A mysterious game of amnesia?

[Malkavian Grin]

I was watching some D&D let's plays where the players had amnesia and had to discover not only their background but their powers as well. It had some metagame elements about it, which I think could be ironed out via play-by-post. However, I also think it could be improved with more amnesia as it were.

Imagine a game where your characters have some basic skeleton features about them that the player will choose--race (Elf, Dwarf, etc.), stats--but beyond that everything else will be discovered in-game through trial-and-error.

Now, what if the game premise itself--beyond some initial setup (or including it if the players vote that way)--was chosen via interpretation of something like Mythic GM Emulator. Thus, both the players as well as the GM have some element of amnesia applied to them and the game won't just feel like a railroad one-shot adventure beyond what is built into the narrative during play. I dunno, this might might sound stupid to other people but I find it a fascinating experiment.

I haven't settled on a system but it'd probably run smoother with a rules-light.

Does this sound interesting to anyone?

[Papa Bear]

Someone started a game like this a couple years back and got me and a few others really excited to give it a go. We rolled some random numbers and found out our races... I was disappointed, but I don't remember what I actually rolled as the game got no further than that. Onne of the shorter games I've been a part of.

[Thot]

May I point out https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Strange_Aeons ?

[Basil_Bottletop]

I ran a game here: Echoes of Yesterday.

I have said it multiple times that I need to breakdown how we did it because I thought it was worth the effort and really helped me 'fix' what I thought was wrong with amnesia games. Specifically, I hate that characters either get lore dumped too early or the players end up doing a bunch of meta actions to try and glean what mechanics they have available to them.

**In one game on the Weave, I remember being coerced into standing in line and everyone throwing a dagger at a board to see who was the DEX fighter. It made zero sense, but if you didn't do the meta thing you got so far behind that you became irrelevant.**

The minor difference for my game over normal amnesia games is that our characters -unbeknownst to the players- had lived full lives already and had been reincarnated to help fight a blighted future era. So we had to start hammering down timelines too to ensure no one overlapped.

Echoes used what we called Memory Tokens. A scene would start and the players were free to post normally but they could also inform the GMs that they were going to use a memory token on some detail provided in the scene* (*some details of the scenes were left to the players to provide on a small scale, so if the player wanted there to be a broken sword or a stainless steel flip lighter on the table, they could put one there).

Then the GMs would put together an open-ended question or scenario request for the player using that token. Posting it in their private thread kept the game from getting too cluttered.

The player would put together a 2-10 sentence response to the question/scenario. Then the GMs would interpret that response with a mechanical response.

We as GMs had some rough ideas on what races, classes, etc the players were going to be... but we had to be open to pivoting those ideas if the player's responses did not jive well with those preconceived choices. Weirdly, our players fell right into line with what we had thought for them, so we didn't have to pivot very much. I do think there's also some natural depth-building that each character can have that means that mechanics can be widely interpreted and thus not shoehorned.

For example, if we decided that someone was going to be a knight and then their first scenario write-up included fishing off the coast with their father...who's to say that the knight couldn't also have those memories? (In our game, the paladin's first memory was walking through an orchard with a child on his shoulder and people paying him respect as he passed them by)

 

This system gave the players some control over their characters while keeping it hidden. There was definitely some times where the players were surprised by the results of their rewards, but other times we got hit with a lot of 'I KNEW IT!' in the discord after the reveal.

[Malkavian Grin]

4 hours ago, Thot said:

May I point out https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Strange_Aeons ?

Interesting. No money to get into it, and I'd likely steal the ideas for use with a less-involved system.

3 hours ago, Basil_Bottletop said:

I ran a game here: Echoes of Yesterday.

Woah! That's a cool take on it! I'll need to delve into the thread when I have time to see it in action. I'm reminded of the Genesis System where players could spend a pool of Story Points to interject a detail into the story to turn a failure into success or be extra effective; each Story Point spent gives one to the GM to be used against the players in the same way. My initial thought is this could pair with your Memory Token idea in a back-and-forth system of "this is how you remember yourself but here's what you tried to suppress or ignore or forgot"?

Knowing this would be extra work for the GM, I might try to minimize the metagaming by not revealing rolls to players but instead trying to impart upon them how doing such things feels through narrative. But that doesn't prevent them from spamming dumb shit lol.

14 hours ago, Papa Bear said:

Someone started a game like this a couple years back and got me and a few others really excited to give it a go. We rolled some random numbers and found out our races... I was disappointed, but I don't remember what I actually rolled as the game got no further than that. Onne of the shorter games I've been a part of.

I think I've played in a game like that at least once but as you say it wasn't properly baked and thus fell apart almost immediately.

[Basil_Bottletop]

There's a lot of players that can adapt to a racial, gender, or class-specific concept pretty effortlessly. But it's not everyone, and the number is probably smaller than some folks want to admit themselves.

I would put forth to players that I'd like them to give me a veto list before we begin. Using d20 as my reference point, just telling me what races and classes you really don't enjoy playing gives me some idea of what not to give you. Because if you're unhappy with the race and/or class, you're more likely to ghost or quiet quit. Then there are those people that are going to shoehorn the same personality onto any chassis you give them, so be prepared for that too.

[Malkavian Grin]

18 minutes ago, Basil_Bottletop said:

There's a lot of players that can adapt to a racial, gender, or class-specific concept pretty effortlessly. But it's not everyone, and the number is probably smaller than some folks want to admit themselves.

I would put forth to players that I'd like them to give me a veto list before we begin. Using d20 as my reference point, just telling me what races and classes you really don't enjoy playing gives me some idea of what not to give you. Because if you're unhappy with the race and/or class, you're more likely to ghost or quiet quit. Then there are those people that are going to shoehorn the same personality onto any chassis you give them, so be prepared for that too.

Very true and well said. Not everything is for everyone. I myself wonder why some people like rat races or kobolds. I just don't get it lol. But I like toads and crocs. *shrug*

That is why I wanted to give players a set of skeleton features they will be comfortable with; race, gender, personality. But that's a great point about class (though I think that boils down to intended party role); are you for close combat? is your voice your weapon? are you involved in the study of a kind of magic?

This is also why I wanted a rules-lite system so that players can be granted a memory (likely through using that Memory Token) and get to choose a generalized descriptor of a power that the GM interprets into mechanics. I think Maze Rats would work as a decent base with some modifications. I want to harness a "yes, and" energy for a game like this because I think that's the only way to keep it interesting for the players.

[Vladim]

Whatever you choose to do, make sure that PCs can unlock the memories of their class abilities relatively quickly. PbP is slow, and it's not much fun playing a spellcaster who can't cast spells because they haven't unlocked that memory yet. Especially at level 1, when starting abilities are generally sparse.

[Semety]

Oh this does sound interesting. I'm not sure how it would work, but it seems like the improv would be fun. One application I filled out for a Dnd game had us make characters based off a random word, and I absolutely loved that idea. I don't mind playing any class really, except when I get the chance I usually avoid wizards, just cause they seem complicated to play.

 

And kobolds are cute, though I might still be picturing them as the fuzzy little guys from when I played ad&d.

[cailano]

Interesting take on an exploration game. With no memories, characters would have to explore both their external and internal worlds. Sounds like a challenge for both players and GM!