Tabletop MMO
Watching .hack//SIGN and playing .hack//MUTATION makes me want to write, and run, a game about playing a MMO. I think it might be too meta, though. I’m not sure. I like the idea of running two plots simultaneously, and allowing players to care about the game plot and the reality plot separately, to whatever degree interested them.
I disliked the Dream Park game, though. And I’ve never been super excited about the kind of game where you play yourself, only transported to a fantasy world. Possibly if, like .hack//SIGN, you never get to interact with the ‘real’ world, but are aware that it exists and occasionally get off-stage narration related to your activities there.
February 16th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
Newspaper articles! About stuff happening far away!
February 16th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
I think there’s a lot of potential for play within a play style campaigns. I’ve often wondered what Yu-Gi-Oh the RPG would look like. How much does the game inside the game need to be developed?
February 16th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
I think it’s all just a question of systems to support having two “characters” at once, one in the game world and one in the real world. I think you could do something extremely cool with it.
February 16th, 2005 at 11:56 pm
I dunno how interested I am in the ‘reality’ part of the concept, actually. In thinking about it, I kind of feel like I enjoy the line between The World and Japan drawn in SIGN and Liminality. SIGN rarely shows us Japan, and never shows us action in Japan. Character stats are irrelevant in Japan, and so is a system. Only The World’s system matters. But on the Liminality side, we don’t see The World much at all. It informs the entire story, but we see only one snippet of it (that I’ve seen so far).
I’m more excited by the idea of reality providing a metaplot. But maybe that’s just because I can’t imagine how to deal with the complications made necessary by having two parallel systems.
February 17th, 2005 at 5:43 pm
I think that in many formations of this sort of game, one or both of the characters will be at least partially stunted. .hack “players” never have to fight monsters, so they don’t have combat stats in the real world. But any investigation or critical thinking they do is with skills from the “player” rather than the “character”. It may be that instead of parallel systems, there’s just a thick line on the character sheet that divides the skills into “real” and “virtual”.
February 17th, 2005 at 6:18 pm
Do you need stats for player-things, or can you just declare ‘you are as good as you are at investigation or critical thinking’?
February 21st, 2005 at 10:42 am
It depends on whether there are challenges and obstacles in the “real world”. If the story calls for a player to put down the keyboard and talk his way past the front desk at a hospital, or do research in the library, then there should be mechanics for that. If the real world is only there as a backdrop, then the mechanics might be “Yes, you succeed,” which doesn’t require stats.
March 8th, 2005 at 12:16 pm
To preserve a distinction between The World and the real world, it could be interesting to distinguish the mechanics in each world. Use a Fortune (dice) mechanic to resonate with the number-crunching and random rolls of online games; use a Drama or Karma mechanic in the real world. The challenge here is uniting them just enough to give a different feel to each world without a context switch big enough to interrupt play.
You might get worthwhile feedback from The Forge. (After it comes back up)