By Darren on April 22nd, 2010
Laying the Cornerstone of Concept – Building an RPG, pt. 1
Let me go ahead and warn you now. If you’ve never played a tabletop role-playing game, you may not be incredibly interested in this. We can fix that. Give me a call. I’ll get you playing in no time. It’s what’s best really. Join us. Or go find something to do while we talk about gaming. Don’t worry. I’ll give you something tasty soon. Go ahead and scurry off now.
Now that we’re alone…
This is the first step in a potentially long walk off the proverbial short pier and into unknown waters. There are things swimming down there. Cold, slimy things with unnatural shapes. Possibly dead things. Waiting to get their hands on us.
I’ve been telling you that I wanted to write a tabletop role-playing game. Before you stop me: I know. I don’t want to do it to become rich and famous. I know that it isn’t sitting on my ass all day, shaking the money tree. I know that writing is hard work. Believe me. Why do I want to write an rpg? I want to write an rpg because there is an rpg I want to play that hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, been written yet. I want to write an rpg because I have a game in my head. I know what I want out of a game and I haven’t completely found it yet. Sure, there are some games that come close, but nothing that wins the prize. I know there isn’t a perfect system or game. I just want to write the game I want to play.
The crazy part is: I want to do a good bit of that process right here. On Geekcentricity. This post is the first in this ongoing series. Expect more of them from time to time as things take shape. Don’t worry, my normal inane ramblings will continue. This will be supplementary. Think of it as a carrot, or an easter egg, for those of you that are tabletop gamers. This first installment deals with concept.
The Concept
I’m a sucker for a good scare. I wrote a book report in 2nd grade about The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson. Hoax or not, that book scared the shit out of me. I’ve been hooked ever since. Unfortunately, I’ve never found a horror game that gave me the best of what I loved about horror. Call of Cthulhu is close, but too hopeless even for my taste. Also, it’s more cosmic in scale than what I am looking for. The most popular horror role-playing games are probably the World of Darkness games published by White Wolf. Their system is one of the best I’ve played. The individual games however, are concerned with the player characters taking the roles of monsters. Believe me, I know the whole “He who fights monsters” thing. I think Hunter: the Vigil is probably one of the closest concepts I’ve seen to what I want to do.
So, what is my concept? The term that describes it most closely is borrowed from video games. I want to write a survival horror rpg. Generally, I want it to be set in modern times, but I want it to be flexible enough to accommodate settings from at least the middle ages up to the futuristic (a la Alien or Dead Space). I want the characters to be ordinary people thrown into extraordinary circumstances. The players won’t be playing characters who have superpowers or sparkly vampire characters.
I want the characters to be isolated and surrounded by the unknown. In the Silent Hill series of video games (as well as the movie), the main characters always find themselves isolated with few, if any, friends or allies. They are trapped in a small area with no known means of escape. Visibility is limited by a thick fog or mist (also used in Ravenloft and very effectively in Steven King’s novella and subsequent movie, The Mist ). They are constantly low on resources. They are surrounded by mystery. Many of the challenges they have to overcome are more than just physical tests. There are many mental challenges as well. To me, this world defines the survival horror genre.
Unfortunately, I need a concept statement that describes the game concisely, preferably in one sentence instead of a 5 paragraph essay. This is the first challenge.
How about this:
The player characters are ordinary people, cut off from the world they know and forced to live off their wits and survival skills in a world where all of their worst nightmares seem to have come to life.
There it is. Let me know what you think. Seriously. I NEED CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK, people. Get to it, my minions. Even if it’s not your favorite genre, or even if you’re not a gamer (GASP! Congratulations for making it this far), tell me what you think.
The next installment will talk about setting/synopsis. I will attempt to elucidate upon the concept above.
[...] started trying to write down my ideas and force them to coalesce into semi-coherent form on this survival horror rpg I’m working on, this is one of the questions I’ve been asking myself: ”Self, what scares [...]
[...] Laying the Cornerstone of Concept – Building an RPG, pt. 1: The post in which I laid out the concept for a project that has been beckoning to me for a long time. [...]