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See, I find a joke I like, and I stick to it, so this post is called "City Of The Straits: This Time It's Remarkably Personal."
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graeae and I have been writing up the City Of The Straits materials - which have gone multimedia, worryingly enough - we've been talking a lot about our vision of this game. In a lot of ways, this feels like a totally new game, something we've never done before, and that's only partly because it is new, it is undone, and the future is as yet unwritten.
In other ways, it feels like a new game, because this is the first game we've ever run, in the last seven years of near-constant gaming, where we decided to actually grow some balls about how we created games. We have a lot of history of success, and we have a lot of history of failure, as well, though we believe that most of our failures were ideas that flew too high too soon. It would be a lie to say that those failures have not coloured how we've handled recent games, though we did not tippy-toe in and anxiously try to direct people in the direction of the plot. And it would be wrong to say that our successes didn't tell us what we did right, even when ideas failed.
This time, we're not going there. This time, we will remember what works and what doesn't, but we're not starting from that posture of defence: this time, we hold in our hands our successes and our joys. This is our game, and we are developing it as we find meet and fit. We are endowing it with themes of magic and pain and diversity and the world around us and wreckage and hope and blood and laughter and all the things that drive us as writers and as creators. We're dialing it up to eleven on every front, and we have finally realised something true about this game, which is the purpose of this post.
This game is our Great American Epic.
Part of it is that we're throwing out canon. There is no canon here. We're not interested in canon - we're interested in guidelines, but we're interested in what people do with those guidelines, not whether someone can play to a type defined by someone else or not.
Part of it is we're no longer interested in what other people think of what we do. If you don't like the fact that half the characters are black, or half are women, or that at least one character is Jewish, that the game is set in Detroit and that we expect that to colour how people create characters, we're not interested in having you in our game. We spent too many years bowing to the implied - and sometimes spoken - wishes of a vocal minority to keep characters white, pretty, and male to be interested in listening any longer.
Part of it is that as we've been talking over our own characters, the themes that keep coming to mind are the ones that make up any good American Epic. When you can look at your character concept and see the theme that drove Steinbeck to write The Grapes Of Wrath, or the personality that created organised crime in this country, or the myth that powers our collective belief in the fundamentals of "being American", you can't say that you're not going to play to that.
Neither of us is willing to play a half-crippled character to appease anyone else, whether an author or a player, ever again. We play what we want to, ever and anon.
This post, however, is not a declaration of war. It is not a statement of defiance for the sake of defiance. It is, instead, an invitation to our players, both the ones we know of and the ones who would potentially join it, to start thinking in the terms we've been thinking in: we want diversity, we want personality, we want no fear, and we want courage.
I can promise this: every time we've said we're doing things differently, we've done that. This time is no exception. Though the game is open for nothing other than PB and name holds we want to spark conversation, and to start sharing what we're thinking of, what we're looking for, and what we want. The wiki is here. Yes, we bought a domain name. The game itself will take place on IJ.
The quick recap:
- It's a game set in Detroit with an ethnically diverse cast of characters. App what you want to play. We want people to play to the setting, but even more than that, we want passion.
- Apps submitted before the wiki is completed and the game is opened will be sent back. We're trying out letting people see our creation process.
- We're interested in, first, last, and always, personalities that have powers, not powers that have personalities.
- We're interested in your thoughts. We know a lot of people are waiting to app - tell us what you're thinking, what you'd like to see, what sparks for you. We make no promises, but we can tell you that we're bringing together more ideas and concepts than we ever have, and we want to know what that makes you think of.
Talk to us.
As
graeae and I have been writing up the City Of The Straits materials - which have gone multimedia, worryingly enough - we've been talking a lot about our vision of this game. In a lot of ways, this feels like a totally new game, something we've never done before, and that's only partly because it is new, it is undone, and the future is as yet unwritten.In other ways, it feels like a new game, because this is the first game we've ever run, in the last seven years of near-constant gaming, where we decided to actually grow some balls about how we created games. We have a lot of history of success, and we have a lot of history of failure, as well, though we believe that most of our failures were ideas that flew too high too soon. It would be a lie to say that those failures have not coloured how we've handled recent games, though we did not tippy-toe in and anxiously try to direct people in the direction of the plot. And it would be wrong to say that our successes didn't tell us what we did right, even when ideas failed.
This time, we're not going there. This time, we will remember what works and what doesn't, but we're not starting from that posture of defence: this time, we hold in our hands our successes and our joys. This is our game, and we are developing it as we find meet and fit. We are endowing it with themes of magic and pain and diversity and the world around us and wreckage and hope and blood and laughter and all the things that drive us as writers and as creators. We're dialing it up to eleven on every front, and we have finally realised something true about this game, which is the purpose of this post.
This game is our Great American Epic.
Part of it is that we're throwing out canon. There is no canon here. We're not interested in canon - we're interested in guidelines, but we're interested in what people do with those guidelines, not whether someone can play to a type defined by someone else or not.
Part of it is we're no longer interested in what other people think of what we do. If you don't like the fact that half the characters are black, or half are women, or that at least one character is Jewish, that the game is set in Detroit and that we expect that to colour how people create characters, we're not interested in having you in our game. We spent too many years bowing to the implied - and sometimes spoken - wishes of a vocal minority to keep characters white, pretty, and male to be interested in listening any longer.
Part of it is that as we've been talking over our own characters, the themes that keep coming to mind are the ones that make up any good American Epic. When you can look at your character concept and see the theme that drove Steinbeck to write The Grapes Of Wrath, or the personality that created organised crime in this country, or the myth that powers our collective belief in the fundamentals of "being American", you can't say that you're not going to play to that.
Neither of us is willing to play a half-crippled character to appease anyone else, whether an author or a player, ever again. We play what we want to, ever and anon.
This post, however, is not a declaration of war. It is not a statement of defiance for the sake of defiance. It is, instead, an invitation to our players, both the ones we know of and the ones who would potentially join it, to start thinking in the terms we've been thinking in: we want diversity, we want personality, we want no fear, and we want courage.
I can promise this: every time we've said we're doing things differently, we've done that. This time is no exception. Though the game is open for nothing other than PB and name holds we want to spark conversation, and to start sharing what we're thinking of, what we're looking for, and what we want. The wiki is here. Yes, we bought a domain name. The game itself will take place on IJ.
The quick recap:
- It's a game set in Detroit with an ethnically diverse cast of characters. App what you want to play. We want people to play to the setting, but even more than that, we want passion.
- Apps submitted before the wiki is completed and the game is opened will be sent back. We're trying out letting people see our creation process.
- We're interested in, first, last, and always, personalities that have powers, not powers that have personalities.
- We're interested in your thoughts. We know a lot of people are waiting to app - tell us what you're thinking, what you'd like to see, what sparks for you. We make no promises, but we can tell you that we're bringing together more ideas and concepts than we ever have, and we want to know what that makes you think of.
Talk to us.
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From: (Anonymous)
no subject
And this: http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness/index.php?title=Chaoticians
You know, just saying. I pretty much love the magic system of the old White Wolf Mage game.
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From: (Anonymous)
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This is Jillian
One of my concerns is not having a canon to rely on, which I can't quite explain but to say that I like having space to roam but occasionally I need an electric fence to keep me on course. The other is seeing how you plan on balancing the mages and the witchfinders to make sure one group isn't overly powered/heavily advantaged.
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Re: This is Jillian
As for your second concern, we think we're going to balance the two pretty well, but obviously you get to make that decision. *g* We'll definitely let people know when the wiki's finalised.
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I really like the magic system from Mage, as I've said. I love how the characters have areas of knowledge, and you take those areas and mix them together to get the effect he/she wants. And how one's knowledge of the areas varies, meaning everyone has their own strengths, but there is the possibility that they can learn new things. Also how each character can have its own belief in how it works, but mechanically its the same in the players' minds.
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Definitely only three characters; feel free to hold all PBs and names if known.
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Cool, I'll list them on the OOC posting.
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Jared linked several aspects of the Mage ruleset above; I really doubt, unless I get surprised by usability, that I'll want to read the entire book, but if so I'll let you know. If you've got specifics you want me to look at, let me know what those are - links preferable, but I can find anything. WW had a pretty comprehensive wiki, as I recall.
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There are no real spells, if you wanted to change your shape, you use Life. If you wanted to change to a living statue, you use Life and Matter. If you wanted to be a living flow of lava, Life, Matter and Forces.
I'm sure you guys won't want to go that detailed, but having the spheres gives a lot of leeway on what someone can do. I don't know how it'd work in a PbP game, but that is why I like it.
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Like I say, if I come to a point that I'm stuck and want to see more of how they did it, I'll let you know.
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Let me know if you want a sounding board. :)
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This is Ashley.
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Re: This is Ashley.
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In a few more words: I've been dying to give a multiplayer RP another go, but I haven't been overly impressed by the offerings out there, especially with the unspoken casting call for pretty white teens. I love the premise and the wiki, and now I've been happily seized by a character idea (although the first thing that strikes me about writing original characters I like is that finding a PB is going to take some work...)
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This is definitely the game to bring those characters that don't fit (which I guess can be seen by the wiki page and already by the hold page). If you need suggestions for PBs, you might give what descriptions you can. A lot of people who are following this thread are good at obscure PBs.
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And if an unnamed PB would be acceptable, I found a great series of photographs with a model who's pretty spot-on (I was looking for a butch Native woman over 35, which believe it or not was a hard combination to find in popular media).
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I can write about arthritis like it's nobody's business. *g*
As far as the PB goes, we like the concept but we would like PBs to be named and know that they are actors, models, etc- public figures of some sort basically. This is mainly because we're concerned about accidentally using a "civilian," as it were and somehow running into problems. If you can track down who she is and she fits into those categories, we'd not object. (And linking the set might be helpful, maybe someone here would know who she is. I first thought Misty Upham when you said that, though she's likely not as butch as who you've found.)
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Are you familiar with Native Celebs? http://www.nativecelebs.com/
I look there sometimes to get inspired.
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Count me out. I hate you all.COUNT ME IN. DIVERSITY.
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