Games for the Mind

You’d think there would be cobwebs over here!  It seems like forever since the roleplaying mechanics part of my brain has been turned on.

Anyway, there is this little idea that has been tugging at my sleeve, so I figured I would dust off this old blog and post it here.  It is a pretty simple one that combines me thinking about module play in light of the recent discussion here about setting and oracles; that old Myst-style of computer play; and my youthful days of playing D&D modules.

I started to wonder, what it would it look like to have a game that, like D&D, relied upon modules but, unlike D&D (or computer games), placed fewer limits on how to interact with that limited space.  I have a rough idea nothing more, but here it is.

Start with the so-called ‘flavor’ text.  Make it the spine of the game, with some basic rules that force players to interact with it.  The rules wouldn’t need to be fancy, something as simple as “all narration must make use of the flavor text.”

From there, I started to think about characters.  It wouldn’t be hard to do the same thing with player characters, to make them nothing more than a block of flavor text.  You could intensify the narration rules, requiring ‘first’ narration in a ‘room’ (I use this term to refer to a discrete block of flavor text) to begin with both an element from the player character’s description and an element from the room.   Something like “Hajj’s greedy eyes wandered over the merchant’s valuable silks…”

That kind of game would be tightly constrained by the elements of the module, but setting rich, with details presented in an ‘organic’ context.  The constraints might have the added advantage of fostering more intensive engagement of the setting elements.

I’m thinking of this under the rubric of simulationist play, primarily, since the emphasis on exploring setting over character, story, and ‘win’ conditions seems to position it there, but I suspect the content of the descriptions and, of course, the styles of actual play groups, could easily make play skew toward other CA’s.

Some light conflict resolution system would be handy, to facilitate interaction between players.  Playing cards sound like a good choice.  It might be fun to sketch out something more substantial.  My heap of half-sketched games hasn’t grown in ages, after all.