Idea Thread

[agoraoptera]

In which Gods Die:

"Moonlight shines upon the guilty, and the innocent alike," the lady murmured softly as she anointed the champions each in turn. They would go forth, the six of them, and assail the Darkfire Pillars of Frae Nuae. They were the prophesied ones who would strike at the very heart of the realm of the gods, take down the cruel deities and restore the freedom of the people.
Unfortunately, it seemed the gods had other plans.
The champions suddenly slumped in their prostate position, dead.
"Oh for the love of-" she bit off a curse. "Now where am I going to find six gullib- ah, righteous champions to kill six gods?"

No points for guessing who the PCs are.

Races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Demon.

Short breakdown:

Human - as per usual. Mainly agricultural society, with much of the harvest going to the gods. After a human lied to a god, the god cursed all humans to be unable to lie. If they try to lie, they start shaking and break out in a cold sweat, their muscles going limp.

Elf: Conniving, untrusting, paranoid tree-stalkers. The racial paranoia was due to a curse from the gods (the curse involves making them fear the trees are about to steal their ears hence the sneakiness around trees but simultaneously even more afraid of the land outside the forest. A sort of "better the devil you know"). They don't even have the word 'trust' or 'friend' in their elfy language.

Dwarf: I am dwarf, hear me shout, I am short and I am stout. When exposed to sunlight for too long, they petrify a la gargoyles. They're cheeky, insolent, annoying and grumpy. The reason why they mine is because they needed a method of venting frustrations and hitting rock seemed like a good idea at the time.

Demon: Servants of the gods; in the case of the PCs, servants who broke away. They're not too happy with their lot as well. They come in many shapes and sizes, depending on which god and what mood said god is.

[SpiritfChaos]

Tvtropes Finally Destroys the World

"One day, a group of friends sat down to play a game. What they didn't know(and really should have seen coming) was that this seemingly harmless game would bring about the end of the world as they knew it. Now, they have to survive in this messed-up world the game has dumped them into, and maybe learn something about themselves along the way.

Okay, if you haven't figured it out by this point, this is going to be largely based on Homestuck, and I find Overseer to be rather lacking in how creative we can get with stuff. So I'm making this happen.

[agoraoptera]

Extreme Prejudice:

Let me start from the beginning. First there was that virus thing, it ate up people and chewed them and spat them out. People became monsters and the monsters began hunting people down. Of course, they mobilised the army and everything, but it didn't matter. The virus had spread too far.

At the same time, they were experimenting on it, for a cure, see? But they obviously forgot about the cure, see, because soon they announced they had some mystical thingamajig that would improve- yes, improve- Man. The improvements started out as a military thing. Somewhere around this point we'd ended up in big cities, not daring to step out, sheltered, insulated from the godforsaken wasteland of a world we now inhabited.

So they had these.. improvements. I don't know who's the genius at the top who decided that, hey, maybe if we buffed up our labourers, they'd work more efficiently. Whoever that genius is, I hope he's alive to see what happened. Sure, work got better when they.. improved the workforce. Liberal 'modifications', they called it, and then it wasn't uncommon to see these demi-humans walking around, half as tall again as any of us, skin glowing from beneath like some faulty light bulb in their flesh. Didn't take them long to figure out they were being used.

And then the inevitable happened. These.. 'improved' people began fighting for their rights and I mean fighting. Being.. improved as they were, it didn't take long before things turned around. Now you had barely literate idiots with the strength to pick up a car, easy as you will, at the top and commanding the country. Then the next thing happened. They tossed us out.

Some, anyway. There were some people who declared themselves "Purebound", God alone knows what that's supposed to mean, and then segmented away. These were regular humans, same as you and I. Most of them got away, but the Three Hour Genic War was terrible. Those who stayed behind under the rule of the improved blockheads were practically slaves.

Then there's people like me, people belonging to neither camp and wanting nothing to do with either. We fled away, mostly, and tried to eke out a living amid the shrubs and scattered vegetation and the roving bands of virus-infected monster-human-things. Later I found out that while we were all dying and barely surviving, they had continued experimenting. Yes, those bastards who came up with the 'improvements' in the first place. They took my wife and children a year ago. I met them a month or two ago and she tried to hug me. I took off her head with a shotgun because she was burning from the inside, everything she touched melting. What can I say? All's fair in love, war and murdering goddamned experiments.

I'm just a cripple, even then only half a cripple. But I'm curious, see. I know for a fact that some of those new experiments have already had, well, sex with some of the Purebound. (I learned this from my son, after I sawed off his legs and fed it to those virus-monsters out there.) The point of those experiments infiltrating Purebound territories was simple. They, whoever these madmen are, wanted to see if the offspring would have anything special, anything noteworthy, anything they can use for their sick experiments.

That's why I limped my sorry ass all the way here. From what my son said, these children are more or less in their teens now. My name is John deJohn and I'm here to make sure these kids get out of here safe before those bastards get them.

---

So, players play as those children. Mutations, powers, etc are up to the players, though of course, with a reasonable power cap.

[narrativedilettante]

Minimalist RP

You'd only have one sentence for your character description, and one sentence for each post. Since sentences could be stretched out to be incredibly long, I'm thinking we'd limit each post to 140 characters like a tweet, or alternatively we could use Lyttle Lytton rules and keep each post to 25 words.

GM posts would be kept to the same limits, and players would start with very little information about the setting, just as they have very little information about each other.

[Victin]

Minimalist RP

You'd only have one sentence for your character description, and one sentence for each post. Since sentences could be stretched out to be incredibly long, I'm thinking we'd limit each post to 140 characters like a tweet, or alternatively we could use Lyttle Lytton rules and keep each post to 25 words.

GM posts would be kept to the same limits, and players would start with very little information about the setting, just as they have very little information about each other.

Seems like a very interesting idea. How much power/ability/freedom/sandbox-ness would we, the players, have under the setting (as GM posts are about as short as our posts)?

Also, I say 140 is incredibly annoying because of one or other sentence which lasts a little longer (like comparison between two things or a comment like "I like X!" followed by an explanation why I like X) though that doesn't happen usually, only occasionally (or maybe it's because I don't use twitter enough). I'd say around 140 or exactly (or around ) 200 characters would be better, but maybe that's just me). BTW, I wonder if the forum would be fitting for this, because pages comprised entirely of shorts sentences sound like a waste of space or something (*remembers threads like Tram of Thought and Endless Tower of Boss Battles exists*)

[narrativedilettante]

Minimalist RP

You'd only have one sentence for your character description, and one sentence for each post. Since sentences could be stretched out to be incredibly long, I'm thinking we'd limit each post to 140 characters like a tweet, or alternatively we could use Lyttle Lytton rules and keep each post to 25 words.

GM posts would be kept to the same limits, and players would start with very little information about the setting, just as they have very little information about each other.

Seems like a very interesting idea. How much power/ability/freedom/sandbox-ness would we, the players, have under the setting (as GM posts are about as short as our posts)?

Also, I say 140 is incredibly annoying because of one or other sentence which lasts a little longer (like comparison between two things or a comment like "I like X!" followed by an explanation why I like X) though that doesn't happen usually, only occasionally (or maybe it's because I don't use twitter enough). I'd say around 140 or exactly (or around ) 200 characters would be better, but maybe that's just me). BTW, I wonder if the forum would be fitting for this, because pages comprised entirely of shorts sentences sound like a waste of space or something (*remembers threads like Tram of Thought and Endless Tower of Boss Battles exists*)

The players would be pretty free, limited only by what's already been established by the GM or other players. Basically, if you want to say that there's a cat in the room with you, fine, but once you introduce the cat, other players can add details as much as they want. If you wanted the cat to turn out to be a reincarnated pharoah, but somebody else beats you to the punch and establishes that the cat is actually a disguised alien, then tough. So, lots of freedom, but not a lot of room for making specific plans.

I can imagine taking some time for a slightly longer post in the introduction, to let players form a basic idea of what's going on, and then maybe there'd be an occasional longer GM post to give a nudge to the action.

As for the character limit... My first thought is tweet length because it's a stringent limit that a lot of us are already somewhat used to, and a lot of people have found Twitter to be a surprisingly versatile format. But I could imagine going longer. It might be something we'd have to experiment with to find a comfortable length.

[Victin]

Seems very interesting then

On a completely unrelated subject: this.

[IslaKariese]

Sounds whimsical.

[SpiritfChaos]

Minimalist RP

You'd only have one sentence for your character description, and one sentence for each post. Since sentences could be stretched out to be incredibly long, I'm thinking we'd limit each post to 140 characters like a tweet, or alternatively we could use Lyttle Lytton rules and keep each post to 25 words.

GM posts would be kept to the same limits, and players would start with very little information about the setting, just as they have very little information about each other.

I tried something like this on Twitter once.

[Victin]

I'm thinking about starting some kind of round robin storywriting game in the forums. It have a character limit of 1,000 or 1,500 per post, and you don't need to let everything spit out in your post, for example, if you say a character has a weapon and is ready to strike, you don't need to say what's his/her weapon is nor who or what he's going to strike. The genre of the story could be set before, change every round or every few rounds or even change between each player. You could have a Silly Comedy Sci-fi story or a Serious Fantasy Epic if you wanted, but that should be put to vote. Also I'm thinking there could be some sort of "points" to make this more game-ish, like:

Every post you get 3 points. Everytime you get some sort of mass reaction (everyone laughs, cries, heartwarms, awes, facepalm, etc.) your story, you get 2 points. You can then use these points to buy more charcters to your story (10 points equals 1,000 extra characters, or 1 point equals 100 characters for example) and maybe solve plotlines or create twists (example, change the status quo and kill the current protagonist, or just change the perspective of the story), or simply change the genre of the story or something, like "until your next turn every post must contain the word 'cow' or a certain character that happens to be a cow" or "the next player must try to write something HAMMY! AND! OVER! THE! TOP!".

Any thoughts?

[narrativedilettante]

I'm thinking about starting some kind of round robin storywriting game in the forums. It have a character limit of 1,000 or 1,500 per post, and you don't need to let everything spit out in your post, for example, if you say a character has a weapon and is ready to strike, you don't need to say what's his/her weapon is nor who or what he's going to strike. The genre of the story could be set before, change every round or every few rounds or even change between each player. You could have a Silly Comedy Sci-fi story or a Serious Fantasy Epic if you wanted, but that should be put to vote. Also I'm thinking there could be some sort of "points" to make this more game-ish, like:

Every post you get 3 points. Everytime you get some sort of mass reaction (everyone laughs, cries, heartwarms, awes, facepalm, etc.) your story, you get 2 points. You can then use these points to buy more charcters to your story (10 points equals 1,000 extra characters, or 1 point equals 100 characters for example) and maybe solve plotlines or create twists (example, change the status quo and kill the current protagonist, or just change the perspective of the story), or simply change the genre of the story or something, like "until your next turn every post must contain the word 'cow' or a certain character that happens to be a cow" or "the next player must try to write something HAMMY! AND! OVER! THE! TOP!".

Any thoughts?

This could be fun!

[Anura]

RP in the style of Evoland and DLC Quest (look those up if unfamiliar). Want a plot? Unlock it. Want to actually play as a character? Unlock it. Want to be able to write in prose instead of wrestling with an ancient text parser? Unlock it. Want to post more than 5 words at a time? Unlock it. Want the GM to respond to you at all? Actually, we'll throw that i- JUST KIDDING YOU GOTTA UNLOCK THAT AS WELL!

[SpiritfChaos]

RP in the style of Evoland and DLC Quest (look those up if unfamiliar). Want a plot? Unlock it. Want to actually play as a character? Unlock it. Want to be able to write in prose instead of wrestling with an ancient text parser? Unlock it. Want to post more than 5 words at a time? Unlock it. Want the GM to respond to you at all? Actually, we'll throw that i- JUST KIDDING YOU GOTTA UNLOCK THAT AS WELL!

Yes. I will play this.

[Victin]

RP in the style of Evoland and DLC Quest (look those up if unfamiliar). Want a plot? Unlock it. Want to actually play as a character? Unlock it. Want to be able to write in prose instead of wrestling with an ancient text parser? Unlock it. Want to post more than 5 words at a time? Unlock it. Want the GM to respond to you at all? Actually, we'll throw that i- JUST KIDDING YOU GOTTA UNLOCK THAT AS WELL!

I'm not sure if I understood how this works, care to explain?

Also, any suggestion to how I should put the round robin to work? What/how you would like to play it? What would make you not play it?

[Anura]

Victin, you put a lot more faith in my opinion than it's worth, really.

Round Robin stuff isn't really my style, regardless of how it's done.

Anyway, DLC-RP is pretty much as I described it. You can play Evoland here for a better idea: http://evoland.shirogames.com/classic

[narrativedilettante]

RP in the style of Evoland and DLC Quest (look those up if unfamiliar). Want a plot? Unlock it. Want to actually play as a character? Unlock it. Want to be able to write in prose instead of wrestling with an ancient text parser? Unlock it. Want to post more than 5 words at a time? Unlock it. Want the GM to respond to you at all? Actually, we'll throw that i- JUST KIDDING YOU GOTTA UNLOCK THAT AS WELL!

This is the first time I've ever played Evoland and I'm finding it DELIGHTFUL.

[SpiritfChaos]

RP in the style of Evoland and DLC Quest (look those up if unfamiliar). Want a plot? Unlock it. Want to actually play as a character? Unlock it. Want to be able to write in prose instead of wrestling with an ancient text parser? Unlock it. Want to post more than 5 words at a time? Unlock it. Want the GM to respond to you at all? Actually, we'll throw that i- JUST KIDDING YOU GOTTA UNLOCK THAT AS WELL!

This is the first time I've ever played Evoland and I'm finding it DELIGHTFUL.

As am I, and OH LOOK. It's on Steam for half price this weekend.

[Sicon112]

Dragon Riders idea:

So the earth is overrun with the Fair Folk, who are basically making life miserable for people and running wild.
Seven or so acquaintances decide to make themselves champions of humanity, and work together to summon dragons (which is far too difficult for one of them to do on their own), each with its own unique properties and bonded to one of the seven. For purposes of this game, dragons are intelligent but noncommunicative creatures; they don't have language, but their human riders will probably be able to understand their individual dragons. The seven riders set out to use their newfound powers to maintain peace and order in the world (probably dividing it up by continent?)... of course, some of them may have conflicting values. As well as powerful fey to deal with.

Umyeah. Just a random on-the-walk-home idea.

So why has no one done a dragon RP yet? I even have the perfect character lined up for one, actually...

MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[Adell]

So, I've been toying around with the idea of doing a possible dungeon-crawling kind of RP, although I'm not sure if RP is the right word for it, since it's more of a game than an RP (though roleplaying can certainly be a part of it). I'm a guy who has raised himself on video games and board games in general, so having some sort of game mechanics to achieve victory is the kind of thing I would like to try out.

Basically the premise is that around 3-4 players will enter a dungeon with the goal of reaching the end and accomplishing some sort of goal. Since this is more of a game, the idea is that a run through of a dungeon will be relatively short, more like a level to a game than an entire roleplaying adventure. The players would move as a single unit around some sort of grid map, with each square of the grid being an event (which can be a battle or just an odd little scenario) and each player will typically take one action a post. Like I said, role-playing would be allowed, but there would be some light game mechanics to it, though it would all be relatively simple stuff.

If you think the idea sounds interesting, feel free to comment on it. I have more details on how I think it should work, but I'd rather not just explain everything and then have no one interested in it X3

[JackAlsworth]

Hmmm... sounds a little like Mystic Wood (an old game my family used to play). I'd try that.

[Qara-Xuan Zenith]

This sounds intriguing, though very difficult to wrap my head around as a noob/non-gamer. (more details? )

[narrativedilettante]

I could see it being lots of fun.

[Victin]

It could be fun, I'd be willing to play it. Can you talk about it more?

[Blurred_9L]

This sounds intriguing, though very difficult to wrap my head around as a noob/non-gamer. (more details? )

Disclaimer: This might (most likely will) be wrong.

Well... basically, the really really old rpg videogames (and some of the newer ones which try to pay homage to this mechanic) were played on this sort of grid, on a first person view. You moved your character around the dungeon floor, exploring and stuff. Because of this, you had to draw your own map.

Basically, these rpgs were about becoming a hero and exploring the world and simple stuff like that and overall lacked a complicated plot.

Anyway, at least that's the idea I have. Adell probably can get into more detail and explain it better and pretty much clear up the things I got wrong.

[Adell]

Disclaimer: This might (most likely will) be wrong.

Well... basically, the really really old rpg videogames (and some of the newer ones which try to pay homage to this mechanic) were played on this sort of grid, on a first person view. You moved your character around the dungeon floor, exploring and stuff. Because of this, you had to draw your own map.

Basically, these rpgs were about becoming a hero and exploring the world and simple stuff like that and overall lacked a complicated plot.

Anyway, at least that's the idea I have. Adell probably can get into more detail and explain it better and pretty much clear up the things I got wrong.

You're not wrong, that certainly is how older games played.

Basically the way it would work is we would have a map made of squares (think like a board game). Your party would be a represented as a single unit on this board, and every square you 'advance' an event will happen. The event could be an encounter with an enemy (which would then lead into a battle) or it could be something useful like finding a magic item or meeting some npc to help you. After the event is completed, you then move to the next square for another event, until you get to the end of the dungeon which will probably culminate in some kind of boss fight.

During battle events, we would do a post order of players, then enemies. Each player would only be allowed one action, which would pretty much come down to attacking an enemy, defending an ally, bracing yourself for an attack, or using an item or some ability. After everyone has posted their action, I do an enemy post which would detail how the round went (how much damage an enemy took, how much they dealt to you) This is were it really differs from an RP, and starts acting more like a game. The character you control would have some very basic stats that would represent your attack, defense, and probably HP (or health points). These statistics would help decide how a battle goes, and they will increase as you complete events. Creative roleplay will probably add bonuses to these statistics though.

This is the basic idea I'm running in my head anyway, I'm open to suggestions if y'all are interested. I'm also toying with the idea of having a dice roll involved of some kind (basically to add an element of unpredictability. Maybe for moments where you guys do things outside the norm of just attacking or defending), but that might be something only the enemies would have to do, I'm still thinking on that.