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Pitchin' Psychedelia (Probably not the final title), a game without any randomizers about a consensual reality slowly seeping into ours. Bizarre rumors starting out as a joke become real, people begin to look more like how they are on the inside, and walking into the wrong side of town will take you into someone else's mind trip. By the time people begin to look for the root cause behind these incidents, it might already be too late. Expect facing your own literal demons, dynamic inter-party relationships, and your only real limitation being how far you are willing to go.
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Jul 25, 2012 12:43
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 16:44 |
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 So I guess I have a proper title now, just making sure to post it up before it becomes too late to change it. I'd say more but it is almost time for Module 1 anyway. 
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Jul 30, 2012 14:11
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My August 1st Design Outline
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Aug 1, 2012 01:03
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Oh man these bonus objectives sound amazing, I can't wait to fail them!Mors Rattus posted:No Psychodrive. 
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Aug 4, 2012 03:22
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Thanks, Mors, between your commentary and RBH's it looks like I really need to shore up my marketing skills, showing is harder than I thought it would be when you also have to tell. I'm experimenting with layouts as well, doing away with traditional 'here's a bunch of rules that reference other rules from twenty pages in the future' and my only issue so far is that it is slightly harder to find stuff that way during play. Finding how HP is derived right before the combat section* instead of during character creation isn't super intuitive, though it does make the process of understanding (and creating) as you read the book faster. This is nothing that good bookmarking, hyperlinking, and cheat sheet-ing won't fix though, but it wouldn't be this easy in a more complicated and crunchy game. *Yes, it is under a page in length.
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Aug 7, 2012 11:00
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Psychodrive Module II - Strands of Determinism Psychodrive Manifesto posted:Roleplaying as a hobby is famous for its use of funny dice and, occasionally, the people beating each other up with foam swords. It could be said that perhaps the biggest sin of this industry is that it has forgotten what makes it unique, that these are games of the imagination. I've spent most of this week wishing I had gone with an Apocalypse Engine-esque system with Moves and stuff that facilitates negotiation instead of a more traditional system that just replaces dice with talking things out. Mostly to save me from having to write rules for every goddamn thing you can do in RPGs. But what is done is done and to change things now would defeat the point of the experiment. So here it is, twenty two pages of content, and somewhere around forty under the 14-size 1.5 spacing format that I could use but won't. Mostly because it would take the combat section over one page in length. It might be a boring slog to read through the rules for negotiating basketweaving and the rest of that boring crap, I'm afraid. That'll likely get me a terrible rating in readability, but at least I got that one length bonus!  As for the module proper, Strands of Determinism is the basic game system with basic character creation. I chose to do four basic scores because I think this game doesn't want to have lots of stats, and I went with a skillless (sorta) deal, though it still has quite a bit of granularity in mechanical customization. The Negotiation system comes in between the calculating of Derived Attributes and the rest of Chargen because the latter are not needed until right before the rules for Conflicts, and I'm experimenting with layouts that don't need you to reference things elsewhere in the book. At the end of the document you have all the boring rules that I slapped in because of ~=+|Verisimilitude|+=~ like movement and equipment. God, I hate all that stuff in RPGs. One thing I did change from the original Outline is that I'm moving character powers and advancement to the next module, which handles all the supernatural stuff. Advancement is only defined through supernatural means though so it works out. I can't wait to get to Module III Unus Mundis where all the interesting things actually are.
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Aug 11, 2012 00:47
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alakath posted:Useful feedback. Yeah, about 50% of the document are odd case examples to solidify how negotiation works in specific circumstances by the numbers, rather than by how fun they can make things. Evidently the frenzied typing of all that content late at night made it spiral downwards in the quality of the writing pretty quick thanks for the pointers, I will be focusing more on that when it is time to fix this stuff up.
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Aug 11, 2012 03:40
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I figure doing daily writeups should help get my gears turning in the toughest spots so here's the Psychodrive August 11 effortpost. Usually I don't care about prewritten fluff at all, so sitting down to make the flavor sections of a game is always weird for me, partly because it bores me and partly because so many ideas. I have a dozen models for how a game of Psychodrive could go, with different backdrops and ultimate goals, something the Outline said. It took some thinking, but I ended up choosing a few options from the many floating about to focus on. A few bullet points: -ESP is real, everyone is capable of it to a limited degree, this is usually what people call intuition. -There is a shadowy pharmaceutical conglomerate that -PCs are test subjects that get paid to do fancy stuff, the pay is great and they probably kick rear end at life with their awesome abilities for a while. -Things go wrong, monsters crop up, people go missing or insane, you know the drill. Support from the organization that was supposed to help the PCs stops coming and everyone is left hanging. This is when the real game starts. -The other world is discovered and everyone figures out scary/alien things are coming from there. You want to drive or banish the scary things out of town (or make a pact with them so they will not mess with you) and it actually works out, for a while. -At some point it becomes quickly clear that the incidents with freaky poo poo are just the symptom of a larger cause. The more you investigate the more it seems like the world is probably going to end. Eventually something will probably try to make that happen. I'm kinda tempted to pull a Buffy and have a different type of Apocalypse every 'season' or arc of sessions but that would probably get old fast in a more serious game, so I will probably brainstorm a bunch of interesting ways to end a
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Aug 12, 2012 01:00
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Psychodrive August 12 Effortpost. Originally the game was called Synchronicity, a name I didn't end up going with because a game using it already existed much to my surprise. Why is this relevant? Because the most important mechanic (besides Power/Negotiations proper) is Synchronicity, named after a concept coined by Jung. Synchronicity is much like causality, but it ties events together by their meaning instead of establishing a relationship based on cause and effect. Synchronicity is when you meet an old friend you were thinking about earlier in the morning, when you are telling someone of a totally cool movie you can't remember the name of and it shows up on TV at that very moment. You may also know Synchronicity under the name of 'coincidence', albeit taken to improbable yet meaningful levels. Synchronicity is also when the universe's sick sense of irony goes into overdrive, and it is this particular side of it that is the bane of Psychic characters who make extensive use of their power. A PC who reads the future to make a small fortune winning at the races may find that someone stole the prize money. A Psychoid who uses ESP to win a lot of money at once will have an accident with a crazed horse wrecking their car, and the cost of the repairs is coincidentally the amount they previously won. The victim is not always the psychic, nor does Synchronicity always offset what they worked towards. Synchronicity can be tricky and subtle, but the bigger the coincidence the more brutal and obvious the acausal connection is. Sometimes the one who gets their car wrecked by a horse is a family member, sometimes it is not a horse wrecking your car for that much money but a letter with a horse stamp informing you that you've got a very big debt you never knew about. In game terms, you can tap into your ESP to increase your negotiation Power by 1 for any kind of Action you take, but you earn yourself a point of Synchronicity. You can hold up to five of them at once, and if they ever would go higher than that, they will Discharge into an improbable series of events that end in tragicomedy. You can choose to Discharge them on your own at any time, for a setback that won't be as bad as the full thing. This is more often than not an OOC choice and an arrangement with the GM. I'll spare you from the table of gradually increasing examples. Usually the GM has a cool idea for a mishap and runs it through you, Negotiation rules apply with a twist or two. There's also more interesting and blatantly supernatural ways to get rid of Synchronicity. From suddenly everything being on fire to opening a rift into the psychic world, just long enough for an unspeakable thing to get a one way ticket to the neighborhood.
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Aug 13, 2012 01:39
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Turns out I'm doing crazy amounts of overtime this week, so I'm hoping it isn't late for the Psychodrive August 13 Effortpost yet. On the plus side I did have a lot of time to write stuff up in my notepad. One of the bits I was struggling the most on was what the hell would I do to give people unique psychic powers. Letting people shoot fireballs is the one of the surest ways to guarantee they will try to take the overpowering Psychofuana demigods head-on and we can't have that. Or we have to keep that from sounding like a good idea in the subconsciousness of roleplayers who are trained to find the most overpowering spells possible, at least. Further complicating things, for thematic reasons power types revolve around the four classical elements in this setting. See Fire, Air, Water and Earth (plus Aether) are the basis behind Alchemy, which is supposed to be a way to better and transform yourself with the Philosopher's Stone being a metaphor rather than an actual thing, but I'll save how the steps of Alchemical transformation correlate to character growth for another effortpost. Having established this, not giving people the ability to shoot fireballs (or equivalent) is kind of a dick move if they're choosing pyrokinesis as their thing. I mean it is the power over fire, what the hell are they going to use it for? The way I've got around is would be to make each Element more than just literally controlling their, well, element. A lot of things come in fours, and Elements usually match up pretty well. The most obvious correlation are the four temperaments/humors (Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic) and you can build on their chief emotions to influence people (Pleasure, Anger, Thoughtfulness, Lazyness... hold on, those sound like they're also four other things, albeit in different order) so with some effort there's a good list of things each Element can do, and there's enough specializations to make sure everyone is mechanically unique. So every PC starts with an Element and a specialized Technique for bringing it to fruition. There's ways to gain other Techniques and even Elements but let's not go there yet. I'll use Fire to exemplify them: Reign - To manipulate the element or commanding it to suit your needs. Basic effects are making it thrive over a wide area or using it for the purposes of divination. This can mean turning a peaceful protest into a violent riot for fire as much as it can mean fortune telling from the shadows casted upon a campfire at night. Blessing - To shield oneself or another from the harmful effects of the element or to grant a bonus based on their theme. This means fire immunity as much as it means a 'morale bonus' for acting all courageous. Creation - This is the summoning of elementals and the creation of items that look mundane but really aren't. This means you can have a ready-made servant or Masterwork tools for any kind of task and basically does all the Resources stat does but better. I considered having a fourth category - Wrath. Let's see if I can get away with not letting the fire user actually shoot fireballs, because that poo poo doesn't help set a horrorish or surreal mood. As for discouraging superpowers from solving all the real problems in the game, Psychofauna are going to be resistant to all their effects innately. I figure that's the easiest way to make PCs big fish in a small pond, and preventing people from trying to play Pokemon to beat up the setting's demigods.
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Aug 14, 2012 02:03
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It has been raining for more or less 24 hours and I don't think I've ever felt so wet and cold in my life as I did yesterday, I'm making no apologies other than I took a nap and it became 5 AM afterwards holy poo poo. I'll do a bunch of (relatively) in-depth reviews later I guess.
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Aug 15, 2012 09:20
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One ticket to the wall of shame please. I don't think I'm going to be able to finish all the goddamn content I've got left to do by tomorrow. I really should've gone with something simpler.
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Aug 16, 2012 13:39
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I'm going to try and run one of these online with my group, not sure which yet though, a whole lot of my favorites kept dropping. Tentatively Arcana, depending on how much of a pain translating the language-based bits of the game to my non-english speaking friends is.
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Aug 23, 2012 23:09
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I actually want to play it, for what it is worth. So I'll be there.
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Aug 24, 2012 13:13
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What, no supplements for Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story? I am disappointed. In my setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Kaidan: A Japanese Ghost Story, people tell and live stories about ghosts all the time with a bent of japanese horror to it, I have done extensive research on this, myself being of japanese ancestry. Because of this and other reasons, you stand to gain a lot in a business sense from making your games compatible with Gaijinoshima from Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story.gnome7 posted:Okay, going through the last page to see who has volunteered to playtest what, the following games still seem to be unvouched for: The whole language mechanics thing was a bit intimidating for the half of my group in need of a translation, so Arcana still needs someone else to run it I'm afraid. In place of that, we went with Nothing Amazing Happens Here. Let's start with the good news: Anime Tarot is fun. Loads of fun. We had not even started the game proper and we already had a convoluted as gently caress backstory of love, betrayal and McGuffins so props with the Tarot Connections table there. Self Made Fiascos are also cool in that the cards you go with mean so much more than the black or white dice from Fiasco, so the metagame has a lot of moving parts and is fun to scheme with from start to finish. That's about all that went well, the rest was wonky. Moves only being usable as a followup to specific cards is annoying and frustrating when their effects are already very conditional. With all the NBP (which we renamed to Genre Points) and Moves being thrown around Actor stance was near worthless as well. Then there's the lack of examples. The game assumes you know how to handle Scenes, Breaks, and other stuff. That makes a lot of sense if you've got experience with Fiasco... except it doesn't really play that much like it, because of all the extra rules on top. It REALLY needs a couple example Scenes using those rules, as a result. I would suggest rebalancing Moves and making them usable all the time, either empowering more or throwing away Actor stance, and maybe streamlining the NBP wagering a bit making it an outright war for changing the results. The way this game works, it is all we like about Fiasco turned up to eleven and without the black dice none of us have. So this is a workable proof of concept, though it does need a ton of polish.
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Aug 29, 2012 13:37
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This was the most interesting contest yet, and not much can be said about the winning entries that wasn't said already, other than hell yes a playable time travel game.
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Sep 15, 2012 03:54
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 16:44 |
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And here I thought I was done being amused/impressed by this contest, this is one hell of a cherry on top.
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Sep 17, 2012 22:16
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