David came up with an idea for a quick-play role-playing game. Think Dungeons and Dragons, but without the three hours of trying to choose if I want to be a race that is good for a shaman or a race that is cool. I have an odd tendency toward half-and-half races, like half-elf or half-orc. I presume this is because I'm a third culture kid and have never really felt that I belonged anywhere. Or really felt the need to.
Anyway. A version of role playing without memorizing the character sheets, looking up things in handbooks, agonizing over race and class, trying to organize a party that has all essential character, and rolling lots of dice to tell us, in a numerical value, exactly what we are good at.
David's idea was something like this:
Story: A group of people go to a coffee shop or some other gathering place. We were heading to Smokey Row the night we thought this up to meet with some friends to play games. (I thought a night of playing games would be wasted on Phase 10 and wanted to role-play, which is rather how this got started.) This group of people gets sucked into an alternate world which they then have to work their way through and cope with. David was thinking fantasy, so it'd probably be due to a portal or magic or something. I was thinking sci-fi, so alien abduction.
Mechanics: The Dungeon Master, that being David, would be a benevolent (or at least neutral) deity who controls the whole thing and tells the story. Our characters would gain skills as they interacted with the world and role-played (like if Shane kept sneaking behind trees, he might get better at it. If I kept throwing rocks at chickens, maybe I'll get better at that).
And... that's it. I wasn't really for this idea, largely because it seemed very susceptible to what I termed "brain vomit" where David could make up anything and in a pinch might put out idiotic things, like talking hats or chickens that could throw rocks back. Maybe it seems I don't have a lot of faith in David's storytelling abilities, but 1) I've never read much that he's written, and 2) he's as stubborn and contrary as the old guy in Up and might do those things just to spite me.
I'm fine with a quick-play role-playing idea, but I rather like the idea that even though a lot of elements are invisible, they still exist. Maybe you don't start with a character sheet, but something defining all learned abilities and your level in them still lurks in the background, at least until later levels. The players might not know anything about the world, but it has rules and scope and isn't just a barren wasteland that gets filled in with said scary chickens in talking hats as we run into them. Best example I can come up with was the Wheel of Time world. It was complete. Things in the first books were referenced that we didn't come into contact with much later books, but when we did, we knew about them and knew they were there. They had existed from the beginning.
Obviously that takes more prep work and David just wanted to get going.
We played Phase 10.
I'd like to point out that to start our bumbling 21st century selves into his new world, we'd get a little bit of a starter. David asked for a short list of strengths, weaknesses, and then maybe our goal in life.
I started my list, even though we didn't play it looked like this:
Strengths
1.
2.
3.
Weaknesses
1. Acrophobia
2.
3.
Goal in life:
Yeah, that's all I could come up with. Oh sure, I could probably brainstorm a LOT more weaknesses. Lack of tact? Inability to read social situations? Stubborn? Myopic? Toxiphobic? Mistrust of all authority figures? Check, check, check, check, check, check. Or is that last one a strength? But I don't know if those are the types of things that would transfer to a role-playing game well. I'll obviously role-play as stubborn and lacking tact. Because, honestly, my roles never differ much from myself. I'm a bad actress. But like myopia? At least I know I have an almost overwhelming fear of heights.
Strengths is kind of similar. I have a mild ability to understand computers, which might help me in my sci-fi world, but won't in David's fantasy. Anyway, most of my generation has that ability and Shane is actually in IT. I've had grand ideas about learning disaster preparedness, Krav Maga, ham radio, gardening, and so on, but I haven't actually done a lot of these things. Ability to run for an hour or so? That could be helpful, I guess, but I can't run fast, which seems the important part. I have no self-defense. I couldn't define what plants are edible. I probably don't have enough mechanical understanding to decipher a wildmill, much less the Six-Fingered-Man's life sucking devices. Even if we switched to sci-fi, I don't know how to pilot an aircraft (another of my dreams) or speak another language or first aid or a lot of things. I probably couldn't get my phone out of Chinese.
And if you find my life goal, could you let me know? I'll come and collect it.
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