Dionaea - System 1 - The Cards

I'll be using a Tarot deck for conflict resolution. The Major Arcana go in one pile, the remainder of the deck in another.

The four main avenues (or strategies) of conflict are Hate, Love, Fear, and Dream. (These names may change.) In this setting, each is equally valid for most conflicts (although trump suits may apply; I'll explore that later.)

Stolen from a Tarot site:

The Suit of Swords - Spades - Air - Intellect

The realm of astral - represents the action. The focused intent to bring forth manifestation. Often times the swords indicate struggles...

The Suit of Cups - Hearts - Water - Emotions

The realm of mental - this is the next step towards manifesting the idea. It is the link to the next step in the order of things. When we see the Cups in a reading, they point to desires and feelings...

The Suit of Pentacles - Diamonds - Earth

Realm of the physical or material, element of earth represents the actual outcome of the matter. It is true manifestation into the material plane, the product of ones labors.

The Suit of Wands - Clubs - Fire - Creative

The realm of spirit - represents ideas, they are the primary seed or original idea and the primary element of growth. When we see wands in a reading, they point to ideas, ambition and growth.

So Swords->Hate, Cups->Love, Pentacles->Fear, Wands->Dream.

Here's how they're applied:

Swords (Hate): Influencing others by force. Duels and other matters of physical violence, destruction, actions of your proxy military forces.

Cups (Love): Influencing others by emotion and family ties. Put politely, romance and affairs of the heart. Put bluntly, the Big Two F's: Family, and fucking.

Pentacles (Fear): Influencing others by politicking and intrigue. Pragmatism, bending others to your will, cunning plans, loyalty not driven by family or emotional ties.

Wands (Dream): Knowing and influencing what will be, rather than what is. Prophecy, specifically as it is brought about by botanically-induced visions.

I'm not sure how trump suits will work, although I like how Nine Worlds handles it. An alternate method would be rock-paper-scissors.

I'm usually very free with Director Stance powers in my games, so here I want to tighten it up. Those types of powers will be reserved as specific effects that players can bring into play using Wands. Drug-induced prophecies are objectively true -- they will come to pass -- so determining just what you see is vital. (Reference any number of time travel stories -- it's extremely dangerous to know too much of your future, lest you lose your free will.)

Role of the GM: I want to play with the traditional concepts of "The GM is God". While the GM carries out many traditional tasks, his primary role is King.

The King has scores, through which the GM influences play. (For instance, to some extent his Director stance powers are driven by his Dream score.) You see, the King (who needs a better name, of course) is objectively right (like the Pope), as determined by prophecy.

Dionaea (1) - Premise

(Dionaea muscipula is the Latin name for the Venus Flytrap.)

There's a really exciting story for how I came up with the concept: I read about the Iron Mace Competition that's going on in High Point, NC, walked away from my computer to get a drink, and it all fell together by the time the fridge door closed. ;)

To be honest, though, all the elements of the game have been floating around in the back of my head for months. None of the Ronnies quite sparked my imagination the way this particular competition did. I'm glad for the kick in the ass this'll provide -- I've got about a week and a half to get it together.

The central idea of the game involves privileged, dissolute nobles in a endless dance of courtly intrigue, in a setting reminiscent of The Dying Earth or The Book of the New Sun. Perfumed courtesans, duels at dawn, and drugged visionaries with blown pupils will feature prominently as well. The primary arenas of conflict in this setting are Hate, Love, Fear, and Dream.

It's drawn largely from the ideas I've dwelled on while preparing and running my Amber campaign, which used a homebaked Primetime Adventures-esque system based on Tarot cards.

Here's some of the stylistic influences:
- Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun
- Amber (the novel more than the RPG)
- The court of Louis XIV
- The Soulless from Robin Laws' excellent GURPS supplement, The Mad Lands

The system's not fleshed out yet, but I can take a good guess at what games it'll be influenced by:
- Ron Edwards' Sorcerer
- Clinton Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday
- Matt Snyder's Nine Worlds

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Character Creation

I've been putting together notes for our next campaign (a continuation of our Amber game using homebrewed mechanics), and while going through the process I thought I'd write it up. This is the technique we've used informally for our last two games, The Tenure Game (Sorcerer) and Trumps (Amber). It's pretty close to what Ron Edwards suggests for Sorcerer.

One caveat: I go for player-driven, thematically charged play, and don't require the PCs to stay together in any way (though they often decide to). So this would require modification if your GM style differs.

My last few campaigns have been largely constructed after our character creation session. (We take the first session to make characters together, bouncing ideas off each other; it gets people really fired up to play, so much that we often play an hour or so just based on the initial conflicts the players have set up. It also has the nice side effect of not having to harangue people to turn in bios.)

All I really need from a player are a few bullet points. Detailed information is fine, as long it doesn't turn into "playing before you play" (i.e., having had the character already do all the cool stuff you've envisioned). Here's the three things I absolutely have to have:

- The character's main goal. It needs to be achievable, but not easily.

- One big reason why they haven't already achieved that goal. This could be an enemy, a confidence they don't want to betray -- whatever.

- A Kicker, which is some event they come up with that puts the character into motion. (Often this relates to #1 and #2 above, but it doesn't have to.)

Supporting characters are great, as well. I typically ask people to explicitly say which of their supporting cast is OK to put "at risk", and which ones should remain in background and not be subject to much change in play. (There's a big difference between "I want my dad around" and "I want to get in conflicts with my dad", so I make sure we're clear on that.)

Then I take that input, weave my ideas for an initial situation and NPCs into it (replacing my NPCs with ones the players have come up when I can), and come up with a few Bangs. That's a lot of prep, but so far it's turned out that a week or so of heavier-than-usual GM prep pays off, and the initial situation is charged enough that it spins for several sessions with minimal between-sessions prep.

Manifesto

(I wrote about half of the items on this list as a reply to a thread on RPG.net, then realized that it really was pointless to argue about anything even touching on GNS over there.)

Here's my personal manifesto, what I mean when I say "I'm focused on Narrativist play." Hell, I doubt this has anything to do with the original essays. And I'm going to stop calling it Narr, because man, people get angry sometimes when I say that how they're playing sounds Narr-ish to me.

Again, these only describe my personal feelings.

• Good works of fiction have theme, whether implicit or explicit. Totally themeless fiction is unsatisfying. (This is a personal opinion, and I'm sure people would say it's snobby. I'm just telling the truth here. I think Return of the Jedi rocks, and Episode III sucks, because the latter doesn't meaningfully address theme.) I felt this way before I read any of Ron's essays.


• You don't have to explicitly state theme, but in one way or another the creator(s) of fiction should have it in mind. That can be as simple as creating motivated characters and putting them into conflict over real stakes. Breaking it down to "This is about judgement versus compassion" isn't necessary, and in fact taking it that far can weaken the story ("show, don't tell").


• Because roleplaying games are interactive, theme should be considered a Premise, or question, rather than a statement. If the theme implicit in Setting, Situation, and Character can be expressed as something like "Is X more important, or is Y?" then the players absolutely have to be given the freedom to make that call, case-by-case, during play.


• Certain combinations of setting and mechanics are more suited to create theme-relevant play than others. If you want to play out a doomed romance in game but the mechanics describe things like "How far can I jump", then you're on your own. If the mechanics describe your motivations and relationships, then the system's supporting you.

Welcome

Hi, folks!

I decided recently to join the "Forge diaspora" of people who were getting out onto their own sites, stating their thoughts on roleplaying, and designing their own games. I've been posting roleplaying theory and opinions for months on my personal journal, and I imagine my previous audience (my play group) will appreciate me moving my more general thoughts to a more appropriate venue. :)

My intent here is (a) to articulate and focus my own thoughts about player-driven, thematically rich roleplaying, (b) to track the design of my own projects, and (c) to get more involved with the "indie" community.

By the way, the name isn't an allusion to how driven characters in compelling conflicts results in intense roleplaying that gets us all out of our "comfort zone", or anything like that. Comfort Zone was the name of the first tabletop campaign I ran since being exposed to The Forge. We bounced all over the place in that game as I applied various new ideas and techniques willy-nilly, but in the end we focused in on a simple Premise ("How far will you go to get what you want?") and nailed it. So the name's just an inside joke and an homage to the first time I "got it", in the sense of articulating what kind of campaign I wanted to run, and pulled it off.