Psychological Survival Horror : comments [benlehman]

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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benlehman

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