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I had a chance to meet Mike (veritascitor) today and chat for a while. And we were talking about some indie/story game, kind of like this: "Boy, that's a weird game. Who the hell came up with that?"
And it got me thinking that there have been some pretty bizarre games created within this community (or at the Forge). Bizarre concepts, bizarre mechanics, weird implications about life, the universe, and everything.
What's the weirdest indie/story game* you know? What makes it weird?
Weird could also mean "innovative". They go hand in hand. But not all innovative games are weird (especially not most of the popular ones).
*: Use your own definition here, I don't care. -
- CommentAuthorLaughingJackWilton
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
The weirdest indie game I have played is Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City written by Jared A Sorensen. I really like it and believe that is makes some bizarre allocations about people, which I totally agree with. One of the coolest games ever. It also comes with a button. -
It Was A Mutual Decision by Ron Edwards. A game about a romantic break up where the two principle characters might be wererats.
I've played one successful and one not-so successful game. However, the successful game ROCKED. I loved it. I really wish there was more interest in this game. It does CRAZY things when it works.
Come to think of it, MOST of Ron's games are pretty weird on some level.
Trollbabe - for the Trollbabes.
Spione - for the round-robin non-RPG aspects and the Transgressions.
S/lay w/ Me - for the subtext of trying to get at what the player's kink is.
Jesse -
I can start:
David Artman's For Mature Audiences.
Because the game calls for the players to bring plush animals, toys, or dolls to the game, and then mutilate and/or destroy them as they play. That's pretty forked up. It's not our mother's D&D, or even your neighbours' Primetime Adventures.
edit: Ha! Not fast enough.
Don't forget to say why the game is weird, though, guys. I know there's some really bizarre games out there. Like games many of us wouldn't even know how to start playing. -
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CommentAuthorDavid Artman
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
*bows*
I still think Shab Al-Hiri Roach is odd, mainly because it comes with a plastic roach. No other game comes with a plastic roach.
Dogs in the Vineyard is a lot weirder than you think, if you... uh, think about it. Invent Your Own traits is its killer app, I figure.
I'll also offer up my Weird One-Shot LARP, The Sea Worshippers, as a game in which you "damage" an adversary player by making them ignite their character sheet (albeit briefly). You get to do this if you beat them in some arbitrary, real-life challenge (like the game of HORSE, or downing a pint, or whatever). -
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CommentAuthorJason Morningstar
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
Orbit is weird. Weirdly awesome. It's the original rock and roll sci-fi epic RPG, after all. -
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What's weird about it, Jason?
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CommentAuthorEero Tuovinen
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
Ron sure does have a personalized design approach, he's not bound to genres. I admire this myself, I just wish I could pick apart my own motivations and interests to cut away the cruft and only bring out the personal vision from among the genre cliches. There's probably no other game designer who expresses himself and his life experience so consistently directly in his design. Leads to all sorts of weirdness from the audience perspective, of course.
On my own list of indie weirdness, however, one game reigns supreme: Multiverser is an intriguing, challenging, philosophical, ambitious work that makes "heavy" games like Rolemaster piss their pants with the sheer amount of crunch. The game is ideological, evocative and straight out exceptional in all the weirdness it drags out. It is also nigh unplayable by the book (an important qualification, as I understand that many people have managed to play the game with a traditional GM-fiated method), but I don't care, as it's too interesting to ignore. Among other things the game involves a chararacter generation system based on simulating the player's own abilities, an insane multiverse ruled by the God of Abraham, creating a new game setting from scratch for every session, having the player characters never meet each other and so many other weird things that the game really can only be characterized as ground-breaking.
Other than that, it seems to me that "weird" mostly means games where I don't understand the context of the game's creation and thus don't understand why it ticks the way it does. In this regard Engle Matrix games are "weird" - I don't have the life and scene experience informing the design and thought processes behind them, so they seem exotic and weird, somewhat like Multiverser, only less insane. -
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CommentAuthorJared A. Sorensen
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
M. Joseph Young is the Henry Darger of RPGs and Multiverser is his In the Realms of the Unreal.
But less naked, underage hermaphrodites? -
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Well if you ask my GF she would say Grey Ranks, as it is totally weird to her to see a group of adults pretend to be teenagers dealing with war, growing up and romance. D&D, Burning Wheel or some other game basic fantasy game to her is just geeky, but Grey Ranks was weird
For me I would say Lacuna is definately up there and prob the weirdest one I have, both as an actual book and as a game.
Don't Rest Your Head is also pretty weird as all hell, something about the way maddness and exhaustion are both skills and your "hit points" added together with the dream like nature of the setting just brings out the weird in me when I run this. Specially at a midnight con game when I am already exhausted and running on caffeen and fun.
I would also add Sea Dracula, the game in which you play Animal Lawyers who fight crime and resolve conflicts via DANCE. nuff said.
- Colin -
The weirdest game that I know of (aside from my own) is Tähti, in which you play member of a (no shit) Finnish Maoist mutant all-girl rock band in a dystopian, hyper-corporate future. It's not available in English, but I mean... it just wins.
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Clearly when it comes to making weird RPGs I haven't been trying hard enough. (Though I have been trying.)
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CommentAuthorChristian Griffen
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
Yeah, Sea Dracula. -
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CommentAuthorjake richmond
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
Posted By: Christian Griffeneah, Sea Dracula
I'd argue that Sea Dracula is the most mainstream game to ever come out of this community. -
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- CommentAuthorKevin Allen Jr
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
I want to say Senkowski's (or however the hell you spell it) Untitled. Because it's presentation is cut-off-your-dick good.
That good, that weird -
Sea Dracula appeals to the people that are normal enough to not like the soap opera format that serves as the unconscious model of many indie RPGs.
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CommentAuthorJared A. Sorensen
- CommentTimeFeb 3rd 2010
Posted By: jaywaltThe weirdest game that I know of (aside from my own) isTähti, in which you play member of a (no shit) Finnish Maoist mutant all-girl rock band in a dystopian, hyper-corporate future. It's not available in English, but I mean... it just wins.
Great idea, great cover. Thumb's up to the Finns! -
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"I want to say Senkowski's (or however the hell you spell it) Untitled. Because it's presentation is cut-off-your-dick good.
That good, that weird"
I am not sure what this means, but it doesn't sound good. Just weird. -
In La Methode du Dr Chestel, you are sent as a team into someone's psyche to sort out their psychological problems. These are the surreal worlds of dreams but coloured by the patient's issues. You have to refrain from using violence because this would damage the psyche. In fact, anything your character does has an impact on the structure of the patient's personnality.
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- CommentAuthorDestriarch
- CommentTimeFeb 4th 2010
For Weird, I think I'd have to go with 'Urchin', in which you play a hobo trying to find paradise in a strange underworld where you have to make sure you beg enough cash to put a coin in the electric meter or monsters arise from the darkness to eat you...
Yeah.
And if it had only been a good game, I would have loved it. Sadly the mechanics fail to promote any form of storytelling and feature the most painfully unforgiving injury mechanic I've ever seen. Put simply, each die you roll in it gives you a 1 in 6 chance of success, and a 1 in 6 chance of being hurt. And you have to succeed at rolls to regain health, but you can be hurt in any attempt including attempting to recover.
Damn shame. Could have been awesome.
-Ash -
- CommentAuthorDestriarch
- CommentTimeFeb 4th 2010
Posted By: GB Steve
In La Methode du Dr Chestel, you are sent as a team into someone's psyche to sort out their psychological problems. These are the surreal worlds of dreams but coloured by the patient's issues. You have to refrain from using violence because this would damage the psyche. In fact, anything your character does has an impact on the structure of the patient's personnality.
Dang, I've never heard of that one, but I wrote a very similar game called 'DreamCatcher'. It's true there's no original ideas left any more.
-Ash -
Armed cryptomormon moralists wandering the American West = weird.
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Posted By: GB Steve
In La Methode du Dr Chestel, you are sent as a team into someone's psyche to sort out their psychological problems. These are the surreal worlds of dreams but coloured by the patient's issues. You have to refrain from using violence because this would damage the psyche. In fact, anything your character does has an impact on the structure of the patient's personnality.
Back in 1991 it was like a slap in the face! Not only non-pulp adventure themed games were rare, but daring to touch the subject of mental illness was really courageous. I had fun playing a session of it as far as I remember but the system didn't look like it was helping the GM in building/exploring interesting patient scenarii. I felt very free form and, since we didn't have a grasp on shared narrative control back then, it was a heavy heavy task for the GM.
Another game dealing with mental illness I wanted to get is Hystoire de Fou by Denis Gerfaud. From the descriptions I read it reminds me of DRYH: reality gets warped and characters enter a world of madness. The rules seem to portray disbelieving hallucinations, or shaping them, also two types of madness (paranoia and schizophrenia) but I don't know any detail. PCs are assumed to want to escape from the dementia crisis. -
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CommentAuthorDavid Artman
- CommentTimeFeb 4th 2010
Posted By: Paul BArmed cryptomormon moralists wandering the American West = weird.
Yeah, that too. -
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Those are some great examples of games based on weird (fictional) conceits.
What about games that are indescribably weird in terms of gameplay and mechanics? I know there's a bunch of them, unpublished (for sale, that is), in the great Diaspora/blog universe.
What's a game that makes you think, "That's a game? A roleplaying game? A story game? I can't even recognize what it is. Who came up with this weirdness?"
Games that challenge our very notions of what a story game or RPG can be, because of the way it's designed or how it's supposed to be played.
I foresee this thread being an interesting compilation of the wide range available to, and exploited by, the designers in this internet community. -
- CommentAuthorDeliverator
- CommentTimeFeb 4th 2010
I think Polaris and Penny both fall into that category, Paul T. Both are so unusual mechanically and break so many assumptions about "what an RPG is like" that it's hard to even name them all. And both are brilliant, so that helps—but also makes it less obvious how weird they are.
Matt -
The module/games of John Harper seemed really weird to me at first. I must admit that I didn't understand them at first. When I found Lady Blackbird, I just thought, "I need to save this PDF for later so I can digest it. It looks cool, but I just don't really get why it seems to be missing so much. Where the hell is the character generation? The resolution mechanic seems half baked. WTF?" I didn't even save ghost/echo at first. "One page of strange evocative lists? A weird dice mechanic? A pretty picture? That is all I get?"
Those are really weird games. -
Until We Sink.
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CommentAuthorhans chung-otterson
- CommentTimeFeb 4th 2010
Another one from Norwegian Style: Stoke-Birmingham 0-0.
You play Norwegian supporters of the English football team Stoke City Football Club. You've traveled to England to watch a game, and it's been a dull match, ending in a tie. You play for 15 minutes exactly. Shit, I'm just going to type up the whole "The Game" segment, since it's so short, and shows how weird this game is.
The Game.
The whole game takes place at a pub
after the match. You play out the talk
around the table, commenting on the match,
reminiscing about legendary matches,
talking about the weather, the hotel,
domestic affairs and any details you may
contrive to make part of the character's
life. Try to engage in your character and
his/her relations to the other characters,
and to be a dull person with a dull life. (emphasis mine)
The relations between the characters
are improvised. If someone implies that
they are married to your character, then
they are. If someone talks about a joint
experience, then you have experienced it.
Go along with the ideas of other players,
but keep it down-to-earth.
Do not under any cirumstances make
any strange or exciting remarks. Be
ordinary. Let silence speak if you find
nothing to say. 15 minutes can be a very
long time in a dull life. Try to stay in it
until the end.
When I read this, I immediately wanted to play it because I'm pervy and holier-than-thou and wanted to disprove the million internet-rpg.net voices screaming in my head that this isn't a roleplaying game.
Still, it's weird, and I want to play it. -
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I've played that game, so have millions of football fans.
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But why would Finnish fans choose to root for Stoke City of all places? I don't think I can suspend my disbelief that much :)
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Posted By: jaywaltBut why would Finnish fans choose to root for Stoke City of all places? I don't think I can suspend my disbelief that much :)
Come on, that game is not about us rational Finns (although there are fan clubs for English lower league teams in Finland) but instead those wacky Norwegians, who are the most football-crazy folk on the face of the earth (Cuper & Szymanski 2009). I think there has been national weekly betting on English football in Norway from the 50's or so. Cuper & Szymanski attribute the Norwegian love for English football to the alleged Norwegian way of seeing the English as Norwegians, only slightly more nuts. -
Stoke and Birmingham are both Premiership teams. Their last two encounters have finished 0-1 and 0-0, so not terribly exciting but definitely quite big clubs.
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Posted By: noclueUntil We Sink.
Elaborate, sir! Until we Sink is remarkably un-weird, it just doesn't have any handrails. -
(Re football: It´s pretty crazy. People here in Norway get really into English football. I used to work with a guy who had five Arsenal sweaters, one for every day of the week. That´s just what he wore to work, I have no idea what he did in his spare time.
Me? I have no idea what Premiership even means.) -
Posted By: Paul T.What about games that are indescribably weird in terms of gameplay and mechanics?
I'll nominate my contest game Sex/Magic, which gives a player the option to short-circuit dice mechanics by satisfying a real life Truth or Dare challenge. Also, there's a reward mechanic for (RL) arousal. -
Thanks, Adam! That's very interesting.
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Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan is a game designed for play by online chat. It is a roleplaying game, but unusual in many other ways because:
* The game takes place entirely after events have transpired. Kyoko has stabbed the Khan, who is quickly dying. The entire game consists of their last conversation, until the player of the Khan decides his time on this Earth is up and speaks the last phrase.
* Both players may only play by following a formula, combining a declaration and a question as outlined in the text.
* There is no form of resolution as we usually think of it: no random elements, no numbers or traits to compare, no explicitly identified conflicts, etc.
(I know I've read another, similar game that is even more restrictive in its forms. There was something about a man carrying a bucket from a stream to a woman or something along those lines. Anyone know what I mean?) -
Sweet Agatha is a game that requires you to cut up the book as you play the game.
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CommentAuthorDavid Artman
- CommentTimeFeb 5th 2010
Long Live The King is a pretty weird hybrid of LARP, board game, and card strategy game. I've yet to manage to run it (in spite of trying to host it twice at cons) and so I can't speak to how well the elements intertwine. I suspect that it could be played without a bit of RP (like, say, Diplomacy) or that it could become so "RP-suffused" that non-mechanical considerations influence play (e.g. one person is so good in a role that others want to help him or her without regard to ideal strategic positioning or "natural" alliances baked into the PC goals/abilities). -
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- CommentAuthorDavid Berg
- CommentTimeFeb 5th 2010 edited
Continuum and Narcissist are Amber meets astrophysics geekery, with confusing time-travel and gravity. No innovative rules, though.
I guess I should mention Amber too for auctioning off rank in attributes.
As for rules, Puppetland is amazing. GM speaks in past tense, players speak only in-character.
Don't Rest Your Head has one interesting rule description wherein a theme/condition is said to "dominate" a resolution outcome. The mechanical effect seems more familiar, but the way the color comes out is kinda unique.
Montsegur 1244's lack of any fortune resolution mechanics is refreshing.
Grey Ranks uses resolution outcomes to reposition markers on a grid which reflects character mental state.
In Contract Work, you retroactively establish a mission you just performed, gradually finding out how much you've been lying as play unfolds.
Burning Empires uses roleplay scenes as resources in a strategic battle.
Ganakagok allows you to push resolution resources around into "good/bad for me" and "good/bad for the world".
Dread uses Jenga. Sign in Stranger uses random word draw.
And then I've got my own weird shit going in Delve with the player-controlled narration speed diagram, "reading" adventure scenarios with a tarot spread, group arbitration of when to engage fortune resolution, and learning how to do magic from scratch, step by step. -
- CommentAuthorDavid Berg
- CommentTimeFeb 5th 2010
Oh, and Paul T.'s Land of Nodd is pretty weird in that, by moving your chips around, you can declare who GMs for you, help your character, or force the end of a scene you're not in. -
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CommentAuthorjackson tegu
- CommentTimeFeb 5th 2010
Paul, you're thinking of Jonathan Walton's game
"Waiting for the Queen / Tea at Midnight", from the first issue of PUSH magazine. -
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Thanks, Dave and Jackson.
Waiting for the Queen/Tea at Midnight is exactly the game I was thinking of. It's reverse-engineered from text adventures, and lists a set of actions for each of the two characters, not unlike the statements in Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan, and tells the story of an awkward meeting between two people. The actions are determined by location and circumstances, so that, for instance, you cannot say "...sets down the bucket" unless you've already said, "picks up the bucket". The tree of statements make up the entirety of rules of play (almost), so that the story is more or less set, and the players just navigate it through it in different ways. Like Kazekami, there is no GM and no "mechanics" such as seen in most RPGs. The end of the story is scripted, but I get the impression that each run through the game might colour that ending in different shades for the players.
If that link is some kind of pirate/illicit source that shouldn't be there, let me know and I'll remove it. It was the first hit on a Google search for "tea at midnight". -
Posted By: David Berg
InContract Work, you retroactively establish a mission you just performed, gradually finding out how much you've been lying as play unfolds.
Providing links for things you reference is always good. Providing a link for this one gets you sainthood. -
For those reading through this thread:
I'm getting whispers from people saying things like, "Wow! I didn't know anyone had made a game that did THAT... this is amazing!"
So, please, keep it going. I know there's lots more games out there that blow the lid of perceived design limitations. Post them, and tell us a bit about them. -
Posted By: PotemkinElaborate, sir! Until we Sink is remarkably un-weird, it just doesn't have any handrails.
Oh, please. You're stuck on an island that is sinking. You can't get off the island. There's no resolution mechanic. And then someone steals underwear. -
So, I got to read a preview replay of Nechronica: The Long, Long Epilogue, which is a new game that Ryo Kamiya (designer of Maid RPG) is working on. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone is dead save for necromancers. The necromancers create dolls, dead girls who, unlike the other undead, have their own will and feelings. In the game you play dolls who fight and suffer through a series of traumatic battles for the necomancer's amusement. I talk a bit more about it in my latest podcast, but it's generally weird and awesome.
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Posted By: noclueOh, please. You're stuck on an island that is sinking. You can't get off the island. There's no resolution mechanic. And then someone steals underwear.
I must've simply have come across stranger games. When I write I often refer back to Until we Skin and work out from there to find just enough weird. Not having a resolution mechanic is no longer weird for me. -
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CommentAuthorChristian Griffen
- CommentTimeFeb 7th 2010
Posted By: PotemkinI often refer back toUntil we Skin
That's the one where you're on an island and the characters inevitably turn into psycho killers. -
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Posted By: Christian Griffen
Posted By: PotemkinI often refer back toUntil weSkin
That's the one where you're on an island and the characters inevitably turn into psycho killers.
Freudian slip? -
- CommentAuthorDestriarch
- CommentTimeFeb 8th 2010
I never did mention that my game DreamCatcher uses free association as a magic system. That's where you make a list of related words and try and turn one into another. It's modelled on the concept of the 'Stream of Consciousness' in psychology.
-Ash -
Posted By: DestriarchI never did mention that my game DreamCatcher uses free association as a magic system. That's where you make a list of related words and try and turn one into another. It's modelled on the concept of the 'Stream of Consciousness' in psychology.
-Ash
Linky? -
- CommentAuthorDavid Berg
- CommentTimeFeb 9th 2010 edited
Posted By: SquidLordProviding a link for this one gets you sainthood.
I got the impression that Russell 99% finished Contract Work, but never even got started on turning it into a physical volume for sale. The best link I can give you is his livejournal where you can ask him about it. -
- CommentAuthorDestriarch
- CommentTimeFeb 9th 2010 edited
Linky?
Errr... hold on...
http://www.kevinallenjr.com/reverseengineer/reversed.html
It's on there somewhere. You'll have to search for it though.
-Ash -
Posted By: Christian GriffenThat's the one where you're on an island and the characters inevitably turn into psycho killers.
Did you guys just accidentally design a Lord of the Flies RPG?
Anyway, I'm having a hard time engaging with this topic because "weird" is such a sliding scale. I mean, when I first heard of paranoia and Toon, they were weird. Like, "haha you can't do that in an RPG can you Oh, you can??" weird. When I first bought Over the Edge, like 12 years ago, it was weird--not only the paranoid drug-trip of a setting, but the minimalist mechanics with no fixed attributes or skill list or anything (both of which weirdnesses I loved instantly, by the way). Now, looking back, it's as "normal" as apple pie next to a lot of the games that followed in its footsteps--even Sorcerer, which has a lot of the classic RPG components firmly in place, if tweaked and repurposed. And now I've been exposed to a multiplicity of games with a wide variety of approaches. So I'm hard-pressed to find a game I think is genuinely "weird."
KKKKK mentioned above is "weird" to me, though in a way I like and want to try. Polaris is "weird" I guess, with its structuring the mechanics as explicit negotiation. The subject matter is poetic and aesthetically focused, but not weird per se. Bacchanal is weird in its structure, with the different influences of the gods jumping around between wine glasses, then "spilling out" not to resolve anything but to show which divine influence dominates the narration. Its subject matter is daring, for sure, but hardly weird. it's more mainstream than the "D&D Fantasy" genre, for example.
Peace,
-Joel -
Posted By: jaywaltBut why would Finnish fans choose to root for Stoke City of all places? I don't think I can suspend my disbelief that much :)
Stoke got quite a nice following in Norway. They got their own supporter-club, like many other low-level English teams. Norway (me included) has been adamantly interested i English league-football since the sixties.Posted By: wanmansouCuper & Szymanski attribute the Norwegian love for English football to the alleged Norwegian way of seeing the English as Norwegians, only slightly more nuts.
Beautiful! I concur!
My first game of Stoke-Birmingham 0-0 was a revelation. We came out of those 15 minutes with the dullness of the characters marked on our faces and our bodies (we were sagging, actually). Never has 15 minutes been so intensely dull. It was a very effective (and terrifying) game. And it was the first ever rp-poem. -
BTW: I believe a lot of people have found my game PERVO to be a bit weird. :-)
And my game Muu has been considered weird by most players for more than two decades now (most of them have only heard about it). It is a poetic fable about beings with no language and a collective identity. It has exciting actions like walking, looking for food on the ground, eating moss, bathing, cuddling ... and you share your experiences through dreams, and always knows what the other muu's are feeling (you feel it too). And in the end, when you have played it for a couple of hours, you are left with a pure and simple feeling of happiness. :-)
Have made some other games too, which are considered weird (a game where you tear your teddybear apart, a game where you play yourself transforming into a crow, etc.). I find weirdness to be quite interesting, actually.
In some games, like My Life with Master, the weirdness is quite refreshing and mind-expanding. -
Breaking The Ice is amazingly weird.
Sitting down with another guy and playing out a story about a guy and a girl falling in love... playing out "dates" and having this push/pull where we decide whether or not we even want this relationship to happen...
...and then pulling out from that, finishing the game, and wondering what to do with the fact that we just went through a romance together. -
- CommentAuthorDestriarch
- CommentTimeFeb 10th 2010
Posted By: joepub...and then pulling out from that, finishing the game, and wondering what to do with the fact that we just went through a romance together.
Yeah, there's a reason why I never liked Breaking the Ice. It generates near-unprecedented amounts of awkward in the average gaming group. Not saying it's a bad game per se, but yikes, not for me. I like romance in RPGs, but BTI takes it a little too far outside my comfort zone.
-Ash -
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CommentAuthorhans chung-otterson
- CommentTimeFeb 10th 2010
Posted By: TomasHVM
And my gameMuuhas been considered weird by most players for more than two decades now (most of them have only heard about it). It is a poetic fable about beings with no language and a collective identity. It has exciting actions like walking, looking for food on the ground, eating moss, bathing, cuddling ... and you share your experiences through dreams, and always knows what the other muu's are feeling (you feel it too). And in the end, when you have played it for a couple of hours, you are left with a pure and simple feeling of happiness. :-)
Can we get this in English, please? Great, thanks. -
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That IS English. Tomas always talks like that.
Oh, you mean the Muu game! Sorry!
*ducks and hides* -
Posted By: Adam DrayThat IS English. Tomas always talks like that.
I will make a weird game where all players play the role of Adam Dray, if you continue to muck my puure Anglish skills like the hat, Adam.
And the hat is a treat! -
=D
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Posted By: Destriarch
Posted By: joepub...and then pulling out from that, finishing the game, and wondering what to do with the fact that we just went through a romance together.
Yeah, there's a reason why I never liked Breaking the Ice. It generates near-unprecedented amounts of awkward in the average gaming group. Not saying it's abad gameper se, but yikes, not for me. I like romance in RPGs, but BTI takes it a little too far outside my comfort zone.
-Ash
Oh...
I really liked that aspect of it.
I like that I was weirded out about something as simple as pretending to date. I pretend to kill people, pretend to be an elf, pretend to be an intergalactic terrorist, pretend to be a were-rat... but then I try to do something as simple as pretend to go on a first date, with a pretty simple little game to back me up, and I get all weird about it.
THOUGHT PROVOKING! WEIRD! INTERESTING!
It really made me examine where my comfort levels were, something that re-enforced how fun the play session was, rather than detracting from it. -
This thread has made me examine how inexplicably difficult it is for me to spell "weird" correctly.
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- CommentAuthorDestriarch
- CommentTimeFeb 11th 2010 edited
Posted By: joepub
Oh...
I really liked that aspect of it.
Like I said, not a bad game per se, and I know a lot of people like it. It's just that I can imagine what would happen if I tried to introduce the game to... well, pretty much every gaming group I've ever been a part of, really. They look at me oddly enough when I suggest "Don't Rest Your Head" or "Mouse Guard". Gamers around here aren't generally the highbrow, artsy type who want to explore their innermost feelings through the medium. They want to splat things hard and take their stuff. :(
-Ash -
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CommentAuthorJason Morningstar
- CommentTimeFeb 11th 2010
Reviewing this thread, Tähti really has to win.
I'll bring my copy to Dreamation if anybody there would like to see it. -
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I'd love to see it, Jason.
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So, reviewing this thread, it's totally unclear why Tähti is so weird. Can someone explain? Is it a normal /game/ but it has a really weird /setting/? Is the /gameplay itself/ weird?
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CommentAuthorEero Tuovinen
- CommentTimeFeb 11th 2010
Jason's just overly stricken by what he imagines on the pages of an exotic foreign game. It's not all that weird - the scenario might be a little bit weird, but it's still definitely within the purview of modern cyberpunk. Also, scenarios for any game can be weirdly specific, and this is definitely a scenario more than a specific game. The system material is minimal, as the game belongs in the local immersionist paradigm - GM-controlled freeform, essentially. The game's art is in line with its subject matter.
An addition for Finns who read this and will read more into it than they should: as I've said before, I think that Tähti is a fine scenario, and I appreciate its topic and treatment even if I don't consider its efforts at rpg system design to amount to much. The relative lack of weirdness I argue for here is not an indictment of the work's quality.
(The Finnish scene is small, you can imagine that anything I say about my peers here will be read with a magnifying glass by somebody.) -
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Adam,
I'm glad you said that. I'm getting the same feeling from reading some of the games mentioned in this thread: "OK, a game about mutants in a rock band. That's, uh, a little weird, I guess. Not sure if it's any weirder than Gamma World, though."
So, yeah, please tell us more! For those of us who don't know those games.
I think Mendel was working on some game where, instead of resolution within the fiction (which was handled freeform), players maneuvered their characters so they could later play cards in their hand (which listed things like "X and Y become friends"), and thus the competition was between the players, with all in-fiction differences being handled totally narratively. That sounded interesting, and very unusual for RPG territory, but it could be my fevered imagination reconstructing something else I heard somewhere. -
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CommentAuthorJason Morningstar
- CommentTimeFeb 11th 2010
I bow to Eero's Finnish literacy regarding content. From my POV, the subject is vaguely weird, but style and format (all I really have to go on) push it into the really weird category - Tähti is a glossy magazine, disposable-looking, and is laid out like one. There's nothing gamey about it's visual presentation. It's beautiful and sneaky. -
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You mean it's SEXY and COOL. Don't forget that part!
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- CommentAuthorDestriarch
- CommentTimeFeb 11th 2010
Ahh I love it when they go for that kind of presentation. 'The Last Exodus' was a little like that, all glossy and sleek. That was another weird game in its way. Ostensibly about angels, but the angels ranged from traditional harps-and-haloes brigade, through anthropomorphic animals, to aliens. Very hard to follow. But for what it was, the layout was sharp.
The same company (Synister Creative Systems) also made Underworld, a game of magic hobos living in the New York Underground. Kinda an Americanised version of Neverwhere, that used coin flips as a resolution mechanic.
Wonder what happened to that company? Think I'll go do a web search.
-Ash -
I think he's still working on Underworld. That game rocks.
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Posted By: Paul T.I think Mendel was working on some game where, instead of resolution within the fiction (which was handled freeform), players maneuvered their characters so they could later play cards in their hand (which listed things like "X and Y become friends"), and thus the competition was between the players, with all in-fiction differences being handled totally narratively. That sounded interesting, and very unusual for RPG territory, but it could be my fevered imagination reconstructing something else I heard somewhere.
Paul, this is not a fevered imagining. There are actually two games you could be talking about. Most likely you are thinking about Faust and Friends, the relationship game about selling your soul which was my 2007 Game Chef entry. I explicitly mentioned how the relationship card mechanic is the core of the game, and how everything else is really just a way to gain credibility with the other players that these two characters actually have the relationship you want them to have - because by design those two levels don't interact except through the fiction.
On the other hand, half the reason I wrote Faust and Friends was to kick myself into fixing some playtest problems in my original game which has much the same structure in a somewhat different context, not soapy college kid's who sell their souls, but crazy shoujo anime relationship chaos in Pure Shoujo.
Although I find it interesting that these are weird games. I hadn't really thought about them that way.
- Mendel -
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CommentAuthorDavid Artman
- CommentTimeFeb 12th 2010
Posted By: Adam DrayI think he's still working on Underworld.
Huh. I thought it was released a while ago.
Yes, it was.
I wonder if any of my ideas got into it. (I was WAY involved in GMS's game design articles and forum, during UW's development. If "Radiance Tides" are in it, that's all me. :) ) -
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Wait, I'm actually thinking of Jeff Himmelman's "Kingdom of Nothing," which also uses coins and also delves into the worlds of magical hobos. It was in ashcan form two Dreamations ago. It's a much better game than Underworld. <=)
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Weird, weird. Poison'd is weird because it incentivizes some hilarious behavior. I think Shab Al-Hiri Roach is also weird because . . . I don't know why, but it's just weird and exotic. I'd rank Poison'd up there, though. And My Life With Master always gets into my head because of its weird psychology. I guess the notion of playing pirates and cultists and Igors isn't too weird, though.
We (sage, dan, me, amy) put together a game where you roleplay dudes in a tattoo parlor bitching about your shitty day and giving tattoos to skanky hos, and that's pretty much it, and yet it's one of the more reliably fun games we've played. Sage probably has a copy if anybody wants it.