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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 2350140" data-attributes="member: 3192">I had a couple novel campaign world ideas back in my senior year at college. One was based on the premise that 3 types of characters existed before choosing roles, races, etc. The first type was for all initial players who did not know of the distinction and needed to puzzle out the secret of the world. The other two were for standard players who already knew the secret. It was sort of a metaplot within the game. The gameplay was medieval D&D fantasy, but with odd quirks dictated by its hard-scifi/cyberpunk underpinnings.The secret: In the near-future (say 100 years) life extension technology had progressed rapidly. As reconstructing the bodies of the entire [paying] human populace was infeasible, most elderly people elected to stay alive in "pods". Within, the human body could last potentially 100's of years, but only if the mind received normal stimulus. So entire generations of people existed primarily in Virtual Reality worlds. I think the internet had just hit big when I thought this up, but it was before MMORPG's. Essentially the idea was: the players who were in on the secret played either real people or "bots" in a simulated D&D world. Those who did not know played illegal AI constructs, which believed they were "true" characters in the world. As "staying in character" in the VR world was part of the game, the VR characters were penalized (in the scifi world), if they directly referenced that world. It was fun to create as I think predicting a hard-scifi future world is more fun than creating a fantasy world. Reading futurists and trying to accurately predict where the future will be like (mainly due to technological repercussions) was part of the reason I studied the idea. Another interesting part was having play explain away real world (sci-fi world) concerns. For example: those who were only visiting the VR world would "pop" in and out, so lots of unexplained teleporting took place when people were alone.Looking at the existing MUDs of the day led me to the discovery of "bots". I thought these might be interesting to create using a ruleset the player had to follow. Meaning sometimes they were not as "human" as a normal person could be. This would potentially work for most of the NPC's too. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have MMORPGs around to see their own metaplay concerns. But I think having them exist takes some of the luster off the initial idea too.I guess the point of all this is roleplaying could become a reality in itself. (hello there behind the computer screen! *waves*)</blockquote>

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