…from the June, 1897 issue
Some Thoughts On Roleplaying Games
As I was looking over my collection of computer games, it dawned on me that in most games, it is the sandbox mode that I play most frequently. Oh sure, the pre-made scenarios are fun and the main adventures in CRPG’s like “The Elder Scrolls” are cool, but just exploring a world is often way more fun.
So, armed with that thought, I got to thinking about a totally sandbox type face to face RPG. One in which both the players and the GM start out with a blank (or nearly so) map and fill in the details as they go along. And I mean ALL the details…from what the geography of a given area is to the local ecology to politics to how magic or technology works to…well, damned near everything.
Of course, the game would come with a truckload of useful tools/charts/ideas/etc, but they wouldn’t be overly specific about anything. Defining the world would be up to the players. Naturally, you’d want a rules system that was extremely flexible and you might even want to go with a GMless system.
So, My Gentle Readers, any thoughts on this?
The Dociverse Blog 
Communist!
Hehheh, just kiddin’, though in a lot of ways, it does sound kind of like Communism;
Looks good on paper, but a disaster waiting to happen in real life.
I wanted to explore something akin to this using the Maelstrom Storytelling game system. The advantage of this game system is that it describes everything in terms of relationships and associations. For example, a village might have a strong relationship with the River Weander (and hence is found on it’s banks), as well as an strong relationship with long warm summer evenings, and a weak relationship with Cameron’s Caravan of Convenient Costumes (which means it might occaisionally be found here). [In my version links could be in a single direction (the only way to Leng is to view the face of Mt Ngarek, for example) or bidirectional (and even of different strengths in each direction to account for the relative difficulty in moving from one node to the next).]
I thought they cheated when they published a map in a later supplement.
Character skills and abilities were handled in much the same manner (a strong relationship with swords, for example, would portray an excellent swordsman).
I was fascinated by the type of graph that could be created in such a manner, and how you could resolve that back into a more normal context. Then again, would there be any need to.
The trick to make it interesting is to encourage the creation of cross-connections (thus each mention of a node adds an entry into the database, which can then be searched by relationships. Hmmmmm. <thinks>
Hmmm…the whole relationship thing sounds very interesting. I’ll have to think on it.
Conquer the Horizon is an attempt to make a game along those lines.
I remember working with a gaming buddy or two on something like this. We mostly gave up on it as it seemed to us that it would be too difficult to come up with a coherent set of rules for it. But we did come up with a few game world ideas during our discussions.