(no subject) [benlehman]

So my buddy

foreigndeviltry has been working for the longest time on an RPG which focuses on storytelling, especially of the stories-within-stories Arabian Nights type. He has come up with all sorts of nifty mechanics, including insane things that involve fanning the table and discarding scraps of paper that go over the edge, etc., but has never managed to put everything together. This is not unreasonable. It is a huge task. I think that a lot of amateur RPG designers have these games which they keep working and reworking and never... quite... finishing. I have Tactics which I have been taking a long vacation from, as well as Gloria Machina with I., although that has become Cradle, for me.

unrequitedthai has Torchbearer. I am convinced that this is not a bad thing -- that these games provide a space for us to experiment and harvest techniques for later games.

But the thing is, I just came up with a mechanic that totally works just right for the Arabian Nights stories within stories with different tellers where players embody different roles and the whole thing ultimately is a story that tells itself with no beginning and end. I figured out a likely way to put the pieces together.

But the frustrating thing is -- it isn't my game. I don't think it would be useful for me to write this game, and I don't think that this mechanic would be particularly useful for

foreigndeviltry either, because it is his game and he needs to get what he wants out of it, and me butting in with a fully-fledged mechanism just isn't really what the whole thing needs.

Heck, I don't tend to even like the genre of meta story, simply because I believe that stories are complicated and that each one needs its own space and time to grow. And yet... the mechanism is there, demonic, tempting...

Perhaps this will migrate in as an optional rule for Cradle, but still, this whole process is totally surreal.

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I would be interested to see your take on the Nights pattern myself.

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The basis is this -- you have a constant number of points (I was thinking 27 because it is a good magic number) spread out amongst a series of characters and stories. You can move these points from one character to another. But there is one character which is "you--" and all other characters have to be similar to or different from in specific ways. (I was thinking "share one trait or opposite of two.")

As a storyteller, you are trying to get people to invest points in your story, because it can only end happily if you get someone to invest as many points as you did. You then get some beneficial return. Anyone can start a story by dropping a large number of points onto it.

But also, whichever character has the most points invested into becomes what the "you" really is.

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Why couldn't you just mention it to him and see if he wants to see it or not? No harm in bouncing ideas off each other. It occurs to me that this post may well be intended to accomplish just that.

This right here is the exact reason I decided it was a good idea to start putting all my games under Creative Commons licenses.

My big frustration on unfinished games: I could finish Ron Edwards' Mongrel easily. I have pages of notes for it. For some reason, the game's always on his back burner. I want to snatch it up, finish it, and publish it so bad that it pains me.

First of all, it's

foreign_devilry. Second of all, whatever Ben. Write your game. Steal ideas from me. Whatever. I'm sure that what you come up with be SO different from Quixote & Coyote / Storypunk / Facedance / Beneath This Facade (if I ever end up finishing the damn thing) that it won't matter at all. I'll applaud you. I'll buy your game. I'm going to be stealing the NPC distribution rules from Polaris as soon as you publish them someone public (possible before that even, if you don't hurry up), so you sure as hell better take something back. Traditional ideas about intellectual property should never, I think, be applied to the mechanics of RPGs. We're a community that produces our best work when we take the Industrial Revolution approach: steal someone else's idea and improve upon it.

Please do borrow. And don't wait on publication. 'cause I take my time with such things.

And, FWIW, the USgov is a bit ahead of both of us. Copyright has never, and will never, apply to game rules.

When I say, your game, I don't mean property, though. I mean yours in a deeper sense. I don't feel like I'm stealing from you when I think about this. I feel like... I'm trying to be you, as a game designer. It's a strange feeling. That was what I was trying to write about. The creative process, not legal property.

yrs--
--Ben