I've been strangled by ideas lately. I constantly come up with game ideas, but in lieu of being able to program or anything like that, they're just game theories. Since I hang out this forum all the time, most are ideas for forum games I'd like to inflict on people. So far, so good.
However, I'm also stuck with an unfortunate combination of laziness and perfectionism. As a result, I've got a bunch of half-baked gameplans that I'd love to manage, but none of them are anywhere close to playable. I've learned my lesson about trying to wing it and the need for preparation, but they're all competing for my attention. The best plan I can come up with is to just yak about them here and see if any of them sound interesting to anyone but me. Basically, I need to commit to one project. (One being a relative term, compared to the three or four other things I have on my mind at any one time.)
Not counting the ideas I scrapped for lack of viability, the list includes-
People here have a lot of different visions about the future of warfare. I have my own. So many predictions seem to focus just on the tools and tactics, with no such thing as collateral damage, eye-witness reporting, or even faulty intelligence. My vision is a little more comprehensive, and more grizzly.
The more connectivity grows, the more important information becomes, not just to soldiers, but to commanders, politicians, reporters, and everyone else with any say in affairs. War of information is fought on every strata across a dozen dimensions, but the soldier on the ground is still stuck making the calls and taking the blame. Knowing when not to shoot is as important as when to, and every pull of the trigger could need permission. Civilians are always all around, and hostile forces are indistinguishable from them until they start shooting. And while any man on the street might have a gun, every man on the street has a camera-phone, and if a squad shoots the wrong target, Command might see it on YouTube before they make it back to base. War used to be Hell - now it's Hell with Twitter.
I will cast a few players as company-level captains directing squads and platoons, in a hypothetical mega-sized peacekeeping action in the near future, close enough to grasp but far enough to speculate. And this isn't some super smack down gun-wank, closer to a war-puzzle, where every action has to be considered in terms of it's material effect, the accuracy of the assessment, and the likely appearance. Because when the whole world can hear every command and see every shot, tactical and political objectives become the same thing.
I came up with this back when Umiman raised the discussion about future war, and since then I've been neck deep in technical specifications and population maps. I want this game to be as much a thought exercise as a competition, but with significant elements of randomness - both to keep things interesting and save me from planning every encounter. Needless to say, it's a daunting task in preparation, but I think I'm on the right track already.
Essentially my own take on the Age of Restoration and other pseudo-Civilization forum games that appear to be rather popular. This time with that unrequited Post-Apocalyptic flair everyone loves so much. What more could you need to know?
The way I'm picturing it, this would be fairly easy to run, and only require some simple rules setup before hand. Then I let people go all Bartertown-y in a randomly generated wasteland.
A handful of strangers awaken in a dark manor, with no memory of who they are, where they are, or why reality is coming apart at the seems. They must discover their identities, discover what has happened, and save themselves and the Earth from trans-planar oblivion.
Yes, a supernatural mystery game, inspired by Call of Cthulhu. The key change-up being that the players basically have to find their way out of a pre-made story. Rather than designing or choosing their characters, I as GM will weave a back-story of a dozen people. Then, the players (probably five) will be assigned people based on their responses to initial solo encounters. Nothing handed to them of course, just a physical description, with trails of clues to follow themselves by.
I've never played Call of Cthulhu, but I wouldn't take the rulebook as more than a helpful reference anyway. Likewise, I've never read any of Lovecraft's books, but I'm not one to adhere to source material either. The biggest hurdle is that I'd have to write a novel's worth of description and plot before I could even get started, without either burning out after the introductions, or making the simplest mystery ever.
An ordinary RPG-type forum game, maybe even an RTD-like (without all that "rules say I can do anything", universe bending bullshit I remember them attracting). The setting would be a mash-up of olden days sci-fi, namely William Hodgson's Night Land, a tremendous brick of text about the Earth millions of years in the future, with a primitive understanding of physics on the author's part.
The obvious stumbling block here being that I'd need to finish reading the damn book, or I'd really be pulling stuff out of my ass. Plus I'd need to write a plot and whatnot, not to mention a game system, but it could be as simple as an ordinary RTD+modifiers.
I already made a thread about this, and actually got some work done back when I committed to it. Not a game in itself, but certainly a project I can be happy with, if I ever hammer it into a playable state. Just needs my attention again.
I can't program or be arsed to really learn how, so I'm always on the lookout for solid DIY game engines. This started nearly ten years ago, when I stumbled across an absolute gem of BASIC programing called The Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Creation Engine (http://hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/index.php/Main_Page.html). I've been following it's development off-and-on for a decade now, and it still impresses me. Basically, it's a self contained package for making RPGs analogous to Final Fantasy 4 and thereabouts. If nothing else, anyone who digs old Nintendo RPGs should check it out.
I don't have a plan for this one, but it pretty much writes itself. If you look around the site, there's a lot of things to be done with the engine. Once again, the best I can come up with is something staring RPG facsimiles of whoever wants in, either as a plot driven story (that I can't write) or some mission-based game (that the engine might not handle). It's different from the rest of the list because all it really needs is a coordinator, and anyone with ideas or some pixel-drawing ability can assist, though it still takes some effort to make anything worth playing.
And then of course there's The Bay Sims 12 2, but I started that figuring I could just come back to it every few days with another easy update. I've been proven right, and the thread's taken on a life of it's own anyway.
So yeah, this whole post is basically a giant ego stroke, but this being the Creative area, I guess there's no harm in throwing out some aimless creativity for perusal.