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The Great Conjunction II (RPG Design Contest)


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Wik

First Post
Ha ha, yeah. I've generally found the "mutant animal" games to be fun one-shots, because players generally buy into the idea... if you give them a chance to self-destruct, players gleefully jump at the opportunity.
 

Jack7

First Post
With what happened in Haiti just now I may not finish on time.

If I get tasked to assist, and I'm pretty sure I'll get tasked to assist in some way then I'll probably be pretty much out of the running.

Nevertheless if I can help out down there I'm gonna help in nay way I can as I suspect it will be a huge, bloody mess with a lot of dead and dying people. Then cleanup is gonna be awful as well. Then rebuilding is, well, hopefully, maybe some good can come of this in one sense by starting all over down there.

Anywho if I'm off the grid for awhile, then you'll probably know why.
If anybody else can help out I'm sure it'll be appreciated.

See ya.
 

Whisper72

Explorer
Well, I probably do not have the time to really participate, but this does not stop me from throwing in some ideas for others.

As to light hearted ideas, what if the PC's are actually lab-animals who have somehow escaped. They need to explore the facility they are in and try to escape. Think pinky and the brain sort of. PC's can choose 'classes' where each class is a strain of experiments they have undergone giving them 'powers' such as great strength, speed, magical/psionic powers etc. etc. sort of a 'supers' game but with a twist...

Obstacles they need to overcome are automatic 'defenses' and containments in case experiments go awry, humans trying to catch the escaped animals etc.


A more serious take on the same idea could be 'escape from Alak Katraz', where the PC's are prisoners who have recently escaped some detention facility, either at the centre of some large maze or some semi-deserted island.

Another explorer idea is to make a game from the Jurassic Park / travel to the centre of the world / lost world movies. The PC's are the team of paleontologists, geologists, cartographers and accompanying hunters/guards who need to map this newly discovered land...
 

Wik

First Post
Aw, two dropouts in one day! Gah!

I have to admit, this contest has a lot less "oomph" than it did last year. C'mon! Let's jazz it up, people!

And Whisper, I'm all for a Jurassic Park game. That'd rock the caspah.
 

Abisashi

First Post
Don't feel sad Wik, I'll join to make up for it! Too bad I've been away from the boards and missed the start of this.

Only half the time is left, but last year I did most of the work in the first and last week, so hopefully I can think of something and do it in a similar amount of time (with fewer typos!).

Now I just need to figure out... everything.
 

Logan_Bonner

First Post
I'm working on a non-competing submission! I haven't been making very quick progress, but I should at least have a skeleton by the end of the month.
 

Abisashi

First Post
Here's what I'm thinking:

Übermachine (from Übermensch)
Players play as sentient constructs seeking to improve themselves, either through exploring the wreckage of civilization/the frontier/etc to salvage parts to replace their own or exploring themselves and their place in the world as machines (or both).

I might have religious mania in the form of persecution of sentient constructs (which adds a counter-theme of not being discovered themselves), and maybe a criminal element dealing in sentient construct body parts. Both will depend on how much time I have left over.

The resolution system I am planning on doing will use a deck of cards customized by the parts the player is assembled from. Last time I had a deck of card to resolve spells and wanted to expand it to all actions but couldn't figure out a way that I liked. I think I can build hazardous magic into this pretty easily, and I'm hoping I can get some actual discovery into it as well, but I'm not sure how that will work yet.

I've figured out how I want the themes to work, but I still need to figure out the setting (medieval fantasy? post-apocalyptic?)
 

Wik

First Post
I'm working on a non-competing submission! I haven't been making very quick progress, but I should at least have a skeleton by the end of the month.

Looking forward to it! I'm working on a non-competing sub myself, although it's kind of hard to work on (started a new job). But yeah, there'll be a skeleton by Feb 1st.

And Abisashi... dude, the idea sounds pretty awesome. Sort of like Wall-E, but at the same time, totally not. And medieval or steam-punk constructs sound like awesomesauce. And I'm always a sucker for post-apoc. :)

Just keep in mind that you don't have to hit all of the themes, and in fact probably shouldn't. The idea of a criminal cartel, for example, seems like it'd muddy up your idea a bit. As for "Discovery", there are a lot of things you could do. What if every "robot" had a secondary purpose, determined by the GM, and robots weren't able to get true "sentience" until they discovered that purpose (there's a religion angle, too!). Or, if you want to run some inter-party fighting, what if one construct out of every group has the goal of destroying the expedition, and the party has the secondary task of weeding out the mole? One PC gets to be all sneaky, while the rest have to figure out who the traitor could be ("No! I've been discovered!")

And the resolution sounds pretty cool - I was thinking about how to do something like that in a game, myself. A game where each PC is built as a deck of cards is kind of a neat idea, eh?

I had an idea where there were four stats, and a player made their deck of, say, 30 cards (or whatever, depending on how many "low" cards you threw in the deck) as they pleased. Each stat corresponded to one suit, and if you did a check and drew a random card of that stat's suit, you got a bonus. So, a "strong" (hearts suit) character would have more hearts in his deck, so he'd be more likely to get the bonus.

As for face cards, they'd allow the PC to "break the scene". Jacks would count as 2, Queens 4, Kings 6, and Aces 8 - if the check succeeded, the character would get to add a rule change to the scene... with the caveat that jacks allow bigger changes than queens, and so on and so forth. So, if you drew a jack of hearts in a combat, and succeeded, you could say that your character has the enemy in a headlock, forcing the enemy out of the fight... whereas if you drew the ace, you could simply declare extra damage.

That was about as much as I'd figured out before I realized there was no way I could do the system total justice. Looking forward to what you put forward!
 

GlassEye

Adventurer
How bizarre. I've been thinking about a character creation/designation and conflict resolution mechanic using cards. The base idea looks somewhat similar to what you posted, Wik, except I've been struggling with how to 'break the scene' as you termed it. I have some different ideas on that matter but I'm still trying to piece it together so that it is coherent with the rest. Right now it's not very. I would like an external scene break as well as a break that can be caused by the player.

Abisashi, did you present the game last Conjunction using Tarot cards?

Also, I recently watched the movie '9'. Awesome little animated film about sentient constructs the size of dolls in a post-apocalyptic world. Throughout the whole thing I was thinking that it would be a great little rpg. With a little loose interpretation (such as hazardous tech subbing in for hazardous magic), the film fit into most of the themes for this contest.
 

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