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 chadu | |
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Hey, long time no LJ post! Anywho... For those of you who don't follow Twitter, I've started brainstorming ideas for a new edition of Dead Inside (my first RPG) with a group of folks I've dubbed "the Utter Bastards" because they finally convinced me, kicking and screaming, that this would be a good idea. Because it's not like I'm working on... 3 or 4 other freelance RPG products right now. GENIUS: I HAZ IT. For those of you who've read it or played DI, feel free to comment on this post about what it mean to you, what you liked about it, what you hated about it, anything and everything. It'll go into the hopper o' ideas. Thanks! Tags: asmp, dead inside, evilhat, freelance, game design, gaming, mad rpg theory, pdq, work journal, writing
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From: chadu |
Date:
January 5th, 2012 07:34 pm (UTC)
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Quick answers at state of current thoughts:
(1) I'm thinking a majority of the mechanics will be tied up with the "soul economy" and what that means in terms of setting details and activities.
Currently, I'm thinking even an even slimmer PDQ than ZoZ was, to serve as a bare skeleton, with the main mechanical action being about, like, what the game's about.
(2) One thing I've been batting around is three slimmer books, each one focused on and mechanic-/tone-tweaked for each "level" of Type: Dead Inside, Sensitives, and Magi. (The other Types become NPCs/monsters in the other games.)
And a free #3 for you: less whimsy, more wild; less baroque, more plain; less Spirit World, more Reality (for DI-level, at least).
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"Once you get to the City, why would you ever return to reality?"
Well, for one thing because it is actually reflective of your nature. Which means that it's very difficult to get spiritual traction there, when that is exactly what you need to be doing to rebuild your soul.
Kind of like running on ice. You are not going to get anywhere fast and more than likely end up crashing in a tumble (and the likelihood that you end up emptier than you already are). [This can come out as a function of the soul economy. It's always more tempting to use that portion of soul for some immediate gratification in the City than to use it to regenerate your own.]
The City is a bright and beautiful butterfly that's leading you over the precipice, and blinding you to it's dangers. A spiritual trap where you don't need to grow, and where either entropy generally ends you eventually, or you simply become part of the warp and weft of the Spirit World and cease to have a separate existence and just go through the motions.
If you stay.
On the other hand in the Cold Hard World the distinction is clearer, and without a soul to insulate you you feel it a lot more too. It's harder to spend your soul fruitlessly as well, so you might as well keep what you have and let it help you keep you warm at night. There is more opportunity to help someone and feel good about it and thus regenerate. Or have their kindness give you the soul seed to nurture.
But I really do think you need the temptation and peril offered by the City and all its wonders to especially put the outer world into cold hard relief. And to offer a motive for why you might want to heal, once you encounter those magi that seem so powerful there. The "why would anyone go back" is the very essence of why it is important and necessary to actually go back.
[I always held that the soul in DI isn't inside you. It's a protective excretion. A mystical slime if you will that prevents you from drying out, and can easily form a hard shell-like crust. In the Spirit World it's a mucous rich environment and there is no need to exude more to protect yourself from drying out. Thus you won't, or rather the chance of doing so is a lot harder.]
And of course there is always the opportunity to trick someone into giving up their soul to you, if you want to follow that path. Something that is unlikely to happen in the City where the soul is valuable because it is in high demand. If you want to spread the misery, which at least one player wanted to. And ended up being more deeply emeshed in the Soul Economics of the City as a result and unable to reach the pinnacle he was actually striving for.
There was one player who decided that she needed her own soul too. Nothing else would do. So she went to a lot of effort to hunt down the pieces of her lost soul. which required heading into the Spirit World to hunt down the pieces there (often after working out in the Cold Hard World where she had left a piece and heading into the Spirit World from there to track it down properly).
Sure, it's a lot colder and harsher in the real world, but if you are every going to find yourself that's where you will. I wouldn't venture into a Hall of Mirrors to do so.
And it gives you the incentive to dare the perils of self-examination in the labyrinth of the Temenos Chapel in the hope that you will no longer be dead inside.
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On a more general basis, it's been a while since we played, but we had lots of fun. It's a game that talked to me as soon as I read it. [But then I may have pretensions towards the practice of alchemy, magic, ad shamanism. <grin>] You've seen my post about staged PDQ which was inspired by Dead Inside. Not that I suggest doing the same thing (there is probably too much mechanical crunch* inherent in the idea for most PDQ-heads to be happy with, I do like the idea that as you reach the next stage of being the Traits and stuff that you had relied on become "merely helpful" in your new life. Essentially rebirthing a character into each stage. Probably a nice mechanism would be tailoring appropriate Traits to each stage. The progression to a new stage should not only be transformative of the character but of the player too. And definitely transformative of the play experience. Everything should be the same yet different. Achieving the next stage shouldn't be expected. It should be something the players have had to work at, even if this means intentionally splitting the party. Then again if you are not interfacing individually with each player in the game and poking them in the absence of their soul I don't think you are quite doing it right. Or rather the players aren't facing what it means to be dead inside, and accepting the butterfly I mentioned in the other comment. I think I did add more detail to the rituals required, as well as tests that could be failed, to make the rituals more of a challenge than just acquiring 15+ Soul Points. For the Temnos Chapel the difficulty was always successfully getting there, despite the fact that the "maze" was actually a labyrinth in my game (with no side branches) - if you did it right. [And the tests never occurred at the chapel. It was always something else, somewhere else, that shaped the labyrinth for you. And from memory I put a mirror in the chapel. No magic. Just a plain old mirror. Mechanically the ability to backslide is a must, but it really has to be a voluntary (as in the player sacrifices their very existence to achieve something). From what I remember (it's bee a few years) I think I found the rules as written made it a bit too easy for someone to force someone to back-slide. Maybe I'll have to reread the books to refresh my memory. [* Our playtest of it in an Arthurian milieu worked reasonably well although it was our considered opinion that the system wasn't quite robust enough for general use. Plus it was rather proscriptive, which didn't make best use of the freedom of PDQ but did suit how many people ended up playing S7S (when you suggest Fortes people will rarely look beyond the Fortes you suggest - that's human nature). Making a Mastered Trait an unchained Technique worked, making a Good Trait a chained Technique worked, but there was a lot of confusion about how much reach to allow an Expert Trait converted into a Technique. Characters were very fragile when being Upstaged, which was a problem. Might have been solved by allowing Techniques to be discarded as damage, but the play group broke up (thanks to the mining boom they got excellent jobs about 2,500km away) before we could seriously test alternatives.]
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