Psychological Survival Horror [benlehman]

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I'm asking for game design advice here about a new game.

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There are 25 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Two thoughts:

1. Dirty Secrets has options for if the investigator is unreliable or the perpetrator. Might be worth playing a bit to see if there's useful things to mine from that.

2. The usual fallback for those games is that the player is usually trying to save someone else- a sympathy building motivation- it also provides an interesting twist- even though the hero is damned, can they help someone they care about NOT be damned?

2) Oh man, yeah. What if you don't make your character, but you make the person that your character is trying to save? That could be really hot.

1) Will have to read it when I get back to the US. I think I have a copy? If not, may have to locate one.

yrs--
--Ben

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Well, you could do this thing where you run several iterations, where each non-main PC gets to be the person trying to be saved. However, it is a different person in each iteration.

Like it might start with your coworker Janice, you had a crush on. And the next iteration it is all of a sudden your best friend from high school. And then it is your brother Jimmy.

And the scenes are references to the experiences you associate with those people (the amusement park you went to in 6th grade where you had a blast). The more you give in to your memories, the more dangerous it gets and the easier it is for you to rescue the person. Or easier and harder, if that makes sense (wider range - easier to succeed better, but easier to fail more dramatically).

Any time you die, the way/place in which you were defeated plays an element in defining the protagonist's overall issue(s) that he is struggling with.

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What's the compelling part of having multiple people to save?

yrs--
--Ben

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Hm. I was mostly thinking of it in terms of a rotating protagonist, and that it would be more interesting than trying to come up with lots of new stuff about the same person.

Also, the people you fail to save, can start appearing in the future scenes to attack your psyche directly. So that your failures weigh down on you, so to speak.

I guess I find a single victim to be limiting?

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hmm... I was thinking of the person you're trying to rescue as not so much an active actor in the game, more like princess toadstool in the original mario game.

That said, there can totally be NPCs. They're just created, played, and controlled by the monsters, because you never really know.

yrs--
--Ben

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Because I am working on a similar project, The Shotgun Diaries, I stopped reading as soon as I saw "survival horror."

That's pretty exciting.

Feel free to read, and steal, if you like. If someone else writes the game I want more me, that's just a win for me. Of course, if your process doesn't like that sort of thing, avoidance is a good idea.

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I've been accused of stealing people's ideas before, so I try to avoid them.

I designed TSD for a friend of mine as a birthday present. It's pure zombie survival stuff. Only three or four pages long (with pictures). He loved it and even ran it a few times, giving me feedback. I'll have a copy of it at GenCon (hopefully).

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Well, I'm not likely to accuse you so much as go "cool!"

But it sounds like you're well past the initial ideas stage.

yrs--
--Ben

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Each time you die and "reload", your Shadows (or whatever term you use for the people playing 'repressed issues') get another level in their ability to Mess With Your Head? Or, something like that? ("No no, that was all a just another nightmare...")

I do like the idea that you get to design the person you're saving, but the main protagonist starts off this nameless cipher whose back-story only gets revealed as play goes on, through flashbacks and such you have no control over. (Which is kind of exactly how most of those games go, of course.)

I'm not so much interested in "what the costs are" as "how are save points implemented?"

yrs--
--Ben

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Well, I was thinking if you justify a "reload" as "it was all a dream" (or nightmare, of course), the logical thing would be to autosave whenever your character gets some sleep.

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Right, but how do we handle play, going forward, after a "reload?" Is it necessarily the same? If so, how do we assure that? Is it necessarily different? If so, in what ways?

A computer is good at consistency. An RPG group, not so much.

yrs--
--Ben

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Maybe it's just this simple and jacked up: You get mauled, in gory detail whatever.

And then you're standing outside the door where it happened. But now whatever is behind the door is gone. No explanation at all.

Maybe there's a limit to how many of these incidents you can have, but it's a variable number. When you run out? Shift protagonist to the person you were trying to save, give them someone -they're- trying to save, and continue play.

I guess it might be worthwhile to watch a bunch of asian horror and look for how it becomes a spiraling shitfest of people getting pulled into the nightmare- Pulse and Ju-on are the two that immediately come to mind.

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Hmm... What if the door itself disappears, like it was never there?

Sure, you're alive, but that way is closed to you forever. The thing I like about this is it discourages use of the save feature of exploration.

yrs--
--Ben

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I find that idea both interesting and creepy.

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You could actually do something like the SH Mark of Samael deal: Something resurrects you when you die, if you tap into its power. You'd have to create various probably-not-good reasons for that, but.

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Yeah, I don't know. I'm not as worried by the in-fiction justification as I am the procedure -- I probably wasn't clear enough about that. But we don't really have a tradition of save points in RPGs. I can think of a few different ways of handling them:

1) It's like "resurrection" in D&D. You're alive again, but time doesn't rewind, and the things you've done all still happened.
2) It's exactly like a save point in a video game. You're alive again, and all the same material is out there, as if you didn't discover it.
3) You're alive again, but things you've yet to experience are not fixed, and they can change.
4) Some sort of mix?

yrs--
--Ben

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It might be interesting to have getting "BAD END"s be related to unraveling the protagonist's mysterious past.

This is really sketchy, but imagine the backstory is expressed as a literal puzzle, and each time you hit a Bad End the other player who did you in has to give your one of their puzzle pieces. Then they frame you back to your last "save point" - which is probably the last time you either worked out a puzzle piece on your own or got one from a Bad End.

That also serves to attach particular elements of the protagonist's mystery to particular bits of setting/adversity/etc., which seems very in-genre. You have to beat boss X in order to uncover the truth about mystery/trauma/what-have-you Y.

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I really, really like the idea of puzzle pieces. Probably because I just played Braid, which despite having neither zombies or shotguns is a clear (and brilliant) entry into this genre.

Maybe there's some way that you, yourself have to put the puzzle together. Like each piece just gives you snatches and disconnected images.

yrs--
--Ben

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I'd recommend checking out the manga After School Nightmare (all 10 volumes available in English) for a possible approach, but it would be spoilery to explain why. If you don't care about spoilers I can email more detail.

I'll keep an eye out for it. Do you know the Japanese name by any chance? Or, even better, the Chinese name? (I'm in Taiwan, so I'm most likely to find it in Chinese.)

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Found it! It's 放课后保健室 in Taiwan.

I'll look around. Hopefully it's at my reading level.

yrs--
--Ben

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(it's lindsey)

you could start out with giving your player a set number of 'tokens' to save with (like in early resident evils). They can then choose a time and place to save, and have to write down/keep track of their status/point in story/etc. to refer back to if/when they die. you would then have the option of changing the game at the point where they died,(like one person mentioned) or letting them better prepare for it. Depends on how video game-y you would want to go. You know what my bias is. :)

May