*Note: I might be new to this site, but not to RP'ing in general. That being said, be gentle with me~*

For quite some time, I've been messing around with ideas for RPG-systems, trying to patch and stitch something together in order to make the 'perfect' RPG-system. And by perfect, I simply mean awesome. So there.

In my quest to create this system, I've come across some ideas that needs to be tested in one or the other way - and that was when I stumbled upon these forums.

Base concept:
In the start of the RP, there will be two player-groups of about 2-4 players each.
Both groups will be responsible for making the characters for the OTHER group, making it so that the players don't get to make their own characters.

The RP itself will occur in a tribal/fantasy setting. Both groups will play in the same region, but won't be directly related to one another, meaning they don't live in the same tribe. One group, one tribe. The game will from that point onwards center around basic survival - in other words, it'll be a sandbox RP where the players choose themselves what they want to do, but with some heavy challenges in relation to survival.
*Note: Should the tribes unite or split, I will merge or split the actual RP-groups*

If a player-character dies, said player has to leave the RP. When this happens, another player may join the game in this players stead and take control of a NPC granted to them by me.

If a player succeeds to survive for long enough, the player 'retires', leaving the game for another player to take over. This new player must take over a relative of the retiring player, unless there aren't any, in which case another NPC will be designated for the player.

If one tribe dies out, that group is closed.
If both/all tribes die out, the game is terminated.

Setting:
We live in a world filled with wonder and danger. As a member of the the currently humble and meek human race, every step you take could easily be your last, every breath a potential introduction to pure agony. Although physically weak and magically inept, the human race holds some odd tricks up their sleeve.

Being masters of endurance and innovation, the humans have taken up the spear and brought life to fire, prolonging their otherwise short lives. The only question that now remains is, if this is enough to survive... For who knows when disaster will stumble across your path?

*Note: Setting is a work in progress.*

Summary:
To sum all the above up in one paragraph, this is the question my RP asks: What would a roleplay be like if there were no goals beyond survival, and if your actions had a direct influence on the future of said roleplay?

If you're interested, post in this thread or send me a message!
Any and all feedback or questions are welcomed!

To me, it seems a bit strict for players to have to leave if their character dies or succeeds. You might end up losing good players you'd want to keep playing.

How will you handle stats and challenges? It sounds like with things like perma-death kicking players out, it can't be freeform.

If it turns out to be too strict, then I'll loosen it a bit. A way to do this could be to force players to take a 'vacation' as a punishment for death before they could return. If this is too strict, then I'll loosen it again.

Also, I'm planning to go with something I call 'semi-freeform'. There will be stats and the like, but their direct effect is occluded and/or decided by me along the way. Either that or some simplistic system that I make up for this game or get recommended to me by someone. I don't want stats to be too big of a focal point for this game.

What do you think of this?

Personally, I don't enjoy this kind of thing, so I'd skip it.

However, I'll say that my general RPOL experience is that people really care about their characters.  Considering a game that doesn't die is likely to take weeks or months to accomplish anything in, that's understandable.  You're giving people two barriers to their characters... someone else is making them and permadeath.  There might be a market for it, but I don't feel like that's a recipe for very deep RP.

Also I'm not sure where the balance for character creation is.  Why would each group not just attempt to make the other group's characters as terrible as possible?  There should be a risk/reward aspect to that, somehow.  For instance, if you let the players make their own characters, then had a system where the sides got to apply disadvantages to each other (the harder you hit, the harder you get hit back), that might be more interesting.

In reply to swordchucks (msg # 4):

i agree with swordchucks, except on character mortality. I think it should be very present, but i don't think any sort of "forced vacation" in any form would be a good idea. You want good players posting, not just sending them packing for the next month and hope they remember/retain interest.

@Swordchucks:
The fact that the players don't get to make their own character is central to the experiment, and can't really be cut out. The alternative would be that I'd make all the characters - as long as the players don't get to make their own characters.

The idea is to try and remove player-bias and the concept of 'winning' from the game by substituting it with other aspects, which in this case would be survival and 'seeing the future of your actions in effect'.

@Eco cola:
Well, the actual idea is to get a 'flow' of players to go through the RP, just like one would die and leave ones child behind, a new generation taking over. So far, the 'vacation' thingy would be a bonus thing, mostly.

I still think you're putting too many barriers between a player and their role.

How about... the PCs provide a general concept and then you make their characters.  There's a list of "advantages" they can pick from, but by picking a bonus, the other team gets to apply an equal value "disadvantage".

---

I think that doing some sort of side-switching would be interesting.  For instance, the losing side would play the children of the winning tribe, and the winning tribe would be a new tribe.  It would flip every generation and, theoretically, you'd have an interesting hereditary line that could be followed.

It's quite likely that once a tribe loses one or two members, they would seek to join the other tribe, subserviently.  That would certainly speed up gameplay and keep downtime shorter.

Ahh, I think you're misunderstanding, there aren't any teams or anything. In fact, the players may never discover the other player tribe, and when they do, they won't be told that it's the other player tribe. (One group's threads are secret to any other group, right?... *newbie*)

But I do like the general-concept thingy. That way, they don't really make their own characters, but they still get to be a part of the process. That might work. :)

*EDIT*: If I make the characters btw, then there only needs to be one tribe.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:52, Sat 12 Apr 2014.

This one sounds like a recipe for disaster, because as has been stated, you're putting a lot of barriers up and not giving the players any reason to jump through those hoops. This just doesn't sound fun at all, and that's a problem. Here's a short list of the issues you'll encounter.

-No control over character creation. (This will turn a great many people off right away)
-No way to affect the system or even know if there is a system in place (There goes another chunk of players)
-Forced retirement if you die (another big chunk gone).
-No overarching goal or 'win condition' (there goes some more people)

Basically, you're stripping away everything that makes people want to play RPG's in the first place. While this makes for a great experiment, it's not gonna be a game concept many people will want to jump on, especially on RPoL where game longevity is bad enough as it is. And take it from me: If a game starts off badly, it will lose momentum quickly. You want to keep good, dedicated players as long as possible when you get your hooks in them, and this whole concept goes against that.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:58, Sat 12 Apr 2014.

But, wait, the things you listed are predominant in different styles of media these days... So why would you say they wouldn't work in an RP-platform?

*EDIT* Anyway, I think I'm going to go back to the drawing board. Thanks for your responses, everyone! Future feedback is also appreciated!
This message was last edited by the user at 17:57, Sat 12 Apr 2014.

This message was deleted by the user at 17:57, Sat 12 Apr 2014.

To this point: It's a good question, one that probably most of us don't think about too much explicitly.

Wouldn't one enjoyable thing (movies, TV shows, a popular book) + another enjoyable thing (gaming) = automatically more enjoyable?

Unfortunately no.

One large distinction is passive vs. active participation in what goes on. "Reality" shows are aimed at pleasing viewers, not pleasing the participants. Participants are generally bribed with promises of fame and/or fortune and so suffer through ordeals for the entertainment of the audience. While a show may have a million viewers, most of those viewers probably wouldn't want to trade places with the people on those shows.

Spectator sports and pseudo-sports are similar. While a viewer might enjoy "imagining" themselves as taking part, the realities of professional sports would be impossible to endure for the majority of people that watch them.

Watching drama and elimination-style programs may be entertaining, but experiencing drama and being eliminated aren't normally entertaining.


Another major factor is scripting/direction. Entertainment media is typically scripted or at least directed, it doesn't just work itself out. At the very least it tends to be "creatively edited" to form the huge amount of material into a smaller, cohesive whole. Video games as well -- however many options the game seems to offer, they're all delimited from the get-go, and the designers (probably) didn't intentionally allow any obviously boring stuff in, at least not without some kind of mitigation.

Books and movies can have any number of unforeseen twists, but there are still writers behind the scenes making it come together. That often includes "bending" the laws of the universe, making changes that retroactively affect the world, and possibly most frequently, tremendous coincidence that works for the narrative.

However that kind of direction doesn't work for most RP games. Players want to make their own decisions that stun the game master, not follow a script and simply provide dialog. That is more "acting," which is similar in some ways to gaming but different. There is almost never an external "audience" to an RP. Watching other people play RPGs is often extremely boring. The people participating in your game *are* the audience.


Then there is the time and effort involved. Depending on the game system, there could be hours of work put into making a character. Games take weeks, months, and if you're lucky years to complete by play by post. You have to consider what other people are doing, post your own reactions, work to keep the story moving day after day, without any simple way to account for real life concerns. It's not programming a Tivo to record a series, or being able to put down and pick up a book at will, and there's no huge pool of actor-wannabees available to replace cast members.

Joining a game or running a game is a commitment. Lots of people can't keep up their participation and games die, typically within 2 weeks. That's an everpresent truth. You will get more interest either as a player or a GM if you have a proven "track record." If you have no track record on RPOL, or your track record is terrible, you will have trouble gaining long-term interest. For that reason, many of us don't even bother applying to games that seem like too much trouble when we come in expecting it will fold within a couple of weeks anyway. Players (and GMs) expect a return on their time investment.

If a player is asked to devote hours/days of their lives to an individual game, getting invested in the characters, the world and the story, they will likely be highly turned off by any "single elimination" game. They will also be turned off by the prospect of perhaps having the chore of tending to a character they didn't want to play in the first place. A character isn't the same as choosing a shoe or a racecar in Monopoly, there's a lot more to it.

"Thank you for participating in this game over the last few months. Unfortunately your PC died due to uncontrollable circumstances so I'm going to have to ask you to get the heck out of here. No, I realize you could make a new character because I value your commitment to the game and your writing, but I'm not going to let you do that. Better to get someone in fresh. There's the door. You can hang out and watch as the story unfolds without you ... if you want." Phrasing it this way seems a lot less appealing doesn't it? That's how the idea of player elimination comes across though.


No game has an infinite supply of players clamoring to join. Especially experimental ones. The RPOL reality is that maybe you can scrape together 5-8 players for an experiment if it's extremely appealing and you're lucky, but you will lose several over time no matter what, and replacements will be hard to come by.

Thanks for takin' time considering my question. One could say just brainstorming is good enough of an experiment for me atm. Heh. :)



Hmm... But the opposite wouldn't necessarily be true, either.



I'm not sure I agree with this. The entirety of the roguelike genre is centered around elimination being part of the fun, and in sports, the chance of getting eliminated is why the participants themselves get a kick out of it in the first place. Experiencing drama and risking elimination is entertaining, although I agree being eliminated only will be entertaining to a select few, especially if it's early on.

From the game Faster Than Light: "Dying is a part of the fun. [...]".



But... If the players aren't acting at all, err... You'd logically end up with complete self-inserts. I can see how it's not a complete act, but without any acting at all... Well, the games just wouldn't be too diverse or interesting to the players themselves. I see roleplaying as living out a role in another universe, seeing the universe through this character's eyes and imagining what said character would do and feel, to live another's life... Which I guess can be likened to acting. You can say you're acting for yourself.

It makes me ask questions such as: How does it feel to have amnesia?



You've got a solid point there... I can see why that would be a problem.



Again, good point... Yea... Player elimination might not be a good idea after all. Hmm... Having ones character die permanently is probably enough of a motivator by the end of the day, now where I think about it...

That wasn't what I was trying to say. I meant acting as a profession, like on a typical stage production. Each actor brings their own touch to the performance, but in most cases there's the script already there, the director and producer(s) have their own ideas about how things will go, and the performance ends eventually.

A lot of "drama" and dialogue exchanges we see in media is produced in a controlled environment. Most conspicuously in skits where people are jerks to each other, but one party lets it slide for the sake of humor or pacing rather than getting offended or arguing too much. Such moments can be done in gaming but it takes effort from all parties, time spent building relationships, and some luck in the situation.

In most RPGs the player is the actor, but also the writer and director, and while they give a lot of consideration to the other people in the game, largely they post for themselves. Roleplaying is much more like situational improv than scripted acting. How the players have the characters respond in any given circumstance is up to them and never predetermined (if we skirt philosophical issues of predeterminism). Getting entertaining drama -- as opposed to "real" drama -- is very tricky.

If you ran a game this way you'd have issues getting it off the ground. The premise narrows down the number of players you'd get to start off with. Then expect to lose 1/4 of your player because they can't be bothered to wait for you to get up and running. Lose 1/4 for RL concerns (moving house, exams, etc). Another 1 or 2 who lose interest during play because they don't 'feel' their characters, or don't like the people they're playing with..

8 successful RTJs whittles down to 3-4 players after the first few weeks.
Then - based on bad luck or secret GM fudging - your character dies before you got going and you have to leave.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it could work on RPOL.

Look at how many people have responded to the concept...  that's enough for a game.

Many people like to have intelligent discussions.  Perhaps a game where there are more posts OOC discussing the game concepts, character concepts, and whatnot. Even if a character is out, there could still be plenty of involvement for the player.  Discussion and debate, just like we are having.  Perhaps even group decisions/voting that effect what happens in game.   Should we make food more scarce or animals tougher to defeat or whatever

Perhaps a thread where the GM and people not playing discuss things without the IC players seeing it.

A "Hunger games" like situation where the characters are in a environment with outsiders having some level of control.
This message was last edited by the user at 12:11, Tue 15 Apr 2014.

Several thoughts in no particular order :

- The game world sounds fine. Survival is a basic human goal and can be fun to roleplay. However, you should allow PCs and GM to discuss short, medium and long term goals. Short term: see tomorrow, medium: cross the desert to the grasslands, long: grow the tribe and secure long term survival... (Or whatever you choose). Just concentrating on surviving until tomorrow could get dull after a while.

- Char Gen system is bad. One of the things that excites a lot of good RPers is that they can create a PC that interests them. By all means put controls in place but you want your players to 'buy in' to their PC and care about them. If you insist on players not making their own PCs then just create a list of PCs that they can choose from. Otherwise you risk someone creating a cool PC and being annoyed that someone else gets to play them, or someone annoyed that another player made their PC a complete dork who can't fend for himself and is guaranteed not to survive.

- Rules for players leaving or taking a 'vacation' if their PC dies seem very harsh and will lead to the game dying. What if A is jealous of B for some reason and decides to smash his head in with a rock as they sleep. B is then ejected from the game because another player murdered them? Not exactly fair. PC death is fine, but allow the player to come back in ASAP with a new PC. Ejecting good RPers will kill your game very quickly.

- all PCs die and the game ends? What if both groups merge and then meet some kind of disaster, like a mudslide or volcano. Poor dice rolling could wipe out the entire party, and rather than allowing all players to laugh about it and begin rolling up the new tribe you end the game? Seems harsh. If you were playing it table top and half way through the evening the dragon killed all your adventurers would you terminate the session and send everyone home? I doubt it.

Hmm... With the feedback I've gotten so far, I'd say that...

- I'm going to make there be one single tribe instead of two.
- I'm going to make a semi-random character generation system instead of a 'another player makes your character for you'-system. The idea is to simulate that some things are genetic while other things came along as your character grew up.
- I'm going to add another long-term initiative, something like a coming apocalypse.
- Players will NOT be kicked on death - however, they are forced to take over one of the NPC's, unless they've gotten a child in their character's lifetime.

Sadly, I don't have much more time to fiddle with this right now as exams are coming up soon. After the initial responses, I hadn't expected to get any further interest, and I began to work on something else.

While I'd like to continue the brainstorming, I probably won't be putting an actual roleplay up anytime soon.

With that being said, what do you think of the above changes?

That certainly looks more palatable, in general.

You might consider doing a "lifepath" type chargen where you look at various stages of life and gain skills/abilities based on what you were doing.  The son of the tribal leader that spent his early years helping his father and the apprenticed as a hunter would have a different life from the orphan that helped the cook and apprenticed to him later.  Throw in some random events, and there you go.

Just a note, palatable and exciting are different for some people. I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to accomplish in this game. It seems like a means to punish players for dying, and further if they died without doing what you wanted them to do.


So you set up this fantasy world with the premise of "do what you need to survive", but then you put invisible walls up "No you can't go fight because you don't have kids and if you die then you'll be just an NPC". Invisible walls suck in video games, and they suck in RPs. I'd suggest taking out the invisible walls (tangible or not).


This for example, means there is an invisible wall. "I can't kill all of the enemies or I can't RP here anymore." That's your non-tangible wall, but it ALSO has a tangible wall, "Oh so if I RTJ on this game it's only temporary? Well I don't want to spend all that time for a potentially short lived game." Thing is, RPOL already has trouble with games petering out often, why design a game to intentionally peter out?

That's not a bad idea... I'll have to think over the specifics carefully though, especially if I want to be able to apply the concept to multiple settings.

@Sleepy:


The first thing: Punishing players for dying is the means to an end, not the end itself. You could say I'm inspired by the roguelike genre.
The second thing: There isn't really any plot, so I basically want people to do whatever they want and survive while doing it. If 'you have not eaten for a month' counts as 'dying without doing what I wanted them to do', then you're right.

Of course, subconscious bias, etc, cannot be taken out of the equation. I think this is a common issue for all gamemasters who do not use a strict math-based system.


I'm not sure what you're referring to. You can kill all the enemies you want without ending the game. I was saying that if every PC and NPC in your tribe died, the game ended. Also, there's only one tribe now, so yeah.

The reason you can't "kill the enemies" is simple. If I kill everyone, the game ends. So if I kill all the enemies, I can't RP anymore. If I like how the RP is going, why would I want to end it by killing all the people from the opposing tribe(s)?

Oh, there seems to have been a slight misunderstanding. There is no opposing tribes and you can kill all the enemies you want - the game only ends if all NPC and PC characters from every player-controlled tribe dies.

Ah then yes it was my misunderstanding there. Though it still does not answer the railroading question about having to do things in a certain order.

In MMOs you could go to any zone you want, but usually there's one or two zones for your level where enemies are fairly simple to kill, and you get good exp for your level. This is called a non-tangible wall. It means the game is linear, but you don't have to follow it, but NOT following it will be near impossible. Unless you have a special strategy, you are forced to do certain things to gain your exp.

What you've designed is a simple version of an MMO. It has specific directions that if you don't follow, you'll be reduced to NPC status. I'm assuming when an NPC dies they just become another NPC, but there's no reward for being reduced to NPC status. So that said, the order of actions has to be 'have kids', 'gear up', 'fight'. It's fine to railroad your PCs all the time, there's no problem with doing so. This is however, provided you know how to do so without it feeling like they're railroaded. If you're the one telling players what they need to do, then they're not the ones making the decisions, and will quickly grow bored.

Well, the idea is as follows:

In every tribe, there lives a preset amount of PC's and NPC's. These characters do not differ too much from one another, at least not at the current stage of planning.

During the RP, the players will have to interact with the NPC's in order to plan and complete different self-assigned tasks. (AKA: 'I scouted the forests and found a boar. We should totally go hunt it, bro!' or 'I believe we should invest time in trying to find a use for this wheel-invention' )
Then, when a PC dies, the PC will take over for one of the more well-defined NPC characters - AKA, an NPC character whom the players have interacted with frequently.

As there isn't really any grand stat-difference between these type of characters, the NPC basically turns into a PC. The player then gets to fill in the blanks of this NPC's existence which was previously left there from the holes between interaction with the NPC.

The tribe also has a set amount of people in it, which is why if too many die, there simply aren't anyone in the tribe for the players to take over from when they die.

*Note: I'm a bit tired right now, so if the above was unclear or wrong in any way, I won't be surprised*