/don't happen in the prior one--though there will be a point in each setting when player characters' ability to affect subsequent settings is frozen, and all activity in the setting after that point turns into alternate universe memories vs mainline memories.

structurally, i want apps to be as minimal as possible because players are going to have to reinvent their characters for every setting. the initial app will be more around establishing character themes and the identifying "mark" that will follow them across reincarnations. subsequent apps--which are only required to play in new settings, and you can app in at any time after a setting drops, and you can skip settings entirely if you don't like them--will mostly be concise history and personality sections (<1000 words) + any resources/powers/whatever the character's got in the setting. you CAN retroactively app into a setting that's no longer affecting the main timeline; you can also submit an official short description of who your character was in that setting if you want to be able to handwave past memories without actively playing in it. (obviously the roles one can do with that will be limited in scope and reach, but.) (i could go on for a while on app mechanics because i have a lot of this thought out in excruciating detail; i will spare anon unless someone really wants to hear me ramble.)

ac will be deliberately light and agnostic to what setting people are playing in (and even when they started threads; if you want to keep making ac off an epic thread that goes back six months, that's fine by me). there will be rewards for better-than-minimal ac, but rather than being on a point system they'll be more structured around plot engagement and completion of (self-selected) character arcs. obviously durable object rewards will be tricky to use in this particular game, but i'm considering the possibility of things like pets/properties/etcetera that reincarnate alongside a character, or keep finding their way to a character, or a permanent upgrade in the power of roles someone can reincarnate into.

there will be exactly one (1) persistent mod-controlled npc in the game; contact with it will be based on character development and specific scenarios characters can get into, and it is there to be a lore-and-direction dispenser vs a buddy people can squabble over getting cr with. there may be other setting-specific npcs who show up, but one thing i'd love to do is have player characters fill out a lot of the otherwise-npc roles needed to make settings run. my thought on how to do this is to post a list of roles, both necessary ones and simply desired ones, that people can flesh their characters out for in apps. example: setting is a sea journey to an island for first contact with the natives; we need a native chief, her son, a ship's captain, a missionary, and the leader of the mercenaries the captain hired on for the voyage.

overarching plot themes will be exploration of how cultures grow/evolve over time and how memory can influence someone's development if it goes beyond a single lifespan. probably there will be other things. i don't want to talk about the actual plot objective here because i'd kinda like it to be a surprise players discover versus something the game says on the tin.

TL;DR: high-concept episodic game involving reincarnation and AU elements, backtag friendly in the extreme.

now, questions: is this anything that would--
1. interest you as a PLAYER?
2. interest you as a MOD? because while i'm happy to write up all the documents, wrangle plot, do apps and answer questions about the setting, i do not have time for active moderation (i.e. making sure no one's being naughty and slapping wrists if they are) or building the community/maintaining docs. (i do keep a mean google spreadsheet, tho.)

also because i'm a dumb idiot who forgets things--

the game's gonna be named The Widening Gyre

need me some yeats

Imma be real with you, this smells like Ink

But assuming you somehow aren't her, this sounds like something better done as a psl than a game. It doesn't sound linear enough to function well with multiple people, and the fact that you don't plan on revealing the actual plot to keep it a surprise would be an automatic turn-off for anyone wanting to know what they're getting into.

Also how would you expect a game like this to even work if you apparently have no time to mod it? It sounds like something that would need heavy mod direction, especially with a plot stretching across multiple character incarnations and lifetimes.

Like not to be overly negative here, but it sounds more like you want to see cool settings exist versus creating a setting where people can actually develop characters.

Don't worry, it's not Ink. If there's a question if I'm OP.. or Ink! mods can verify I'm not, I just know the person who came up with the idea and want to kibosh the Ink thing.

as i said, i can do a bunch of back-end mod things--including overall plot wrangling, especially since that can be prewritten vs done on the fly--but would not be great at doing comm setup & handling player disputes.

but thanks for the feedback! yes, it will be complicated and probably not appeal to most people & i am 100% okay with that.

re character development: the whole point of leaving settings open for people to play with throughout the life of the game is to let players do just that, instead of yanking the rug out from under em and forcing them to (mostly) start over every x period of time.

re nonlinearity: that's (kinda) the point! plot progression is linear (in that each setting follows the others in time; i'm not crazy enough to do the original book's sandwich structure), but because everyone's welcome to backtag and plan CR across multiple incarnations, you can set up cool nonlinear structure within your own threads--like callforwards to something else you're threading with another player. it's a feature, not a bug.

re no plot reveal: yep, aware of that. i will say that it's more i'm not going to lay the detailed objective out from go vs doing what is pretty common in horror games--"a strange thing is happening here, WILL YOU FIND OUT THE SECRET??"

HOWEVER, you've made me think that given how complex the game structure is, it might do better to be totally explicit about the overall end goal so people know what to structure around. i'm just a little antsy about making people feel constrained in how they rp (esp in small groups, which i expect this will be) because they have to get the "best" outcome from a pre-determined batch that their rp
affects. you get some uncomfy player behavior around that.

i'll give it a longer think though. :|a

Which part of this seemed AT ALL inkesque to you.... if nothing else the coherence of the prose should have made it obvious

i'm tentatively interested and have a few questions. recolle was my introduction to reincarnation games (though i dont think there's been many since sadly lmao) and i loved creating AUs for my characters and planning pre-game CR. the concept of doing this multiple times in a game is tempting, especially knowing i can use this to play with my CR and lay down character arcs. an overarching plot is also very interesting.

1) if i were not interested in playing the game in a nonlinear way, would this be possible? episodic implies that there will be consistent lifetime progressions for our characters, but would i have to "lifetime" hop through out the game, so to speak?

2) you mentioned being able to app into previous cycles. does this essentially mean playing out multiple lifetimes concurrently? that is to say, i play bob in lifetime C. someone i am interested in playing with apps their character into lifetime B. so then i would have to play bob in lifetime C and B at the same time? basically: is there a way for characters in different lifetimes to interact? my first thought was that someone could app into a timeline where people don't really play, but i might be confusing myself on this.

3) this is kind of a sub-question. can different people play the same character in different lifetimes or is it one player in each lifetime?

4) do you have a planned character cap, ideal mod team size, etc? i think that this might be something that needs a decently present mod team, and i wouldn't want anyone to be run ragged modding the game. you mention that this would probably be a small game and i agree, but do you have an idea of what you think you could handle?

5) is this entirely AU or would characters' OU selves play any part in the game beyond still being batman, cap, bucky, etc?

finally, i feel a little confused about the nonlinear mechanic you're advertising so i just want to make sure i'm understanding!

i app Bob into the game, during episode 3/lifetime C. i am welcome to play only in lifetime C if i would like to, or A and B as well, or even just A or B. i can talk to players about their AUs and plan out my character's lifetime prior to me apping into the game in previous episodes. as plot progresses, i am also able to/encouraged to play Bob in lifetimes D, E and so on. the actual plot of the game is linear, but can be affected by any character in any lifetime, so for example: the game's plot is now in lifetime D, but Sally is in lifetime A and does something that affects the progressing plot. is this correct?

hopefully this isn't too much, i also apologize if i'm being a bit of a debbie downer lol i would love to see this game around and would probably tdm at least just to see what it's like!

thank you for the interest!! i'm glad to hear it's got some appeal outside of me and a couple of buddies i've pitched it to; i don't know what recolle was doing with the idea at all, but if there is a niche for another reincarnation game, well, i'd be happy to throw this at it.

1. you would not be required to lifetime hop! only the most recent setting ("cycle") in the game will be affecting the on-going main plot, so if you app in when there's four cycles out, you only need to join the fourth one and can totally ignore the other three if they don't appeal to you. the cycles will be introduced in timeline order, so each will be further into the future than the cycle preceding it--in that way character progression IS linear. apping into completed cycles to play around is 100% an option, not mandatory.

the "nonlinear" aspects will mostly apply to developing CR further during a past lifetime, and then being able to introduce that via remembering it in a newer lifetime. as a concrete example: let's say cycle C is the current cycle and it's been running since the start of april. on april 10th, bob & alice's players decide to start a new thread back in cycle A because they really enjoyed the setting. during that thread, bob proposes to alice and they go have a spontaneous wedding! while this hadn't happened (in our irl timeline) by the time cycles B OR C started, bob & alice's reincarnations in cycle B and cycle C might now remember the wedding.

2. kinda! to elaborate on your example, here's how i am thinking apps will work:

your initial app is two parts: the general game app, and then a cycle app.

the general game app is all about the character as she exists in the original canon, and is meant to be short and mostly touch on character themes rather than a detailed personality and history. it will also include a section for describing the identifying mark that can always be found on the character in every reincarnation.

the cycle app is the character's AU persona for the *currently* active cycle. every new player will app into the currently active cycle first, before submitting apps for past cycles.

once you're approved and in the game, you can then immediately submit apps with the appropriate AU information for any past cycles you want to start playing in.

so in your example, both you & the other player would app into cycle C initially. then if you wanted to play in B with them, you'd need to app whatever B-AU of bob you want to play to cycle B.

CAVEAT, tho, because i realize you might end up in a position where what you really want to do is play the cycle C version of bob against the cycle A version of alice--i am thinking of various ways to have characters continue unchanged through several cycles, to give people options.

one option would be a character variant that remembers all past history across all reincarnations, including the origin material, very early on in life. so these characters may have very different bodies across reincarnations, but they have all their lifetimes of memories to work from.

another would be characters who actually just live through several adjacent cycles. if the cycles are close to each other in time (and i'm thinking there could be some that are at most two-three decades apart, depending), these could be characters who have human lifespans and just happened to make it to the next cycle. otherwise, these could be various types of long-lived or immortal critters.

deciding to be one of these things post-hoc if you app into a later cycle but want to play in an earlier one might be tricky, i realize, so i'd have to think a bunch how to implement that fairly.

3. i'm 100% open to copies, since everyone's AU'd anyway and presumably will be doing totally different things with their AUs. i might revisit this if two people playing the same character both wanted to have that character remember all the way back to their origins, though. maybe the limit is "any number of copies of the character who can't remember their origins, and one that can".

4. honestly i'd be surprised if this game got to forty active characters--and i would say that would be about what i'd be up to managing, though again i might revisit that considering even three cycles would mean forty on-paper characters is actually 120 different characters (at most) bouncing around three settings. for a mod team--i'd want one more dedicated behind-the-scenes plot mod with me, one-two dedicated spreadsheet/application wranglers to keep track of who's who, someone to prettify the comms (who could just help make it look nice at the start and then retire to a glamorous life of periodically consulting via messenger, rofl), and possibly a floater mod who could flex to anything else. which is a big mod team for a small game, but many moving pieces, etcetera.

5. so see above somewhat on this! i'm thinking about different ways that could work--

one is as i described above: OU selves may or may not be available via past-life regression, depending on what players want to do/# of copies in the game/etcetera.

another option: OU selves are entirely confined to a tea room/meta community where they can watch all the goings on and interact with each other in a kind of "green room" scenario, but they can't affect the plot (initially...)

a third option: OU selves live on a space station or in a mystical time cavern or in a weird dimension where they are actually SENT OUT to these past lives, knowing they need to live them all the way through and perhaps complete a mission before they return. most OU selves will not remember themselves or the space station/time cavern/weird dimension during their "away mission," but will remember all their lifetimes while they're in home-base. there may be an additional metaplot for the OU characters to engage in along with the overall plot being accomplished by the reincarnation part of the game.

the third option, i feel, changes the flavor of the game most but seems like a potentially useful compromise to deal with OOC coordination problems for getting two characters together in the same lifetime with the right personalities.

also i thiiink i answered most of this above, but to reiterate: when you app in initially you'd need to app to bob cycle C if it's the currently active one. it's certainly okay, though, for you not to play much (or at all, if you're okay with having no plot impact) in cycle C in favor of playing in cycle A & B instead, and then picking up the plot in cycle D if it's more to your taste than C was.

for plot impact, though: in order to save everyone's sanity, only things done in the CURRENTLY ACTIVE cycle affect the overall game plot(*). so if cycle D is the currently active one, anything sally is doing in A does not alter the plot. HOWEVER, any characters who interact with sally may have memories of the past having gone *differently* than what's widely believed/reported to have happened in cycle E.

this could extend to really dramatic stuff, like sally could embark on a campaign to destroy the world in cycle A after cycle A has closed. obviously she didn't affect the whole plot because cycles B, C, D, and E happened on the undestroyed world, but bob, jeremy, and cody could now have memories they swear are real of their lives ending when the world blew up back in cycle A. SIMULTANEOUSLY, if adeline and benny want nothing to do with sally's world-ending plot, once the cycle's closed, nothing she's doing has to affect them as they play out their coffee-shop AU in cycle A.

this is not the case for an open/active cycle--player choices have consequences for all characters then--but once it's closed, people can pursue their own timelines and interweave them (or not) as they like. (please tell me if this sounds like a terrible idea ROFL)

(*) the one exception to this is that i am considering having bits of plot-relevant information still be available in closed cycles, and these could be carried forward to affect future cycles.

also not too much at all!! i hope this is, in turn, not too much to take in all at once.

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nothing but backseat drivers in this clown car

cloud-atlas-esque reincarnation game over multiple lifetimes

sa

Re: cloud-atlas-esque reincarnation game over multiple lifetimes

Re: cloud-atlas-esque reincarnation game over multiple lifetimes

op

Re: cloud-atlas-esque reincarnation game over multiple lifetimes

Re: cloud-atlas-esque reincarnation game over multiple lifetimes

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