Towerlands: In Spirit...
I had this idea this morning for that game I'm not writing. I thought it was cool and original, then as I started writing this post I realized that I saw pretty much the same thing in Spirit of the Century. Oops! I'm gonna steal it anyway. I may also have been influenced by Guy Shalev's recent Trolls game in a vague way.
So Towerlands will encourage players to contribute creative ideas to the fictional world beyond the traditional boundary of their character. A series of games will start with the players defining the towerland in which they live. It's a statted thing, like everything else in the game. Mostly it just has some freeform traits (with scores) that describe it. So your towerland might be "large 14" and "covered with rich forests 12" and "led by crazy inbred dwarves 6."
The idea I had was that those traits aren't just metagame stuff. That is, they're traits of the actual spirit of the land. There's a powerful spirit creature that protects and embodies the towerland and that spirit has those traits. If you want to change those traits or act against them, you're acting against that spirit. It's anthropomorphizing the state as a game design efficiency for handling such things. And it has a fantasy flair that I like. Furthermore, I think things get more interesting when people start attributing emotional traits to the spirit of the land. Your towerland can be "grumpy 20" (which is very grumpy, indeed) and the group will have to determine what that means in game terms.
Whether the towerland and its people are that way because the spirit made it so, or the spirit is that way because the towerland and its people made it so, is a matter for the philosophers.
So Towerlands will encourage players to contribute creative ideas to the fictional world beyond the traditional boundary of their character. A series of games will start with the players defining the towerland in which they live. It's a statted thing, like everything else in the game. Mostly it just has some freeform traits (with scores) that describe it. So your towerland might be "large 14" and "covered with rich forests 12" and "led by crazy inbred dwarves 6."
The idea I had was that those traits aren't just metagame stuff. That is, they're traits of the actual spirit of the land. There's a powerful spirit creature that protects and embodies the towerland and that spirit has those traits. If you want to change those traits or act against them, you're acting against that spirit. It's anthropomorphizing the state as a game design efficiency for handling such things. And it has a fantasy flair that I like. Furthermore, I think things get more interesting when people start attributing emotional traits to the spirit of the land. Your towerland can be "grumpy 20" (which is very grumpy, indeed) and the group will have to determine what that means in game terms.
Whether the towerland and its people are that way because the spirit made it so, or the spirit is that way because the towerland and its people made it so, is a matter for the philosophers.