Gamer Tales The SUE Files III: Basically, Exercising Your Cheese-Forging Genes [Archive] - Page 3

Zelphas

2014-03-20, 12:13 AM

Whatever we end up making it, I was thinking perhaps the Agency is, itself, rather oneiromantic (oneirophonic? the speaking version of listening to dreams) in its doings; rather than normal dreams, its agents get their briefings that way. This also avoids the players having their own setting, since now they can't dream, although we might want that. Perhaps after their first, undirected hop, the Agency waits a while to see if they can make it on their own in a wholly alien world, then zaps a sort of introductory nightmare into their heads.

This is cool, but it does bring up a question: If you are brought into the Agency after you've already "dreamed up" a world, what happens to that world? Does it vanish in a blast of broken Immersion? Does it freeze or wither away, bereft of the imaginative force hat drove it? Or does it simply continue on, somehow separate from the mind that created it?

It could be possible that the act of "waking" someone into the Agency causes massive Immersion break in the worlds of their heads. One of their first jobs could be to shut down their fantasy world before the resulting chaos can manifest into a powerful SUE. Then again, this paints the Agency in a decidedly darker grey than perhaps we want, so maybe not.

Trekkin

2014-03-20, 12:37 AM

If we want to avoid making them dark grey, perhaps they simply elect not to wake someone responsible for a world, instead dispatching their existing agents to help them reintegrate wherever they landed.

See, I've been kind of toying with the idea of the player ranks of the Agency being filled by orphans, if you will. Before someone flees their home world, the Agency isn't even aware of their existence; it's therefore impossible for them to return someone home, since all world tree coordinates are relative. Randomness and infinite size mix in fun ways.

Creators, then, get dealt with by agents; they act like psychotherapist smugglers, popping them back to somewhere that looks like where they left and doing their best to calm them down. The Agency keeps tabs on them, when resources permit, but doesn't try to wake them. They only wake the people who, having shed everything they've ever known, are completely free. After, say, a month of living through that, then they get woken up with a bad dream.

It rather reminds me of Changeling: the Lost, only it's the view from the other side of the hedge. Then again, maybe people want their characters to be able to go back to their actual friends/family/life, rather than the best approximation they can find locally. Opinions?

EDIT: It could also tinge the briefings/visions with a certain amount of nostalgia.

DOUBLE EDIT: The idea of Earth Prime's been growing on me; how would it be if such Prime-worlds are the source of so many worlds that the Agency's positively paranoiac about damping Immersion losses and maintaining the masquerade as perfectly as possible? I haven't run the numbers yet, but if the average world has a few million creators hanging out in it, anything in the trillions is probably very closely guarded indeed. That way the tree stays unrooted, but we can still give the players a home base to operate out of.

Deffers

2014-03-20, 02:01 PM

I don't mind Prime worlds in that context, by any means. Just having A prime world is the only thing that feels off. Having some targets be prioritized over others just helps make things feel more tense and varied, as well.

I feel like my idea of recursive worlds might help explain some of the weirdness of creators that are separated from their worlds-- maybe that's how realities get popped into interesting geometries. Either the dreamer is jolted awake, or something ate a SUE and tried to patch up the damage, and the results are topologically and conceptually bizarre areas that are nested inside themselves.

I don't mind themes of "can't go home again," though that might interact strangely with, say, a wizard who could teleport between planes in his old home and who is still the stubborn old goat he had to be to get good at magic so many years ago. We need to define how powers and tech that involve dimensional teleportation work relative to our multiverse.

Trekkin

2014-03-20, 03:02 PM

I feel like my idea of recursive worlds might help explain some of the weirdness of creators that are separated from their worlds-- maybe that's how realities get popped into interesting geometries. Either the dreamer is jolted awake, or something ate a SUE and tried to patch up the damage, and the results are topologically and conceptually bizarre areas that are nested inside themselves.

I don't mind themes of "can't go home again," though that might interact strangely with, say, a wizard who could teleport between planes in his old home and who is still the stubborn old goat he had to be to get good at magic so many years ago. We need to define how powers and tech that involve dimensional teleportation work relative to our multiverse.

Well, I had intended the dream to be ongoing regardless of the waking state of the dreamer; otherwise we're back to playing only in leaf nodes from all the necessary time dilation, since everything else has to be nighttime. So yes, topological weirdness is going to happen. And to think I'd started this off hoping for a directed acyclic graph universe.

That plane-hopping wizard is less a problem than it might be under the circumstances, since all the planes are in the same node. Once he jumps all the way out of that, he's doing the same random jump as everyone else -- and wherever he lands, his magic still works, only now it costs Immersion to make it work. It might be too much of a cop-out, but "out of the wrong kind of range" seems like a good answer to teleportation. They work natively because the native physics let them work; outside, they're magic anyway, neither more or less effective than any other kind of magic.

Incidentally, recursive dreams help but do not completely solve the issue of time; specifically, we're packing a whole universe's timeline into some portion of a single lifespan, and we're stacking that effect on itself constantly. A billion-fold difference per level...in all likelihood, when they leave their destination ends within an instant of local time.

Sounds to me like we need time travel as a fundamental skill for dreamjackers, but I'm desperately hoping someone has a better idea.

Qwertystop

2014-03-20, 03:16 PM

Looser connections? The dream world could keep running in the background while the person is awake instead of pausing. In that case, the people in whose heads these worlds exist might be daydreamers or easily distracted or just a bit dense, because a lot of brainpower is going to the world-running.

History as part of the initial dream? The first moment someone starts dreaming up a world, it might not start at the creation of that world - the creation and such is all backstory. This allows for situations where a world's starting state might not make sense relative to what the capabilities of the beings in the world are - you get the scenarios you have in D&D 3.P generic settings, where the world is pseudo-medieval until the PCs come along and start actually using magic for what it's good for - except all the NPCs can start having those realizations too, as soon as the dream starts. This would look like worlds suddenly popping into being with a thousand years of history written, then progressing at a normal rate.

We could just say it depends on the world- some people are the sort to dream about the creation of a world, others would think about later events. Some minds time-dilate, others only experience a few hours of the world every night.

Deffers

2014-03-20, 03:48 PM

Leliel

2014-03-20, 06:43 PM

Maybe people's dreams only start the level editor, as it were-- the dreams persist after their deaths, maintained by the entities that act as maintenance men for the whole universe.

Once we add time shenanigans, things begin to look like a fractal and distorted palimpsest that it makes my head hurt to look at.

That's what I was thinking.

Also, I can think of slang for the entities that appear when you finally break Immersion:

Some call them Demons. This is both insulting and highly wrong, as they provide a vital role to the universe and are largely responsible for cutting out the cancer before it metastasizes. This is the dreamjacker name for them.

Many call them Seraphim. Misleading, as they aren't angels, not hardly, but they are warriors and caretakers of infinity. So this is the "official" name, much of the time.

All who know anything, however, call them the Janitors. Because, well, when you remove all pretense, that's exactly what they do. It's really unfortunate that a lot of the mess is that wet carbon-based thing we call life, eh?

Sith_Happens

2014-03-20, 07:35 PM

that wet carbon-based thing we call life

Or that somewhat-less-wet silicon-based thing, or that metallic Energon-powered thing, or that sapient sound wave that eats other sound waves to gain back intensity as it travels, or...

RedEttin

2014-03-22, 02:18 AM

So I'm not overly keen on there being one root world, but assuming here is, and we don't mind recursive dreams, perhaps there could be a mechanism in place that makes it so much more real.

So, starting at, say, three steps out from base reality (Can we call them cuils (http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory)? I've always wanted a real use for that word), there's a single dreamer who dreams Earth Prime. At four cuils, maybe there are three such dreamers, with none at all again until eight cuils, where there are two. Some unknowable pattern, like prime integers, of recursive dreamers seemingly born with the purpose of stabilizing the root of reality. If you really want to get messy and cover the effects of dilation, maybe they're each dreaming a different section of universe history, with some being 3 quadrillion cuils out dreaming nothing but the first ten seconds of he universe in extreme detail, possibly including a small lead-up to the Big Bang. Presumably, the closer someone is to Earth Prime, the closer to 'present' their dream.

Trekkin

2014-03-31, 11:33 AM

I think we're going with roots being, at most, local. That is to say there are some worlds with so many links that the Agency devotes considerable resources to maintaining the masquerade.

Incidentally, there was a new post (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-sue-files-one-day-well-even-have.html) over the downtime. I think we've solved the global time travel problem, and I have no problem with in-universe time travel being an assignable property of specific worlds. With an external reference it's actually easier to keep track of time, so we can at least leave the option open.

As for everything else...hopefully we're not getting too complicated. The next post ought to be shorter.

Incidentally: I'm becoming more and more disillusioned with HERO as a base for this, if only because it's not free. If anyone knows of a similarly versatile free system, I'd love to know about it, but I'm not above just building my own.

Sith_Happens

2014-03-31, 12:33 PM

Incidentally: I'm becoming more and more disillusioned with HERO as a base for this, if only because it's not free. If anyone knows of a similarly versatile free system, I'd love to know about it, but I'm not above just building my own.

I've been spending a lot of time on the M&M 3e SRD lately, so I guess I'll be the one to make that particular obligatory nomination. I often see people refer to M&M as the more pick-up-and-play version of HERO, though I don't really know much of anything about HERO.

Arbane

2014-03-31, 01:58 PM

Incidentally: I'm becoming more and more disillusioned with HERO as a base for this, if only because it's not free. If anyone knows of a similarly versatile free system, I'd love to know about it, but I'm not above just building my own.

M&M's already been suggested, so FATE, maybe? It's one of the least-simulationist systems ever, though.

Qwertystop

2014-03-31, 02:58 PM

So.
Yesterday morning (as in pre-getting-up haze) I had an idea related to this system. I promptly forgot it all day.

Last night (pre-sleep haze) I remembered it and quickly wrote it down.

I have since taken a picture of it. Filtering through it, anyone think there's something in it worth considering?
http://imageshack.com/a/img21/4372/zfjy.jpg
Not the whole idea, of course, but maybe bits-and-pieces of the lower-impact magics by way of filtering things through the world's rules.

Winds

2014-03-31, 02:59 PM

Some Archetype ideas. I've based the descriptions on the assumption that each world/dream/root/leaf/thing is a story that is affected by the presence of dreamjackers. (What kind of affect depends on how they handle Immersion, of course.)

Transient-
A SUE with this designation is a step beyond the usual. More than being aware of other worlds, this SUE is determined to use them. What 'using' means will vary according to their other designations. Often carries the Emperor designation as well.

Corrupter-
A SUE that subverts the world to their own purposes. Subtle cases may involve simply convincing a character choose different at an important point in the story, while high-threat cases may leave the character almost unrecognizable from their original state. See also Destroyer, which has a great deal of overlap.

Destroyer-
A SUE that ruins or discards parts of the story they don't care for. Subtle cases may interfere with the flow of the story, which can stain Immersion for characters within, as some reactions and events no longer fit. See also Corrupter, when the SUE makes changes to the things they like as well.

Kingmaker-
SUEs that stay in the background, and affect the story by suggesting things behind the scenes. Discretion should be used: be certain that your target is not a fellow dreamjacker attempting to repair the influence of a SUE. Also bear in mind that any SUE with this designation may be noticeably more or less threatening than they estimated Threat would indicate.

Sith_Happens

2014-03-31, 05:36 PM

I like "dreamjacker" (which I'm pretty sure I was the one who came up with) getting adopted as a term, though the way I used it referred somewhat more specifically to those people doing things that put them on the path to potential SUEdom. Maybe "dreamhopper" for the general class of people-who-broke-out-and-can-travel-the-worlds?

Dreamdrifter?

Dreamwalker?

Awoken?

Qwertystop

2014-03-31, 07:13 PM

I like -drifter, personally.

Trekkin

2014-03-31, 10:48 PM

I've been thinking of them as Ramblers, because not all who wander are lost.

If we felt like getting mythological with our Agency operative names, we could go with Oneiroi, or the Hands of Hypnos (assuming we like Ovid.) Alternatively, Hendersonians. If we wanted a more RPG-esque name: they keep the stories running at least in the general direction of the rails. We could call them the Engineers. It's a bit of a double entendre.

I thought I came up with dreamjacker in that one blog post, but my search-fu is weak. Apologies for initially dismissing your term, Sith_Happens; my dislike of it was contingent on me being its source, since my names are usually pretentious and sometimes I'm bad at detecting that. See above.

Winds: love the archetypes. I needed a dimension like that to fill out sort of the N-dimensional identifying matrix of SUEs. I had not considered classifying them by their goals as well as their methods, and those names are nice and ominous.

And Qwertystop: brilliantly done. There needs to be something like that to explain why our various flavors of tagonist hang out where people are, threatening Immersion breaks and so on; otherwise people would just go to some unobserved place, like underground or the depths of space or behind the Sun, and make stuff until they were unstoppable. A background count of subtle magic leaking from thought to reality via coincidences fits the bill nicely, and I think the downstack effects propagate well as written. Think about fire a lot, find lighters. Moreover, if a lot of people are thinking about fire -- or one person really hard -- lots of people find lighters, and eventually we have a self-sustaining zeitgeist. This means that, at its most ludicrous extreme, mass-spawning space death cruisers in an Arthurian fantasy world is going to result in a lot of ancillary weirdness of the blacksmiths-sell-spaceships style. The gods you describe can simply be another sort of extreme, one of urgency or fervor or regard rather than magnitude.

It also sets up a nice margin of confusion for our forces to hide in. People are always the heroes of their own story, but stories have people who are not heroes; presented with this multipart cognitive dissonance, the poor confused simulation responds with coincidence and serendipity and ways of compromising causality. To hunt dreamjackers, then, is to sort through a constant ground scatter of deja vu, funny feelings, and superstition.

Zelphas

2014-04-01, 12:16 AM

The way that SUEs are made in this system is really interesting; it actually allows for sympathetic, even pitiable, SUEs. Something like this: A boy is afraid of the monsters, so he wishes himself away. He finds himself somewhere utterly different, and for a time, he might even believe he had escaped from the monsters. Every mind has its demons, however, and therefore so does every world. Soon, the boy finds himself confronted by a monster, in the world he had fled to to escape the monsters. He can't believe that a monster had invaded his monster free world; he rejects its existence--and therefore, it ceases to exist. The boy awakens to his SUE powers, and suddenly realizes that reality is whatever he wants it to be. He makes himself braver, stronger, faster, the hero every little boy wants to be. Every time something doesn't go his way, he just stomps his foot, and suddenly everything's okay again.
Then people show up and tell him to stop, that what he's doing is bad. He tries to get them to stop saying mena things to him, he tries to get them to go away, but his ability doesn't work against them. Then they start attacking him! He fights back, thinking that if he can send them away again, then everything will go back to being nice, the way it was before.
This is a little kid, at most five years old, so his rewritings of reality are sweeping and sloppy. Immersion has been broken horribly, and the world finally responds with its Backlash. What do you think it sends? That's right, a monster. The dreamjackers/drifters/Ramblers/whatever go from fighting an angry, powerful SUE to a frightened child who has just learned that some monsters can't be wished away.

Some days, waking up to reality must really suck.

Cristo Meyers

2014-04-01, 02:28 PM

This is all very similar to a short story setting I had a while ago. It never went anywhere, mostly because I didn't have the skill to make it work. Guess I was just thinking about it in the wrong terms, because this is all much better.

The way that SUEs are made in this system is really interesting; it actually allows for sympathetic, even pitiable, SUEs. Something like this: A boy is afraid of the monsters, so he wishes himself away. He finds himself somewhere utterly different, and for a time, he might even believe he had escaped from the monsters. Every mind has its demons, however, and therefore so does every world. Soon, the boy finds himself confronted by a monster, in the world he had fled to to escape the monsters. He can't believe that a monster had invaded his monster free world; he rejects its existence--and therefore, it ceases to exist. The boy awakens to his SUE powers, and suddenly realizes that reality is whatever he wants it to be. He makes himself braver, stronger, faster, the hero every little boy wants to be. Every time something doesn't go his way, he just stomps his foot, and suddenly everything's okay again.
Then people show up and tell him to stop, that what he's doing is bad. He tries to get them to stop saying mena things to him, he tries to get them to go away, but his ability doesn't work against them. Then they start attacking him! He fights back, thinking that if he can send them away again, then everything will go back to being nice, the way it was before.
This is a little kid, at most five years old, so his rewritings of reality are sweeping and sloppy. Immersion has been broken horribly, and the world finally responds with its Backlash. What do you think it sends? That's right, a monster. The dreamjackers/drifters/Ramblers/whatever go from fighting an angry, powerful SUE to a frightened child who has just learned that some monsters can't be wished away.

Some days, waking up to reality must really suck.

If this ever gets to the point of writing fluff stories, this should be one.

It does bring up a couple of world-building questions that I don't think have been answered yet: what happens to the defeated SUEs? I mean, sure, some are going to be "exterimate with extreme prejudice" but what about the above? Or low-level threats? Can they be contained or is this going to be a bagged cat situation where once he's out there's no getting him back in?

Trekkin

2014-04-01, 02:43 PM

Indeed it should be one of the stories, should there be any. In answer to your question:

I'm writing a post on it now, but I'm trying to make it so that, ideally, players are almost never put in a situation where destroying their target is the only option. The problem, after all, is doing extraordinary things in unbelievable ways until Azathoth.exe wakes up, so to speak; if the players can convince the SUEs to stop doing them or to do them in a concealable manner, that's just as good a solution.

In a perfect world, they'd try to notify and recruit as a first resort, working under the assumption that most folks doing this are just dealing with a very scary situation in a way they don't yet know (or believe) is ultimately detrimental to their long-term existence. Even actively malicious SUEs can probably be reasoned with.

Obviously in practice there will be a lot fewer win-win situations and a lot more losses on both sides, especially in more urgent cases, but if possible I'd like to at least leave room for, say, new players to be introduced as minor villains and things like that. At the very least that means low-level, oblivious, or well-meaning threats can probably be contained or moved or simply convinced to change.

See, I don't want to make the reality-hopping version of The Cold Equations. If nothing else, too many stories can involve people doing troublesome things through no fault of their own for me to be happy saying they all need to end.

Deffers

2014-04-01, 03:36 PM

I like the new developments, guys! I think they're quite cool.

For the record, I was the one on the blog asking about what would happen if a very alien thing decided it wanted to leave where it was from and reform in a new place. i.e. something like Cthulhu, that is mountain-sized and would have a hard time hiding, deciding it wanted to leave its home reality and it ended up, by dint of the random nature of its first jump, in an Arthurian fantasy. I can't dream up of a way for Azathoth.exe to NOT wake up if this happened, given the psionic wave of madness that washes over anybody in proximity to Cthulhu. It was a thought experiment that came from my wondering about exactly how "sane" you'd have to be to still be admitted into the Dreamjackers. Cthulhu's sane, by the standards of him and his kin. And he'd be modeled off the same template as every other sophont.

Another question-- if magic is just a very stubborn application of your will to something, wouldn't skilled SUEs and Dreamjackers be able to kill whoever they wanted by way of, say, willing for their victims' stomachs to suddenly develop malignant tumors or by rapidly accelerating the growth of bacteria inside someone's food/drink until they're basically eating out of a septic tank? Would they even have to be in the same room to do this? Would they need to be in line of sight?

I feel like these might be a problem, inasmuch as they're things almost any PC or SUE could do with the rules that we've written, and these subtle effects would be significantly more powerful than just drop-kicking a mountain in half or using Immersion in ways that would be unique to a character and their background.

Another question: let's say you come from a sci-fi setting. You've got a jetpack and a laser gun, because you're a Cool Space Ranger, and you had them on you when you left your native reality so you instantiated them in with you when you got to your new location and you've kept them on hand; after all, you wouldn't know about Immersion when you first jumped, you'd just know you had a jetpack and a laser gun. Anyways, let's say you go to a modern-day setting, and use your jetpack and laser gun in public. This would cause Immersion strain, right? But being a dreamjacker, you could also make every pane of glass in a house spontaneously shatter, right? At the cost of Immersion, of course. And if you lose your laser gun, you could just dream in a new one, right? Again, at the cost of Immersion-- probably a significant one. The point I'm getting at is, unless we make the costs for blatantly supernatural things like that cost exorbitant amounts of Immersion, it seems to me like all PCs run the risk of becoming more or less similar in terms of capabilities. However, if we make the Immersion cost of brandishing your laser gun too high, what was even the point of you packing Cool Space Ranger equipment? Should characters start off with no traces of their old, original reality? Because, again, that leads to the problem where everyone has similar powers.

I propose we figure out a reason for people to have distinct ways they can shape local reality that are unique to them and, if we like, their origin. A good example is how, in Zelphas's story, it feels like the way a kid would try and rewrite reality. See, he's not gonna give a toss about bacteria or tumors, he's just gonna stomp his feet and have the bad things go away. But that makes sense because the character is a kid, and that presents the only limitation to his power. If you've instead got a nerdy guy who knows a reasonable amount about science and who spent his time reading fantasy and sci-fi-- never heard of a person like that before, I know :smalltongue:-- well, that person could be a god-tier dreamjacker or one of the most powerful SUEs imaginable, simply by dint of their knowledge of various settings, their knowledge of things like bacteria that others might not know of, or things of that nature. Hell, how good of a dreamjacker you'll be might only have to do with how rich your native reality's fiction was and how much of that fiction you consumed.

Any ideas?

The_Werebear

2014-04-01, 03:54 PM

...The point I'm getting at is, unless we make the costs for blatantly supernatural things like that cost exorbitant amounts of Immersion, it seems to me like all PCs run the risk of becoming more or less similar in terms of capabilities. However, if we make the Immersion cost of brandishing your laser gun too high, what was even the point of you packing Cool Space Ranger equipment? Should characters start off with no traces of their old, original reality? Because, again, that leads to the problem where everyone has similar powers.

I propose we figure out a reason for people to have distinct ways they can shape local reality that are unique to them and, if we like, their origin...

Any ideas?

Part of it might be the limitations of what you're used to, and what you view as essentially part of you and your reality. You're a knight, or a cyberpunk hacker, or a nondescript agent. Even if you KNOW you could will reality to change in ways, there is a natural inclination to stay within what is reasonable for you to be able to do. Think of it as your own, personal immersion. This is in addition A natural "default state" that costs immersion to surpass (but allows you to use immersion breaking powers for the setting at a discount because they're appropriate to you). So, a "wizard" might be able to throw a fireball in a cyberpunk dream for less immersion than a "Government Agent type" because they are a wizard, and carry their personal conviction of that.

The second could be the conservation of detail that was mentioned earlier. Dreams tend to follow storybook logic to some degree, and focus mostly on what's important to the dreamer. Willing someone's food to become infected with diseases isn't appropriate in most stories, and the dream itself will resist the contrivance. However, going through the effort to PUT something diseased in the food will stick, because you give it story focus and reason to happen (even if you cheat with immersion breaking powers to pull it off). In essence, physically going through the motions is important from an immersion standpoint because the importance that you put on it makes it important to the story. It might, however, also make it more noticeable to SUES who are, in effect, writing against you.

I hope this makes sense.

The Glyphstone

2014-04-01, 04:14 PM

Part of it might be the limitations of what you're used to, and what you view as essentially part of you and your reality. You're a knight, or a cyberpunk hacker, or a nondescript agent. Even if you KNOW you could will reality to change in ways, there is a natural inclination to stay within what is reasonable for you to be able to do. Think of it as your own, personal immersion. This is in addition A natural "default state" that costs immersion to surpass (but allows you to use immersion breaking powers for the setting at a discount because they're appropriate to you). So, a "wizard" might be able to throw a fireball in a cyberpunk dream for less immersion than a "Government Agent type" because they are a wizard, and carry their personal conviction of that.

The second could be the conservation of detail that was mentioned earlier. Dreams tend to follow storybook logic to some degree, and focus mostly on what's important to the dreamer. Willing someone's food to become infected with diseases isn't appropriate in most stories, and the dream itself will resist the contrivance. However, going through the effort to PUT something diseased in the food will stick, because you give it story focus and reason to happen (even if you cheat with immersion breaking powers to pull it off). In essence, physically going through the motions is important from an immersion standpoint because the importance that you put on it makes it important to the story. It might, however, also make it more noticeable to SUES who are, in effect, writing against you.

I hope this makes sense.

It does, since it's sort of what I was thinking. A dreamjacker's thought-body is probably going to strongly resemble the real meat-body he/she/it left behind, if they had one in the first place, because of its unconscious association with what they consider 'real'. The closer their actions stick to their personal paradigm - a wizard throwing fireballs, or a Cool Space Ranger brandishing his laser gun - the smaller the cost in Immersion. But to make it interesting, and fitting to what you wrote, they have to deal with both their 'personal' paradigm and that of the Dream...so a Wizard throwing a fireball in a high-fantasy setting will have an extremely low Immersion cost; the Cool Space Ranger brandishing his laser gun the same fantasy setting would be higher, since laser guns aren't 'native' to the Dream, but that Wizard brandishing a laser gun would be even higher since it's both non-native and against his personal paradigm. Doesn't mean he can't do it - say, if there is a nasty stone golem immune to magic in his way - but there's a cost.

This would also encourage 'diverse' operations teams of dreamjackers; having someone whose personal paradigm is close enough to 'pass for native' - someone with an instinctive understanding of how this Dream is most likely to work - will give a valuable advantage in staying undetected. Plus, jokes about a elven wizard, cyborg soldier, and anthropomorphic banana walking into a bar never get old.

Qwertystop

2014-04-01, 05:06 PM

So from a rules perspective... we'd have general categories of "stuff you can do"? Seems this'd need a pretty free-form system, unless you just dissociate fluff from crunch entirely (at which point you could use a point-buy for how much power you've got/Immersion you spend and just say "penalty to points if the fluff doesn't fit you or the world").

Deffers

2014-04-01, 05:22 PM

I'm not sure how deep we want to go with the story themes, though. On the one hand, this all started based on trying to make a good version of Marty's 7200 published works stuff. At the same time, though, I feel it'd be a cool thing to explore the concept that there's not one way peoples' stories are "supposed to go," and that's a reason to object against the SUEs philosophically.The horrors on the edge of reality are there to give the PCs a shared motivation to actually take these people on and not let them get out of hand. Following storybook logic kind of implies that there's a canon that's being hijacked, and that's what our dreamjackers are trying to stop. It doesn't really wreck the setting, and in fact both could exist side by side as philosophical interpretations of why a dreamjacker's job is important past saving several worlds and stopping a cataclysm. However, I do think we should settle out, within certain tolerances, how prominently we want story logic to play a role.

I bring this up mostly because if dreams reject the contrivance of things like important people just dying from bad food or tragic accidents, then that means a world like ours where people simply die for absurd reasons couldn't happen, except in worlds that employ existentialist and absurdist themes. Which is both difficult for the PC's to determine and would, in my mind, leave it up to the DM whether or not a "make the food diseased" ploy would even work in the universe he's crafted. Because of that, I feel like we might want to codify this a little more. Apologies for being nitpicky on this-- but it feels to me like one of those gaps between narrative and actual mechanics that we should flesh out.

Also, I like the idea that certain backgrounds will reduce the immersion cost of certain extraordinary actions. Of course, that means that a psychic from a science fiction setting could potentially get all the benefits of a wizard and a cool space ranger with none of the downsides. 40K Psykers would get a whole extra set of downsides along with that power, of course, but other dreams might not. In the Mass Effect universe, biotics and tech people could light people on fire, freeze them, create gravitational singularities, lift things with their minds, and STILL be able to fire high-tech weapons. Maybe they get a reduced Immersion discount compared to pure magic wizards or pure cool space rangers?

The Glyphstone

2014-04-01, 06:35 PM

The process of becoming a Dreamjacker could require a certain degree of focus...someone from the ME universe might have biotic abilities and understand technology, but when they Release and re-imagine themselves, whatever aspect of themselves they're more subconsciously invested in takes prominence. So an Adept who Released and became a Dreamjacker would be most likely to think of themselves as a biotic first and a techie second...they'd know how high-tech weapons worked, making them useful in a sci-fi themed Dream, but they'd pay more Immersion to 'conveniently' have one stowed away in their backpack. A Soldier/Cool Space Ranger wouldn't, since that is the sort of thing a Soldier/Cool Space Ranger would have, but he could then hand his new pistol over to his Adept buddy and they wouldn't need a crash course in not blowing their own head off. A separation between Who You Are and What You Know, basically...the first reduces Immersion penalties from your background, the second reduces Immersion penalties from the Dream/your environment (you know the tropes, the 'language' the world runs by). When they overlap, you're at your most powerful, but varying foci would improve your versatility, and allow for concepts like an engineer from a magitech-based setting.

Or we go with the half-and-half thing, like a sort of cosmic multiclassing system.

Winds

2014-04-01, 07:17 PM

Qwertystop

2014-04-01, 07:57 PM

With the discussion of Immersion discounts to characters using abilities to fit their personal story rather than the root story...

I thought of Shadowrun.

If you weren't aware, SR is a high-tech, high magic setting. It had gotten to the cyberpunk age before magic turned out to be cyclical in the setting...leading to magic being revealed to the world when previously mythical dragons showed up. In this system, that would be a pretty hefty Immersion breaker...but it can't be, because it is part of the story as it 'should' be. So say we take this one step further. Off of the power similarity concern, we can make it a reason to split things up. Maybe too much use by several jackers/drifters/whatever burning their personal Immersion on their own powers makes characters in the root start 'revealing' similar powers. After all, I saw several people casting that kind of spell/building that kind of tech/cutting down that mountain, so it must have been possible all along...

I think that would work best as a optional rule. The main thing I would expect to see it used for is to encourage subtlety at the cost of spectacle, which means it may not work for all groups. For those that want to run an intrigue/challenging campaign, it's a useful way to have the players save their personal hole cards for when they really need it.

Thoughts?
My nighttime scribble was actually sort of interpreted as basically something similar to that:

And Qwertystop: brilliantly done. There needs to be something like that to explain why our various flavors of tagonist hang out where people are, threatening Immersion breaks and so on; otherwise people would just go to some unobserved place, like underground or the depths of space or behind the Sun, and make stuff until they were unstoppable. A background count of subtle magic leaking from thought to reality via coincidences fits the bill nicely, and I think the downstack effects propagate well as written. Think about fire a lot, find lighters. Moreover, if a lot of people are thinking about fire -- or one person really hard -- lots of people find lighters, and eventually we have a self-sustaining zeitgeist. This means that, at its most ludicrous extreme, mass-spawning space death cruisers in an Arthurian fantasy world is going to result in a lot of ancillary weirdness of the blacksmiths-sell-spaceships style. The gods you describe can simply be another sort of extreme, one of urgency or fervor or regard rather than magnitude.

Zelphas

2014-04-01, 08:36 PM

I like the idea of personal Immersion as a limiter on someone just "making the food poisonous". After all, a dreamjacker is just a manifestation of his own personal thoughts; if he starts changing the world, and himself, too much, how long until that thought enters his mind? How can he verify his own existence if he can literally change every aspect of it? For the child in my story, this isn't an issue; a child doesn't question their existence, they just exist. For an adult dreamjacker, however, all it takes is the belief in one thought--"I don't really exist"--and boom, their beliefs make it real. From a gameplay standpoint, it could be something similar to a Sanity meter--how much you still believe in your own existence when the world can change on a whim. A character would start with an inborn tolerance level, and power uses would either raise or lower this value.

What do you think? Is this too complicated?

Thanks to everyone who said they liked my story; I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Deffers

2014-04-01, 09:42 PM

My main problem with that is, Mary Sue exists. Some people can apparently warp entire swaths of existence without questioning their reality. Besides, it takes conviction to make thought reality-- if a stray thought or harsh question could do it, not many would survive becoming dreamjackers in the first place.

Making such subtle measures difficult might, however, be a way to handle it. It might take a supreme act of willpower to do something like accelerate the growth of millions of bacteria of only certain kinds.

EDIT: Right up until a mystical cleric of poison and decay joins the party... but then, that'd be a specialty of the individual, and thus not that bad. Maybe everybody can, in a pinch, pull something flashy like what I mentioned about blowing out all the windows in a city block. But it'd take a subtle hand to accelerate life without access to the mental framework of a magic system that allows that, because the thought itself is difficult to frame, as it were, and a complex operation even within that system. It's not just something you pull out of your ass. Same with turning someone's drink to poison-- the fantasy world you're in might not even have atoms

Trekkin

2014-04-01, 10:51 PM

My main problem with that is, Mary Sue exists.

Or does she? In all seriousness, though, as described it'd be fairly easy to say she's insane, but a kind of insanity to which ready recourse to reality revision predisposes dreamjackers. The waking nightmare (ha!) is as much a warning of her as of the horrors.

One thing I've been toying with is that yes, it does take conviction to change things -- but then, it takes conviction for these folks even to exist. The world is constantly asking them what they are and demanding a sure answer, because they shouldn't be; internalizing the weirdness around them erodes that sureness. Immersion's an ablative defense to that. It's saying "I should not be doing this. What I am cannot do this. But it is happening anyway." Eventually that cognitive dissonance has its own cost, but it's a much more subtle one. Giving up and saying "what I am is what power is"...down that road lies Mar(t)y's particular brand of insanity, one that turns them into something wretched. It's like lichdom, really.

In other words, personal Immersion works great as their Immersion in their own identity. I hinted obliquely at this in the post on the process, but what dreamjackers are, even down to its slightest detail, is very much their own construction. If, for example, a wizard Releases (like that word for it), he's going to give himself a pointy hat and a long beard and so forth wherever he lands, because dangit that's what he thinks wizards are, and who the hell does reality think it is to tell him otherwise? It might not translate into his personality; it might operate mostly unconsciously. It can even be a partial justification for XP: it's their increasing ability to retain a more complex understanding of themselves without faltering.

So yes, I like the idea that a crisis of self-identity might cause ontological inertia failure, if only because it's a constant-if-not-conscious battle to exist. From a mechanical sense, the diversity may well be in the details, since a wand isn't aimed or fired or maintained the same way as a laser gun.

As far as blowing out windows and turning drinks to poison, that's partially an issue of complexity; the sim, after all, is going to want to know where all that energy came from and what's guiding it. I do like the idea of the former being a very Immersion-depleting, flashy, dangerous kind of last resort and the latter taking time and understanding to craft.

Deffers

2014-04-02, 01:10 AM

You sold me on the idea of you going poof if your personal Immersion goes to zero. Hell, you might get an Immersion boost from using stuff from your own world-- a Cool Space Ranger will never feel more like himself than when he is doing high-flying jetpack antics, raining laser-hot death from above. Suddenly, you've gotta balance your needs with the needs of the world, and SUEs could try and use that against you.

I suspect that if Mary Sue doesn't exist, she has the potential to exist. And the potential to exist means the potential for a deletion the likes of which has never been seen.

ReaderAt2046

2014-04-02, 05:50 AM

One thing I've been toying with is that yes, it does take conviction to change things -- but then, it takes conviction for these folks even to exist. The world is constantly asking them what they are and demanding a sure answer, because they shouldn't be; internalizing the weirdness around them erodes that sureness. Immersion's an ablative defense to that. It's saying "I should not be doing this. What I am cannot do this. But it is happening anyway." Eventually that cognitive dissonance has its own cost, but it's a much more subtle one. Giving up and saying "what I am is what power is"...down that road lies Mar(t)y's particular brand of insanity, one that turns them into something wretched. It's like lichdom, really.

In other words, personal Immersion works great as their Immersion in their own identity. I hinted obliquely at this in the post on the process, but what dreamjackers are, even down to its slightest detail, is very much their own construction. If, for example, a wizard Releases (like that word for it), he's going to give himself a pointy hat and a long beard and so forth wherever he lands, because dangit that's what he thinks wizards are, and who the hell does reality think it is to tell him otherwise? It might not translate into his personality; it might operate mostly unconsciously. It can even be a partial justification for XP: it's their increasing ability to retain a more complex understanding of themselves without faltering.

So yes, I like the idea that a crisis of self-identity might cause ontological inertia failure, if only because it's a constant-if-not-conscious battle to exist. From a mechanical sense, the diversity may well be in the details, since a wand isn't aimed or fired or maintained the same way as a laser gun.

As far as blowing out windows and turning drinks to poison, that's partially an issue of complexity; the sim, after all, is going to want to know where all that energy came from and what's guiding it. I do like the idea of the former being a very Immersion-depleting, flashy, dangerous kind of last resort and the latter taking time and understanding to craft.

An alternate idea for personal Immersion is that it's not what allows you to exist, it's what allows you to exist as something not native to the given dream. In other words, whatever dream you are in is continuously exerting a very faint pressure to change you into something that belongs in that dream and erase all powers, knowledge, and memories not native to that dream. So Jetpack-Man will have to at least subconsciously fight off a pressure from Magic-Dream to turn into a wizard or a warrior and forget all about dreamjacking. This could allow for partial failure (losing chunks of power and memory but not all of it), allow encounters with "lost" dreamjackers just barely recognizable as what they used to be, even permit a reincarnation-esque plot involving the same being Releasing multiple times.

This also explains why personal Immersion is strengthened by using your own native abilities: You're reminding yourself (and the universe) what you really are and what you can really do.

The Glyphstone

2014-04-02, 11:21 AM

So rather than every Sue-esque action costing immersion, now it can restore your Immersion instead - though maybe it still has to fight against the dream's own conservation of weirdness? So Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger, using his jetpack and laser guns would restore his Immersion, but would also cost a little bit because he's in a warriors-and-wizards fantasy world - net gain of less Immersion than if he was doing so in a retro sci-fi world. Wally The Wizard would gain more Immersion for throwing fireballs in that fantasy world since he's not fighting the world paradigm, but throwing fireballs in a postmodern zombie apocalypse world would result in a larger Immersion hit?

This feels like it could be a good way to reflect the constant pressure of the world to make someone conform - even if they're doing everything normal and acceptable to the world, if that still goes against their personal paradigm, it'll be a slow erosion of their Immersion. Following their personal paradigm against the world can halt or reverse this, but at the reality-destabilizing effect cost mentioned previously. The pseudo-natives (people from worlds similar enough that they can blend in naturally) become especially valuable since they can maintain extremely high Immersion easily.

Trekkin

2014-04-03, 12:05 PM

Back when I was sketching out mechanics in HERO, I had intended the Endurance cost, now the Immersion cost, of everything to be considered in two halves: one half was the cost paid to do it, the other the cost paid to see it.

I think we can recycle that to reflect personal Immersion costs fairly effectively.

Let's go with something like Endurance for extraordinary things, some scaling cost of Immersion per unit effect. Call that the base cost or whatever. For everyone observing the expenditure (including the dream itself), multiply the base cost by some multiplier ranging from -1 to 1, with the precise value based on some metric of familiarity.

Mechanically, this is actually relatively simple for the GM to handle, since all the natives(and the dream) are going to share a multiplier except in special circumstances and players can know their own familiarity. Just call out the base cost and let folks work it out for themselves.

Conceptually, though, this pushes characters to do extraordinary things in line with their own identity. Yes, plinking with your laser guns at tin cans lets you say "yep, I'm a cool space ranger." John Woo-ing your way through hordes of orcs with those laser guns while pulling jetpack-assisted backflips off various cliffsides lets you say "hell yeah I'm a Cool Space Ranger. (and a dizzy one)"...but it also means you just eroded local reality enough to start lethal levels of Backlash. It also means that pseudonatives are hugely important as emergency Immersion restoratives; at a guess, though, repeated or sustained spending starts increasing the multiplier, so even they don't get unlimited fancyness.

Before I go elaborate this into a post, is there any problem I'm not seeing?

Qwertystop

2014-04-03, 01:22 PM

Sith_Happens

2014-04-03, 02:13 PM

It just occurred to me that going this route in general has amusing implications for party dynamics, since a heterogeneous group of PCs will constantly be pushing against each other's Immersion.

...Unless of course one of the basic components of Agency training is building a certain level of tolerance for having your Immersion broken, which seems like a no-brainer given the occupational exposure. As a bonus, this same "Immersion resilience" can be how you resist enemy "magic."

Trekkin

2014-04-03, 04:57 PM

Good point. I suppose, then, that we could run with some sort of scale, say -10 to 10, working on the principle that most people can rapidly recall the decimal times table.

What I don't know, though, is what skew to put on the scale. For example, do we make it -5 to 10, saying that things can be strange more easily than familiar? Do we flip it around and say -10 to 5, implying the average mind more easily comes to grips with things than snaps? I would assume a symmetrical scale is best, but any bias we put on it will adjust how the extremes of the setting work.

This does imply that the base, assuming a base multiplier of 1, is minimally but not critically unusual; 0 is something equivalent to reality but different, and -1 is definitely but unremarkably real. Higher (absolute value) multipliers just refer to how many basic assumptions about the world are being upheld or denied, which is distinct from the actual per-effect base cost. I'm trying to emulate how people tend to react more strongly to more obviously counterintuitive things, as well as more counterintuitive things, while also letting us treat Immersion as mana -- without completely counteracting the simplicity of having everyone have their own little reality meter, since that's much easier to track than what I was originally planning.

EDIT: And yes, we certainly should have Agency operatives be more resilient to Immersion loss. Otherwise I can't see too many surviving.

Qwertystop

2014-04-03, 05:11 PM

That seems to fit. Base value reflects how much you're doing, multiplier reflects notability to a given person, sign reflects whether it seems impossible. Also, zero seems to be more like "this person doesn't notice this thing at all". Not sure how something noticed would be neither normal nor weird.

Trekkin

2014-04-05, 12:16 AM

I had intended x0 to be either "doesn't notice" or "doesn't care."

One thing I think we're missing, though, is the mechanical advantage given by interacting with the setting. If Immersion is a personal resometer, then there's no reason to go see the world before saving it.

Would it be overly complicated to have the Agency training be adaptive? In other words, by interacting with people the setting gradually seems less impossible, until the agent is holding two norms in their head.

Deffers

2014-04-05, 01:50 AM

I suggest that might be a form of character progression. Your character can not only become more willful, but also more flexible.

Legendary Agents aren't the people who can drop-kick mountains in half in a world about extreme accounting. That would be a legendary SUE. A legendary Agent would be someone who can fit in with a range of universes, integrating near-seamlessly without losing a sense of self, capable of working within the background of even the most alien realities to defeat SUEs that have already pushed a world's Immersion to its breaking point.

Really, I feel like the Agency at large would probably value the capacity of its operatives to be able to work delicately. That's something we might want to consider.

Lord Raziere

2014-04-05, 03:05 AM

oh I'm seeing how it works....

A SUE would be like very powerful but not very subtle- like they have a specific story that they force the world to bend to.

An Agent however is very flexible but less powerful.

hm. perhaps the Agents win by finding the inflexible parts of the SUE's story structure that holds it together, and sort of sabotaging them? like the entire goal is to able to sabotage a SUE's story without them noticing until its too late using the flexible nature of being an Agent to adapt their powers however they can.

for example:
An Agent wouldn't have one identity, but multiple ones that are functionally the same but aesthetically different:
one universe, he is a wizard.
in another, he is a scientist
a third, he is an alchemist
a fourth he is a psychic
a fifth he is an inventor
a sixth he is a scholar...

and so on. sure, they look different on the outside, but on the inside they are pretty much the same.

the whole Agent thing sounds like having a thousand masks over a single core identity that doesn't change. like having a lot of costumes over a single body. maybe there are a few tried-and-true archetypes like the wizard example above that have a lot of aesthetic variation that the Agents are encouraged to use?

Jacob.Tyr

2014-04-05, 12:14 PM

Random thoughts I had after reading the most recent blog posts:

Regarding Immersion- Give characters two ways to deal with immersion breaking. One would obviously be level of immersion, or immersion pool. Agents with a lot of experience adapting to new worlds have a really big immersion pool after entering a new world, they can really get into things and figure out how the world works after exploring a bit.

Another could be Will or Stubbornness that works as a way to resist immersion loss. A really stubborn character refuses to accept what they're doing as something that isn't right. They don't lose immersion for kicking a mountain so hard it explodes. Sues will have a really high Stubbornness, the worst ones can't really lose immersion.

Stubborn characters, however, still affect the immersion of the world/sim/dreamer. They don't realize what they're doing doesn't fit, but the world does.

To borrow from Cthulhu-themed games, add a doom track. This will add pressure to the players, and create downsides for overuse of powers forcing them to be more creative and stealthy. An agent could have really high stubbornness, but when facing a Sue the whole benefit becomes moot as a handful of people throwing around immersion breaking powers but not being affected will crank up the doom track so fast that everything the agents are working against happens in a few rounds. And maybe once you reach a certain level of "stubborn", your character stops being a PC and just becomes a Sue anyway. Sort of like what the Dresden Files RPG uses when your character becomes too powerful to be a PC.
-
Regarding characters that don't make sense in the world they're in- Buzz Lightyear in high fantasy, Cthulhu anywhere.
Buzz Lightyear is Buzz Lightyear in his head, sure. He seems himself and his powers that way. But that might not be how he exists in every world. Characters have a mind that reflects how they see themselves, but each world they entire renders it in a way that almost fits.

Example: Steve Stevenson is a member of the SWAT Team when, during a massive shootout in a meth den, he wishes to be ANYWHERE else, and poof! He's now sitting in a high fantasy world wearing his swat gear with a riot shield and sub-machine gun. To people around him, however, they see a knight in armor with a shield and some sort of fancy crossbow.

The details of his equipment are received differently by different worlds, it's only when he wills them to behave in a way that doesn't mesh with the setting that the immersion starts to break. Agents can figure out how to use their equipment in ways that fit with each world, and that's how they become more powerful. A powerful agent can learn how to take a different mask that better fits the world they're in, and use it without breaking immersion quite so much.

Further, no ones equipment or powers are native to anywhere but their own world. Subtle differences cause problems for everyone, even a wizard who jumps to another high-fantasy world. The true mark of a good agent is that they figure out what analogs work for their powers in the world they find themselves in. After jumping enough times, Buzz finds himself in a high fantasy setting. He's been to these before, or has heard of them. He realizes that in this world his jetpack might be a pair of magic shoes, his laser is a wand. He can behave as the world interprets him, and doesn't break world immersion as much when he acts now.

tl;dr - Sues are so stubborn that they don't lose immersion for themselves, they just break it for the world. Agents, on the other hand, learn to become really immersed in the worlds they visit, and learn how to act in it such that their actions don't break immersion for the world quite as quickly. Tracking World Immersion via a "Doom Track" could add a bit of pressure for the players, as well as a resource they share with Sues that makes them have to act with more caution.

Eldest

2014-04-05, 04:13 PM

A counter to people going for a character from an all-inclusive reality for all the powers would be saying that stuff from your natural environment also effects you easier.

Saidoro

2014-04-06, 01:32 AM

M&M's already been suggested, so FATE, maybe? It's one of the least-simulationist systems ever, though.
Given all the discussion in the last few pages about how a character's skills are more vague categories that can be carried between worlds than consistent hard capabilities and characters can gain more power by acting according to their narrative roles and so on, this may actually be the only setting ever written for which this statement isn't true.

Trekkin

2014-04-07, 05:57 PM

There's a new post (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-sue-files-how-world-doesnt-work.html). I know I haven't gotten to everything but I'm trying to keep them shorter than in the past.

And yes, FATE makes more sense than it ordinarily would. I'm also working out the kinks in another one that uses bunches of d2s. Might be more practicable just to make it for two or three systems at once and see how they all fit.

Sith_Happens

2014-04-08, 01:41 AM

I'm also working out the kinks in another one that uses bunches of d2s.

Time to build a planeswalker with Krark's Thumb (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=48923) then.:smallwink::smalltongue:

Snowyowl

2014-04-08, 08:13 AM

I'm becoming less and less clear on the point of having "dreamers" at all. It's starting to seem like worlds are self-contained, without a need for a higher branch on the tree to create them. The cross-links are enough.

Some people glimpse beyond the veil of reality or are trapped in a no-exit situation and find themselves thrown out of their home and into the multiverse. OK. They find themselves in a world shaped by their expectations and preconceptions. Now, the way you explained it, they end up in a physical body, with air and gravity, and lying on grass or stone or a bed because on some level that's what they expect. Then they look around, and subject to dream-logic, they mentally fill in whatever should be there.

I'm thinking it's possible to arrive in a pre-existing world, and be affected by its existing physics as well as your own dream-logic. But you can also arrive at an empty memory location, with maybe a few scraps of dereferenced data lying around, and be subject only to the physics you create. Once you've actually created physics, of course. Anything that's missing, any time you look somewhere you've never looked before, you create something that you expect to see there.

Arriving in a world where stuff already exists independently from you is probably better for your sanity, but this is not an absolute rule. On the one hand, once you've created a universe and added sentient inhabitants, it's self-sustaining and new events and discoveries will happen that you didn't expect or plan. On the other hand, a person able to subconsciously rewrite reality without realising it wreaks havoc on an unsuspecting world. That's what a SUE is.

And coming back to the fanfiction angle, think about how dream-logic works. In a dream, the mind tells stories. In telling a story, the mind is inspired by other stories. Sometimes, a freshly-minted SUE would think "I must have found my way to Narnia" or "I must have been ejected from the Matrix"... and it would be true. They'd find themselves in a world based off someone else's fiction - indeed, such worlds might well be better thought-out and more consistent than ones created haphazardly on the fly, and so survive longer against the Immersion-breaking failures of causality inherent in the worldbuilding process.

There, I'm done. It never comes back to a person living safe and sound in their home universe, writing a story that becomes real somewhere out there. It comes back to some godling taking bits of that story, re-interpreting them, and making that real. The multiverse is made of fanfiction.

Trekkin

2014-04-08, 12:03 PM

First, we have a new guest post (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-sue-files-needing-bigger-boat.html) and it is hilarious.

As for why we still need dreamers: From a purely topological sense, you're right in that we don't -- and certainly worlds as you describe exist out there. The reason I like them is because it means you can have a split party performing psychoanalysis on the universe while running around inside it, to put it slightly facetiously. I like the idea of being able to understand the world by understanding the person behind it, and I like letting worlds change as their creators do -- or as they intervene via lucid dreaming -- without having to have them inside, and therefore subject to whatever they come up with.

It's just a way of making these processes more human, and a way of helping to diversify the worlds. Essentially it lets us ask "what would X character build?" while insulating them from the results. People imagine places differently if they don't think they are living there.

Sith_Happens

2014-04-08, 09:16 PM

First, we have a new guest post (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-sue-files-needing-bigger-boat.html) and it is hilarious.

Oh, PCs sometimes.:smalltongue:

Snowyowl

2014-04-09, 03:32 AM

As for why we still need dreamers: From a purely topological sense, you're right in that we don't -- and certainly worlds as you describe exist out there. The reason I like them is because it means you can have a split party performing psychoanalysis on the universe while running around inside it, to put it slightly facetiously. I like the idea of being able to understand the world by understanding the person behind it, and I like letting worlds change as their creators do -- or as they intervene via lucid dreaming -- without having to have them inside, and therefore subject to whatever they come up with.

It's just a way of making these processes more human, and a way of helping to diversify the worlds. Essentially it lets us ask "what would X character build?" while insulating them from the results. People imagine places differently if they don't think they are living there.

Ah, so you're starting from that particular scene of talking with the Author while other people are trapped in their world. I've never designed an RPG before, but starting from the typical gameplay and working out the rules from there seems like a very good way of doing it.

Trekkin

2014-04-10, 02:14 PM

Why, thank you. I did much the same thing in the new post (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-sue-files-beyond-katanas.html).

I think we're within measurable distance of having enough of this rather dry meta-mechanics done that we can actually get to the settings. Apologies for the wait -- also, I keep deferring to a weird mix of the work of Iain Banks and Harlan Ellison for adaptable ideas. I'm guessing it's coming through rather clearly.

Qwertystop

2014-04-10, 02:17 PM

In between all this, I realized something:
Having one world in which the world is actually a simulation Matrix-style as well as multiverse-made-of-dreams style would be... interesting. You escape the Matrix, and then... you escape it again?

The Glyphstone

2014-04-10, 03:01 PM

So now we have Secret Sue Societies, acting against or separate from the Agency. Interesting.

Cristo Meyers

2014-04-10, 06:10 PM

So now we have Secret Sue Societies, acting against or separate from the Agency. Interesting.

Indeed. Makes a lot of sense, too. What is SUE-dom if not basicallyessentially wish-fulfillment? What better way to enhance that then seek out others to act as yes-men to reinforce the belief?

I wonder if maybe we should look into how a coven of SUEs may effect Immersion for the area. A single SUE may not be all that warping on the area around him, but a group of them in concert? The damage they could do would increase possibly exponentially.

Deffers

2014-04-10, 07:39 PM

Zelphas

2014-04-10, 08:25 PM

I think I'm gonna love the part where we make settings. There's no reason not to make settings-as-vignettes; little, small, footnote-esque ideas that a GM (or, hell, a contributor in this thread) could develop on if it piques their fancy.

Hell, we can get creative with it. There's plenty of chances to explore worlds that bring to question what a SUE is. Imagine a completely silly not-even-trying-for-serious world of badass where a German Suplex is considered an informal greeting, or something equally ridiculous. For every serious world, there's going to be other ones that are farcical and silly-- and there's no harm in exploring them.

You know what a SUE for that world would be--a Rules Lawyer. Something like a Nuclear Physicist, working on his world's version of the Manhattan Project. Something goes horribly wrong, and he wishes he could be somewhere where this couldn't happen. He wakes up in Discord's Dreamworld--flying pigs (without wings), water running uphill, etc. The first words out of his mouth are "This isn't right." So he goes to make it right.

captpike

2014-04-10, 08:28 PM

You know what a SUE for that world would be--a Rules Lawyer. Something like a Nuclear Physicist, working on his world's version of the Manhattan Project. Something goes horribly wrong, and he wishes he could be somewhere where this couldn't happen. He wakes up in Discord's Dreamworld--flying pigs (without wings), water running uphill, etc. The first words out of his mouth are "This isn't right." So he goes to make it right.

I could even see the adventure starting when some PC's arrive to go on vacation in their favorite "so crazy is fun" universe and see horrifying things like birds with wings, and guns that shoot bullets rather then a piece of paper with "bang" written on it.

TuggyNE

2014-04-11, 12:00 AM

I could even see the adventure starting when some PC's arrive to go on vacation in their favorite "so crazy is fun" universe and see horrifying things like birds with wings, and guns that shoot bullets rather then a piece of paper with "bang" written on it.

YOU MONSTER. :smallfurious:

Deffers

2014-04-11, 01:37 AM

Well, I was more thinking of a silly world where everybody's a Final Fight character, but the wonderful thing about infinite worlds is we can have our cake and eat it too. So we can have a world where pigs fly sans wings, too. We can have a world where pigs fly sans wings AND everybody is Mayor Mike Haggar-- infinite worlds equals infinite possibilities.

Hell, what just happened (I mentioned a silly world, other people filled in what they were thinking) could be something of a trend, if we like. We can also submit our own individual world, but maybe being given a direction by somebody else and then having to fill in a world from that "prompt" could be an interesting thing we could do sometimes. Democratic storytelling, if you like.

Sith_Happens

2014-04-12, 01:36 AM

Thing is, assuming that an actual game document is supposed to eventually come out of this, we don't want it to describe too many premade worlds, at not with more than the barest few-sentences minimum of description. Otherwise potential GMs might feel obligated to stick to them as much as possible, which is precisely the opposite of the point of the setting.

Deffers

2014-04-12, 11:27 AM

I'm not saying we shouldn't have big, fleshed-out worlds. I'm just saying we could also include a list of less fleshed-out worlds in a list at the end as part of the design doc-- i.e. ideas about where your dreamjackers could go.

And I'm also suggesting that we try and build at least a few of the big ones collaboratively, because it'd be fun.

Trekkin

2014-04-14, 09:35 AM

And I'm also suggesting that we try and build at least a few of the big ones collaboratively, because it'd be fun.

At present, I have maybe three worlds that are sketched out enough that we could collaboratively build something big with them. The rest are a paragraph-long idea, at best; we could expand them or just leave them alone. Half the reason I wanted to do this was because once I'm done with the interesting parts of a setting I tend to slack off a bit, so here's a meta-setting that lets us focus only on the interesting parts.

As for how to build them collaboratively, would a wiki work?

Deffers

2014-04-14, 12:26 PM

A wiki MIGHT work-- but if we look at what happened with the Techronomicon wiki, perhaps we need to reconsider our approach to using one.

Sith_Happens

2014-04-14, 01:57 PM

At present, I have maybe three worlds that are sketched out enough that we could collaboratively build something big with them. The rest are a paragraph-long idea, at best; we could expand them or just leave them alone. Half the reason I wanted to do this was because once I'm done with the interesting parts of a setting I tend to slack off a bit, so here's a meta-setting that lets us focus only on the interesting parts.

I think paragraph-long is best, actually. At least without a big fat warning reading "FOR EXAMPLE PURPOSES ONLY. USE IT OR NOT, YOU'RE NOT 'DOING IT WRONG' EITHER WAY."

Trekkin

2014-04-14, 02:26 PM

True enough, although given my loquacity there are some long paragraphs in there.

I'm just trying to avoid two equivalently problematic extremes: I don't want to inundate people with data until they feel constrained, but I also don't want to require people to build their own setting before they play. I know a lot of really good DMs who enjoy the adjudication/play more than the worldbuilding, and I'd like to lower that barrier to play as much as possible.

All I really want is to build something as infectiously fun as possible, then let everybody play with it however they want and feel free to throw the results up for people to use/modify. Seems like a wiki would let that happen, or maybe some other kind of repository.

llehctim

2014-04-17, 09:41 PM

I completely forgot about this thread for a while, but having caught up, you guys have a ton of cool Ideas, especially on the immersion system (which I was unable to think of any ideas on how to make that work better).

I was also considering the sues as a sortof 'Unlocking their inner potential' giving them reality bending powers at a cost in sanity, making them distinctive and probably set in their ways. As well as making an enemy of the agency and potentially the 'janitors'.
(what the actual benefits/side effects are would likely depend on the system).

The setting really lends itself to my style of character creation (for both the villains and agents), so if there is a wiki made for it, I would probably put up quite a few options for settings and villains/other agents, if only because I tend to think of them anyway.

Also as a possible idea, if there is a near infinite number of realities: presumably some of them are extremely resistant to SUE reality breaking, so could possibly be used as prisons or places for SUEs to gather, and potentially have spars or 'duels' to prove which of them is stronger, (potentially using minions gathered through their time traveling, if they want to not put themselves at risk directly).
Possibly even a gathering of powerful reality traveling 'mages' who have amassed large amounts of followers, territory and technology :smalltongue:
Possibly even having tournaments run by the Animancers.Which could lead to possible missions where the agents might need to infiltrate one of these tournaments or nests for information on a disruptive SUE they are tracking.

PS: It's really been a long time, but pretty much all of my characters have a life of their own like Eldan mentioned. I have been told that my role-playing is both a pro and a con. Given that it has led to me turning down 11 free multi-class levels in 2e AD&D because my character Llehctim would not give up his quest for revenge.
And on another instance my character had to ditch the party that was stupid, and my next character ended up having to self-destruct murder the main character of that party later on (it's complicated, but mind control should not be your first choice on getting an ally to do something.).

Trekkin

2014-04-18, 08:14 PM

New post (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-sue-files-morphean-operandi.html). Does the ambiguity sound good?

Qwertystop

2014-04-18, 08:33 PM

Sounds good, yeah. I like the touch with the calling cards - any random fortune-telling device may or may not actually work, but you can't tell.

The_Werebear

2014-04-19, 01:06 PM

The Random NPC

2014-04-19, 01:28 PM

I just realized something, this is becoming more and more like the role-playing game Continuum. There's quite a few obvious differences, but the core idea is very similar.

Zelphas

2014-04-19, 02:27 PM

Hmm...

One question I have. The Agency appears to at least have some people who are corralling others into heading into trouble areas. How does one become a ranked member, or is there not a visible heirarchy at all? If you are needed as an (for lack of a better word) "officer" in the organization, do you receive a dream assigning new duties?

Furthermore, Does all communication descend from above, or can the Agents use longer distance Dream communication to flag in help from different worlds or contact their superiors with updated information?

I saw it as a seniority thing. Your team gets sent a dream to pick someone up on the way to a mission, and they just become part of the group. They're the "youngest", so they have lowest seniority, and so on until the "oldest" of the group is the de facto leader.

Now, if Agency members are essentially immortal, then this method runs the risk of creating huge teams. This can be solved in two ways: One, the teams can split apart once they get too large, going off on separate missions and meeting up to assist each other on big jobs; and/or Two. While Agency members don't really age, every day is a struggle to assert your existence on the world around you. Sometimes, members just...stop fighting, and fade.

I like the idea of Agency members being able to call each other for help. It adds another layer of doubt to the "higher-ups" of the Agency; what's to say that briefing you got wasn't a distress call from a dreamjacker cell that failed before you could get to them?

Deffers

2014-04-19, 10:19 PM

The way I initially conceived of it in my first post on mission control was that who these higher-ups were was never, ever made clear. You could be a legend among your fellow dreamjackers, having worked literally centuries and had a hand in taking down dozens of SUEs, and still not get closer to having an idea as to who sends you to your necessary hotspots. You simply get a dream pointing you to a world, and you go there. As to hierarchy, that would vary from Ops team to Ops team-- some teams could have a leader, some might be democratic, but on the grand scheme of things there's generally no recognizable being orchestrating more than one Ops team. I like the vagueness of it, and I find it to be super useful, because it would let people from different realities create their own explanations for where they're getting their missions.

Now I've got another question: we've obviously decided that operatives can't go back to their original homes, even if they should be able to since they'd have a strong sense of place when it comes to their zone of origins. No objections from me; I really like the theme of "you can't go home again. Question, though-- let's say the team decides to set up shop semi-permanently in a world-- that is, they've decided to make a home base that is definitively theirs on some world. Could they go back to that world as many times as they like?

Trekkin

2014-04-19, 11:18 PM

Question, though-- let's say the team decides to set up shop semi-permanently in a world-- that is, they've decided to make a home base that is definitively theirs on some world. Could they go back to that world as many times as they like?

I don't see why not. The primary obstacle to going home was, at least as far as I understood it, the part of your mind responsible for knowing where you really are staying dormant until you leave; once they're out, I'd assume they can go back to a new home as often as they're willing to make the trip.

And having looked at it...yes, this is a lot like Continuum. Had I heard about it before now, I probably would have made this setting a bit different, but at least we don't need to think four-dimensionally.

Deffers

2014-04-19, 11:30 PM

The question, of course, becomes whether or not a group of dreamjackers would actually find a reason to make a home base. The way I see it, there's two options-- a world in which Immersion is so strict that any enemy assault based on SUEish powers would be both easy to triangulate and exceedingly lethal for intruders, or a world in which Immersion rules are so lax that they can just be themselves. In the former case, it provides our Ops team with a place where they can be safe so long as they play by the world's rules-- so they could make a fortress and only have the most foolhardy of opponents try to do something stupid like karate chop the walls of the fortress down. It'd be a place with a certain amount of concreteness, which might be something quite lacking in a dreamjacker's life. In the other extreme, we have a world where they can let loose, relax, and be damn near invincible but also have trouble responding to enemies in a meaningful way. If the world can react to kick-flipping a planet in two without skipping a beat, then it would probably not offer any resistance to SUEs, who are exceedingly stubborn, no-selling wounds that would otherwise be fatal.

captpike

2014-04-19, 11:34 PM

Sith_Happens

2014-04-20, 02:45 AM

While Agency members don't really age, every day is a struggle to assert your existence on the world around you. Sometimes, members just...stop fighting, and fade.

[Sis Puella Magica (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKtfwubz9OY) intensifies]

Trekkin

2014-04-20, 03:14 AM

Vis a vis bases: would you like third, fourth, and fifth options?

Option 3: Wander around. The Agency call system can find an agent wherever they are, so might as well go exploring; it also avoids letting the operative get too used to one way of existing.

Option 4: Stasis. There are very good reasons not to do this, but it does ensure constant readiness and security.

Option 5: To Each Their Own Pseudonative Vacation Home. Like I said above, people don't need to stay together, so everyone might as well spend their off hours wherever they're pseudonative and subtly tweak things until they represent too hard a target for SUEs to hit. One hopes, anyway.

Most of these require an analogue to the calling cards, a sort of transreal pager to tell everyone when to take a nap immediately. This also lets GMs slowly tease everyone's individual Masquerade apart. Depending on how well their chosen facade can incorporate them just randomly disappearing, sometimes for days or weeks at a time, their time off may well be as interesting as the missions themselves. Like the subplots from Spycraft, really, except with far more shenanigans.

Deffers

2014-04-20, 09:10 PM

Those aren't bad options, and I'd assume they're the default options for Ops teams-- but I was more focused on why a group would set up a semi-permanent base instead of doing those three things.

Bucky

2014-04-20, 09:20 PM

The way I see it, there's two options-- a world in which Immersion is so strict that any enemy assault based on SUEish powers would be both easy to triangulate and exceedingly lethal for intruders, or a world in which Immersion rules are so lax that they can just be themselves.

Or they could compromise on a world in which Immersion is idiosyncratic - the group already knows how to cheat without getting caught, but any foreigners would need to go through some highly conspicuous trial and error first.

Deffers

2014-04-20, 11:15 PM

That kind of world would be a goddamn prize for anybody who's not a SUE, and even some of the brighter ones could see its benefit.

Of course, it'd be of limited use, at the same time. You can't affect a world from another world unless they're part of the same chain of worlds. It'd be a shelter and a fortress-- but a lot of the things that make a fortress interesting, tactically, are gone. Dreamjackers have no supply routes-- if they need something, they either wish it in, procure it on-site, or utilize a contact. The only geography that's interesting is the geography which worlds are connected and how, so the only worlds that can be distinguished as more valuable than others are those that act as major nexus realities.

I did just think of something that might make a dreamjacker value a base, though. It's implied that calling cards don't just exist-- they have to be made. You can't just get any deck of tarot cards, if I'm reading it correctly. So it implies there's certain tech that transcends the barriers imposed upon dreams, which further implies there might be, if we want, more items like calling cards. That means that there could be a use for R&D even to a group of people who could make any technology that's native to a reality.

Thoughts?

Sith_Happens

2014-04-21, 12:25 AM

So what ever happened to my idea that screwing with a world's integrity can affect the one(s) who dreamed it up? I think an Inception-style element like that could still fit into the setting, especially if we get into situations where some sizable portion of one world are all the dreamers for the same adjacent world; any SUE who finds that second world could set the groundwork for their conquest of the first before setting foot in it.

Deffers

2014-04-21, 12:40 AM

Oh, I was going off the assumption that your idea was totally a thing. Hence my statement about only being able to affect worlds if they're in the same chain, so to speak. Someone else suggested that this also work upwards, too, for extra mindscrew.

Trekkin

2014-04-26, 03:55 PM

New post. (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-sue-files-something-with-numbers-i.html) I did say we'd have rules one day. Kind of. These are something like rules, anyway.

Sith_Happens

2014-04-26, 06:58 PM

Zelphas

2014-04-26, 08:22 PM

I don't think Focus is a single pool that can be transferred into each of the four elements. Each character has four pools, one each of Physical, Mental, Social, and Immersive Focus, that can be allocated separately.

One way of stopping someone to throw all of their focus into one task is to add negative drawbacks when that is done. Say someone throws all of their Physical Focus into punching a brainwashed villager. For this example, let's give are dreamjacker (I'll call him Punchy) the arbitrary number of +5 Physial Focus, giving him the currently arbitrary 5d6 dice to roll. He rolls extremely well, and ends up throwing 28 Focus damage upon the hapless villager. Unfortunately for Punchy, said villager had a Physical Cathexis of 4. The villager becomes a smear on the wall, and the remaining 24 or so Focus Damage is dealt to local Immersion.

The same thing could be applied to Mental Focus (coming up with concepts beyond the scope of local reality--think Non-Euclidean geometry or somesuch) and Social Focus (a simple suggestion ends a war that had occurred for a millennium with its unbelievable eloquence). I'm not sure about Immersion working into this, though.

The_Werebear

2014-04-27, 03:59 AM

From the way I was reading it, I got the impression that there was a cap on how much focus you could have in a subcategory at a time, based on your archetype. A Martial Artist will have a much higher maximum potential physical focus (derived from the two stats that make it up) than a Con man archetype. So, if they both chose to throw maximum focus at a physical task (say, punching through a mountain) the Martial Artist will be more effective (or at least more precise and less damaging to local reality) than the Con Man would be by dint of how well they know what they're doing.

I also do like the idea of having a system where you can literally prove someone doesn't exist and have them disappear in a discrete puff of logic.

Trekkin

2014-04-27, 04:04 AM

I'm not sure I entirely understand how this is supposed to work, but I definitely understand enough to see a major flaw: If you can reallocate your Focus each turn, there's no good reason not to just dump it all into whichever pool helps the thing you're actually doing that turn.

You're not wrong, but I had intended something like that to be the case: the system is intended to collapse into whatever form a particular combat needs to take. If all everyone's doing is fighting, then heck yes, all Focus into Physical, ignore the other two tracks, and suddenly we're only worrying about half the numbers we would be ordinarily.

That depends on something I apparently forgot to note, though: it's not so much a bonus as it is the resource powering doing things. That is to say, different actions have specific Focus costs, separate from how long they take, that have to be met in order to do them. Let's posit a character with 10 PFocus trying to run and gun, and let's say aiming, firing, and running all take 4 PFocus. On any given turn that character could do any two of those things, but not all three at once. Alternatively, they could allocate 8 PFocus to running and sprint, for example. Let's further posit they have a PCathexis of 1; after taking three Physical damage, they'd be unable to run and gun at all.

Zelphas,that's actually a very good idea. The only reason I'd had them as separate bins for a shared resource was to simplify determining when plot-important characters are dead: when the Focus you need to have tied up in wounds exceeds your available Focus, regardless of whether it's mental, social, or physical damage, that's death. There is, however, another way of doing that math that lets us just have all four tracks operate independently, which greatly simplifies the math. One stat, multiplied by some constant, gives us the Focus pool size; the other probably determines resistances, and they split skills.

I like the idea of damage overflow hitting Immersion, and you've actually nailed how I intended Focus to work, although I had intended the additional step of allocating all 5 PFocus units to melee combat.

Heh...debating people to death is an important feature. I was just trying to make a system where one PC is debating the BBEG to death while another is punching the BBEG in the face and there's actual mechanical synergy there.

Sith_Happens

2014-04-27, 09:20 AM

So basically, the solution to the fact that you're only actually doing one or two things per turn (and the too-easy Focus allocation that comes with that) is to granulate those "things" into as many components as possible that each need to be allocated to separately? I'm not sure if that's better or worse; I can definitely see a lot of potential players seeing it as a needless attention to detail bogging down play.

Basically, the issue is how Focus allocation interacts with action economy. Unless Focus is the currency of action economy, in which case that's extremely unclear.

Trekkin

2014-04-27, 10:35 AM

georgie_leech

2014-04-27, 11:18 AM

It was intended to be, yes; it was my attempt to link damage to the action economy directly so as to accommodate unusual forms of damage. Hopefully future posts will be less obscure; it made sense in my head. :smallredface:

For what it's worth, I think I get what you're trying to do, and I don't envy the difficulty of figuring it out. It can't be easy trying to take an already abstract mechanic for damage and then try to apply it to things that probably should affect it but have fewer analogs.

Sith_Happens

2014-04-27, 03:56 PM

It was intended to be, yes; it was my attempt to link damage to the action economy directly so as to accommodate unusual forms of damage. Hopefully future posts will be less obscure; it made sense in my head. :smallredface:

Is there supposed to be any other limit, or can you do as many different things in a turn as you can invest the necessary Focus in?

Trekkin

2014-04-27, 08:47 PM

Is there supposed to be any other limit, or can you do as many different things in a turn as you can invest the necessary Focus in?

Other than common sense (and that only in extreme cases), no, not as designed. I suppose some tasks might necessarily take a specific amount of time regardless of how hard you work at them, but I had intended for Focus allocation to govern the action economy.

Should there be another limit?

Sith_Happens

2014-04-28, 08:42 AM

Should there be another limit?

Not necessarily. If nothing else, it seems like someone with a huge Focus pool suddenly exhibiting super speed could be an Immersion risk in many circumstances.

Qwertystop

2014-04-28, 07:01 PM

llehctim

2014-04-28, 11:16 PM

Well. Not quite related to this new system so much as to what it came from:

I entered in a game on these forums. The premise is that all characters (and most of everything else) would be generated largely by RNG. In the case of characters, this is via a very wide-reaching (though not very deep, and quite skewed towards unusual results by way of assigning the same odds to everything) physical-description-character-trait-and-minimal-backstory-generator. My character results were... odd, but I suppose everyone's were. I decided to make this my first attempt at writing a backstory instead of just a few snippets of character traits, to try to explain the bizarre mixing of traits the randomizer gave me (half-elf, anti-magic hometown, sorcerer, religious leader, religion is a cult, more interested in "spirits" than in gods, narcissist megalomaniac, and really weird hair).

Somehow, in writing said backstory, I seem to have managed to write someone else's bad wish-fulfillment Mary Sue backstory. Every checkbox is there (for the bits I've written so far - for example, there's no gratuitous ys and xs in the name because I haven't come up with a name yet), except for the character being someone who I would in any way compare to myself, agree with, or want to be.

Should I just embrace it and go nuts making it as bad as possible?

I'd say yes in general so long as it doesn't detract from the game. Parody characters can be hilarious and a completely randomly generated world is going to lead to a lot of strange and comical things, so it probably would work.

But it also depends on the other players/characters and how the GM wants to run the game, so at the minimum it probably wouldn't hurt to ask the GM (or just have 2 back stories prepped, at different levels of silly/sue)

EDIT: And reading your post again, you don't necessarily need to make it a bad parody, play it how you want. I have had characters with massive SUE levels that other people were totally fine with and enjoyed playing with. The key is don't shove it in peoples faces and constantly steal the spotlight in my opinion. The trait I find makes a 'SUE' is that they see themselves as THE main character in the story.

georgie_leech

2014-04-28, 11:59 PM

EDIT: And reading your post again, you don't necessarily need to make it a bad parody, play it how you want. I have had characters with massive SUE levels that other people were totally fine with and enjoyed playing with. The key is don't shove it in peoples faces and constantly steal the spotlight in my opinion. The trait I find makes a 'SUE' is that they see themselves as THE main character in the story.

I've played characters that believed that to an extent. I think the key is not fall into the trap of thinking it yourself.

Qwertystop

2014-04-29, 10:24 AM

Yeah, clarification:

The character was not intended as such a parody, nor was the backstory. It just turned out looking like one in a few ways. Intent to run the game is not present.

(and I asked basically the same thing in the thread there and people are fine with it)

Sith_Happens

2014-04-29, 07:00 PM

I say go crazy, it's not every day you have this sort of opportunity just handed to you.:smallbiggrin:

Qwertystop

2014-04-29, 07:33 PM

End-result character. (http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetview.php?sheetid=873796)

(Not complete)

ReaderAt2046

2014-04-29, 08:01 PM

Huh. That's quite a backstory. I like it. Could you please give us a link to the campaign so we can see how this pans out?

Qwertystop

2014-04-29, 08:27 PM

Huh. That's quite a backstory. I like it. Could you please give us a link to the campaign so we can see how this pans out?

If you scroll down past all the linebreaks you can see the random-roll that initiated it.

And it's here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?344000-Let-s-be-a-Tad-Random-%283-P%29&p=17390931).

Trekkin

2014-04-30, 01:36 AM

That's just plain beautiful...especially the hair. Because really, what other kind of hairstyle is a cultist/magical rebel going to have?

By the by, I tried refining my system post (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-sue-files-something-with-numbers-i.html) somewhat. Hopefully it's less abstruse now.

Qwertystop

2014-04-30, 10:14 AM

I feel like the way to make sure dreamjackers confront SUEs in their own element (not nuking the chessmaster) might be to make damage also hurt Immersion in certain circumstances.

If you punch a SUE who knows themself to not be good at physical combat, it will hurt, but it will also mesh very well with how they see themself. So they take damage to Physical focus, but also gain Immersion - and since they wouldn't be likely to try much physical stuff anyway, that means they're helped (by the extra Immersion) more than they're hurt (by the restriction on how much they can do what they wouldn't have done).

If you manage to out-debate them on a point, though, that's a major shock. They would lose both their primary resource and their Immersion.

Currently, that would mean that if you can't defeat them before they can act, attacking a strength is risk-reward, harming their ability to retaliate if you succeed but giving them power if you fail. Attacking a weakness takes them out faster but leaves them more able to harm you before you take them out. The problem is the ease of incapacitating them before they can act.

Edit: tl;dr: My point here is that having attacks impact Immersion would give a reason to attack someone's strong points if attacking their weak points isn't a one-shot, so then we'd just need a way to make it not a one-shot.

Sith_Happens

2014-04-30, 11:08 AM

Does the Focus "spent" to increase Initiative come back the next turn or is it tied up for the rest of the encounter?

Trekkin

2014-04-30, 12:42 PM

Focus spent on Initiative should come back the next turn. It encourages people to waste more Focus on something of generally marginal utility.

As far as Immersion damage, that could work really well. Perhaps Cathexes should work like that, instead of bonuses to rolls: +X Immersion for succeeding on an action, -X for failing at it. In the case of debate, for example, every "attack" that hits they'd get a little Immersion boost, while every one that misses dings them a bit. This also opens the door to negative Cathexes, although those might be a bit harder to work.

As far as the ease of incapacitating them is concerned: I'm working on that, because it's a significant problem. I'm thinking of just letting dreamjackers spend Immersion instead of Focus, even on tracks where they're in the red. This runs parallel to certain universally impossible actions requiring Immersion outright.

The_Werebear

2014-04-30, 01:35 PM

As far as the ease of incapacitating them is concerned: I'm working on that, because it's a significant problem. I'm thinking of just letting dreamjackers spend Immersion instead of Focus, even on tracks where they're in the red. This runs parallel to certain universally impossible actions requiring Immersion outright.

So, you could basically no-sell lethal hits by telling the universe "no I am not dead."

Could you theoretically wreck a Dreamverse with this? A SUE refusing to go down and drawing more and more immersion from the surrounding area until the local reality can't take it anymore and snaps in cleaners?

Trekkin

2014-04-30, 02:29 PM

In theory, yes, but it's a question of capacity: All but the most powerful SUEs are going to run out of their own Immersion or tank their entire health grid before they spend enough for that alone to cause widespread breaks. Since it's not actually healing damage, nuking the chessmaster is still a possibility -- it's just hard to knock anyone out if they really want to stay up.

This also helps distinguish novice SUEs from the really dangerous ones: the really dire threats have ways of letting themselves be severely defeated without actually dying, and the Immersion-to-Focus conversion gives them some running room to implement those plans. Maybe a way of building backup bodies, so you can no-sell fatal wounds by saying "I have a completely redundant set of vital organs. They're in exo-Canada; you wouldn't know them."

Qwertystop

2014-04-30, 03:32 PM

As far as the Immersion goes, I was more thinking damage for getting hit/persuaded in your strongest attribute, or gains for getting hit/persuaded in your weakest (vice versa for blocking attacks), not just for making attacks.

An idea comes to mind:

Inspiration: "participation is tacit agreement"
(also AOOs)

Two people, A and B. A is a physical-focus dreamjacker, B is a social-focus one.

A attempts to punch B. B has two routes here:
1: Attempt to block/dodge the punch. Result on success: reduced or negated damage via physical means.
2: Attempt to verbally discourage A from punching him by convincing A to not hurt him or just make A feel horrible. Result on success: reduced or prevented damage via distraction.

My idea here is that if B chooses option 1, the physical counter, he is implicitly accepting A's framework that this is a physical-combat situation. If he blocks/dodges successfully, great - damage reduced and opposing damage dealt as normal. But if he fails to block or dodge, oops - he takes the full Physical damage, and with a low Physical Focus he's in trouble.

On the other hand, he could choose option 2, the social distraction or persuasion. Here, he's denying the premise that A is setting in place, saying "no, this is not a fistfight, it's a debate." Because of that, even if he got hit, he would take less damage (but it would probably be harder to outright block the attack). Perhaps put extra Immersion damage to whichever of them fails this, but not by much.

With that, there's now an incentive to attack the enemy on their strength - they can't get the automatic partial defense. If A is enough better at Physical than B is at Social, a Physical attack can still be better for the extra Immersion damage to B (allowing for the one-person-punches-the-SUE-while-another-debates-him image), but it's still a risk to A unless he far outstrips B in the comparison. If A isn't far enough ahead, he can go for a Social attack so as to at least impair B's ability to fight (socially).

Deffers

2014-04-30, 04:12 PM

I like Qwertystop's latest idea-- with maybe an added possibility of using, say, a physical attack to hinder social attacks, or vice versa.

Let's say a Physically-oriented dreamjacker is fighting a social-oriented SUE. The SUE is going to try to use words to either make the dreamjacker poof, or have a psychological meltdown, or whatever. The dreamjacker's not a moron, so he knows this. In keeping with that, he decides it's going to be a lot harder for the SUE to use his skills through a mouthful of broken teeth-- so he punches his enemy in the mouth with the intent of hindering their speech. Now the SUE has to spend Immersion to either heal his busted up mouth or use Focus to speak eloquently even as he's spitting out blood. This seems to me like the sort of tactic an actual player would try, so maybe that's not a bad idea.

The SUE, also not being a moron, sees the worth of this tactic and tries using it on the character. If he succeeds, he might use insults to shake the dreamjacker's confidence in their abilities-- reducing the impact of their hits.

The point is, of course, it's not as easy to disable someone socially using a physical attack as it would be using a social attack. You need to expend more effort to achieve the same results--you can't make someone disappear into a puff of logic with your fists unless that's literally how the world works.

What do you guys think of that idea?

Another idea is maybe combining two of your tracks somehow-- like Physical and Social so that every attack also acquires a rhetorical dimension. But I don't know how to flesh out that idea or if it's even of any use.

Qwertystop

2014-04-30, 04:51 PM

Deffers

2014-04-30, 05:00 PM

...

...In retrospect, my idea sort of became yours halfway through the writing and I never noticed. Whoops. :smalltongue:

I was more trying to imply that other than your explicit options 1 and 2, there could be an option 3 predicated on something similar to called shots in some systems-- hence my specific reference to hitting them in the mouth/ using cutting remarks. But now I realize that my option 3 is just a fanciful variant of options 1 and 2. I apologize-- hadn't really thought it through.

Still, I clearly like your idea! :smallbiggrin:

Sith_Happens

2014-04-30, 10:01 PM

Focus spent on Initiative should come back the next turn. It encourages people to waste more Focus on something of generally marginal utility.

I can't figure out if this is a problem or not. On one hand, there's literally no reason for whoever's going last to not blow all their Focus on becoming first (assuming that they have enough Focus to accomplish such in the first place, which I suppose isn't a given), because they get an immediate extra turn at their new initiative count and get the Focus back. On the other hand, boosting yourself from last to first doesn't actually accomplish anything as far as I can tell; in your example, Gamma is still the one who acts after Beta and before Alpha.

...Actually, that parenthetical part is kind of the key. Boosting yourself from last to first is the only time things get weird like that.

...On the other hand, if you still have Focus to spare after buying yourself from last to first, you've essentially gained extra Focus for a turn. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature though; this is already supposed to be a highly unorthodox way of governing action economy, so any way of gaming the initiative order to milk even more actions per unit time seems like it should be fair game.

Trekkin

2014-05-01, 12:53 PM

As far as the Immersion goes, I was more thinking damage for getting hit/persuaded in your strongest attribute, or gains for getting hit/persuaded in your weakest (vice versa for blocking attacks), not just for making attacks.

I like this. I like this a lot.

Would it work to apply bonuses to reacting to an attack with an action drawing from a different Focus? I will work on this more later, but for now, it would mean essentially building a little 3x3 (Mental, Physical, Social) matrix of damage resistances for each character, the diagonal of which is automatically 1; as you say, accepting the paradigm of a given conflict means accepting the results. I'm not yet clear on how to calculate the resistances for the non-symmetrical parts, though. Maybe base it on the difference in resistance statistics?

That way, when our social dreamjacker B is attacked physically and chooses to defend socially, they only take [vigor]/[nunchi] of the damage before other defenses come into play. Chances are, being social, their nunchi is far higher than their vigor anyway; at the worst extreme, they might only take 1/4 damage.

Is that something like what you were thinking?

Qwertystop

2014-05-01, 03:38 PM

Trekkin

2014-05-01, 04:13 PM

Pretty much, yeah. So the damage B takes to Physical in that case is of equal proportion to his Physical damage grid as the actual damage is to his Social damage grid.

How would Mental combat play out?

Same way, I think, just with Acumen as the resistance stat. I tried making a table for it:

Damage Fraction
Physical Attack
Mental Attack
Social Attack

Physical Defense
1
Acumen/Vigor
Nunchi/Vigor

Mental Defense
Vigor/Acumen
1
Nunchi/Acumen

Social Defense
Vigor/Nunchi
Acumen/Nunchi
1

And we could run it as the grid size ratio, but that pulls in four stats and has a lot of possible fractions. This is more or less the square root of the grid size ratio.

By way of making it more easily computable, we should probably round everything to the nearest tenth. Asking people to multiply damage by 7/13ths might be a bit much.

Qwertystop

2014-05-01, 04:47 PM

Re: Mental combat
I mean, what would it be? Physical combat is... sort of the general-purpose meaning of the word "combat."
Social is trying to convince people of things.
What's Mental?

Zelphas

2014-05-01, 05:24 PM

Social attacks could be convincing people to do things using overwhelming charisma or appealing to their good nature (i.e. the ethos and pathos forms of argument). Mental attacks, conversely, would be straight logic (logos). The Mental Chessmaster would be the one who makes people disappear in a puff of logic, not the Social cult leader.

On the other hand, mental could be twinned with Immersion somewhat, in that you use it to deny that someone could do something. When the Physical SUE says "I hit the wall so hard that it explodes," the Mental dreamjacker says "no, you don't; and here's why." This would make Mental power almost entirely reactionary, however.

Trekkin

2014-05-01, 05:33 PM

Mental combat might be a few things. In terms of adjusting the combat paradigm, there's always fighting via weaponized Sherlock Scan. It might also be psychological warfare, or the employment of various kinds of psychic powers, or the exploitation of an opponent's "two-dimensional thinking."

In other words, it's less a matter of direct blow-by-blow combat and more the case of fighting to harry and confuse an opponent or shake their confidence in their tactical prowess. Or Hollywood hacking, the kind where the defending sysadmin and the attacking uber-hacker spew technobabble across jump cuts until a download completes.

It might also be possible to run cryptography this way. Or riddling contests, I suppose.

Deffers

2014-05-01, 05:40 PM

Some kinds of magic could also be tied to that-- like in DnD, or in the Laundry series where it's a straight up branch of computer science with its own high tech and science stuff.

Icewraith

2014-05-01, 07:57 PM

This has been fascinating.

The completely open setting along the mechanics discussed here lets you fluff whatever your character concept is and attack various attributes with your various attributes, as long as you can justify it.

However, it might be best if you could only inflict certain kinds of damage by attacking a particular stat.

For instance, a swordsman could try to damage an opponent (attack vs. physical), debuff-perhaps disarm, feint or stun (attack vs. mental) or slash his opponent's belt and pants the opponent in public, humiliating him (attack vs social). Also the last example is probably an attempt to inflict two conditions with one attack, or an attack (vs physical to inflict immobilize or entaglement or somesuch) with social damage.

Or, you have attack-defense-damage/debuff completely divorced from each other based on the nature of the character. Maybe attack-defense-result?

Attacks are determined by method-
Physical attacks are with conventional weapons, fists, swords, etc.

Mental Attacks use the power of the mind, and perhaps ranged or energy weapons? This may be a gray area. A girl-genius style spark should certainly be making mental based attacks, even if they're actually from death rays or fiendishly concealed devices. I'm not sure what Johnny Hero the rocket trooper should be using to shoot people with his laser cannon though.

Social attacks use communication or information.

Defenses might be determined thusly:
Any attampt to destroy via physics is defended by physical.
Any attempt to fool, confuse, mislead, or humiliate is defended by mental.
There is no social defense- all the attack vectors I can think of also resolve to mental or physical.

Damage might be :
The target dies or is KOed when it takes too much physical damage.
The target is too humiliated, flustered, confused, or trapped in a realm of their own nightmares to act when it has taken too much mental damage.
The target cannot exert their will on the surroundings if they have taken too much social damage. They have lost control of the story, and the universe will not reshape itself to remove the circumstances around event X.

I use that as "Social" becuase the entire point of being a SUE is to be admired by everyone around you, except the enemies you deservingly and inevitably crush under foot. Therefore your ability to be admired by the general public is a function of your ability to control the story. Most attacks dealing social damage are attempts to lock a character into a certain relatively harmless and obscure "defeated powerless loser" archetype where they have no power, no influence, and no friends, and no one trusts or believes them enough for them to bend the local universe so that it is no longer so.

Edit: Once I was able to actually get at the blog post instead of just the forum side discussion I relaized I misunderstood how others were using some the the terminology. I also realized that I was still thinking of physical attributes as important in a game about dreams.

There's no strength except strength of willpower, no constitution but mental durability, and no dexterity but there is accuracy and speed of thought. If there's interest, it does raise the question of how good someone should be at using an unfamiliar combat style when trying to avoid immersion breaking. The greatest wizard dreamjacker ever may have no clue how to "think" throwing a punch well enough for the universe to register. Even though there's no "actual" physical stats, there may need to be pseudo-physical stats, or ranks or combat skills or something? Someone who is a 92-pound weakling "back home" may or should find it harder or more immersion breaking to win a physical fight than the Alex Louis Armstrong of dreamjackers.

Which absolutely must be a thing in this system.

Trekkin

2014-05-08, 05:01 PM

Disabling deliberate Immersion expenditure at 0 Social Focus would work interestingly.

As for the differential Immersion cost for dreamjackers of different original levels of strength, even though it's entirely made-up strength, we're kind of doing that. That's why strength and con are lumped together as "vigor" -- it's more or less my version of the Matrix's idea of neurokinetics, in one sense how vigorously a given individual thinks.

By the by, I aten't dead, just under suffocating levels of bureaucracy prior to entering grad school.

ReaderAt2046

2014-05-10, 05:02 PM

I wonder what would happen if you gave this (http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-572) to Marty.

Arbane

2014-05-11, 02:44 AM

I wonder what would happen if you gave this (http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-572) to Marty.

The results would end up on either COPS or America's Funniest Home Videos, undoubtably.

Snowyowl

2014-05-20, 10:38 AM

I like this setting. It seems the dreamjackers are at least a little like SUEs, in their methods and powers. And there's enough wiggle room to explore the he-who-fights-monsters conundrum, if the plot happens to wander that way.

But if that's not interesting, you can just note that the Agency is trying to prevent the physical annihilation of large sections of the multiverse, which basically guarantees that they're the good guys. The perfect plot hook: one that can be quietly dismissed if it's not needed.

Trekkin

2014-05-20, 08:59 PM

Thanks, but unfortunately I've written myself into a bit of a problem: I don't have time to debug the mechanics before graduate school starts, and I'd be a fool to try to keep working on it while so totally occupied.

In the free time I have left, I think it might be more productive to just throw the proto-mechanics I have onto some kind of wiki and let people do what they want with them, bearing in mind that the setting can also fit FATE and/or HERO fairly easily. I'll post a link to that when it's ready.

Sith_Happens

2014-05-21, 02:01 PM

Just throw everything you've got into a Google doc, write up a blog post explaining your reasonings for various aspects of the rules and what you're going for, and let us take it from there.:smallwink:

Icewraith

2014-05-22, 05:53 PM

While the whole game world is mental, it's based on bending the limits of reality, so perhaps physical stats are still important as a baseline for what each dreamjaker's "normal" is relative to what they're doing?

There probably need to be staged levels of increasingly bent reality, although the GM can give alternative descriptions as long as it's clear what's going on. Suggestions, in approximate order of increasing intensity

Fading. It seems like there's a thin layer of smoke in the area, but when you look closely at anything in detail it's not there.

Terrain bleed over. Out of the corner of your eye, distant objects and landscapes are from the wrong reality. Maybe the color is wrong, or there's ocean instead of desert.

Localized bleed over. The air writhes as it reacts to movements of people from other realities as they walk past. You hear random snippets of conversation. This is an effective defense mechanism against minor sues, who tend to have a complete nervous breakdown, kill themselves, flee in terror, or subconsciously will themselves powerless rather than deal with sensory evidence they're going crazy.

Weather. The buildup of extradimensional potential creates an appropriately dramatic thunderstorm or other weather event. If you look closely when the lightning flashes, and are of strong enough mind, you can briefly see into the nether/void/realm of eldritch horrors.

Perspective Loss (think CS Lewis' eldils). Even though local gravity is unchanged, the world feels tilted and you have the sensation that you're on a ball whizzing through space at incredible speed. Alternatively, the sensation that the world has transitioned from cartesian to polar coordinates, and while everything is mathematically exactly where it was before and reacts how it was before, you're stuck still trying to think cartesian in polar. SOMETHING is paying more attention to this little patch of reality.

Fracture. "Lightning" strikes leave behind rips in reality that do not close (or will take awhile to heal). If you look at them too hard you get an effect similar to being under the direct eye of sauron. It's do or die, if you try and jump out of this reality now you'll probably just bring cthulu through to clean out whatever realm you bailed to. Also, don't touch them or try to move through them, you might as well try to clothesline yourself on monofilament wire. If you're desperate and supremely selfish jumping sequentially into multiple realities might "lose" the eldritch horror if you find enough realities with serious issues to distract it, but only because the horror is busy eating those realities.

Total perspective failure. Cthulu breaks into the reality and annihilates everything. A supremely skilled dreamjacker or powerful SUE might be able to save himself by jumping into the nether right when the horror enters reality and immediately not thinking about anything or trying to do any more reality manipulation. Any attempt to manipulate reality will create a new proto-world the entity can trace back to you. However, if you can avoid going crazy in the Nether/whatever, you might be able to jump back to the point and location in your own reality that you jumped out and discovered you were a dreamjacker.

Remember though, that the events that cause people to become dreamjackers are often extremely traumatic and/or dangerous. Any reality bending within the next few days will re-flag your trail through the nether and result in an immediate visit from Cthulu, and even if the character survives the original trauma that caused them to leave, their own reality will be doing its damndest to convince the character they simply had a weird and intense mental episode from the stress.

If you fail to avoid bending reality in the nether aside from the jump home, you wake up in an analogue of your original reality from an extremely wierd dream. The time will have either advanced or regressed slightly from where you left, and whatever was "normal" for your reality will be what is going on. Any memories of dreamjacking or the events that sparked your dreamjacker-ness will be wiped out by psychic trauma form Cthulu and The Realm Of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Cthulu may or may not break into your reality sometime in the next few days depending on how good your timing was and how long you were able to stand the far realms before you screwed up.

If Cthulu doesn't come, over a period of time your new reality will merge back into your original reality. The GM will confiscate your character sheet and you'll need to roll up a new one. Things will go swimmingly for your old character for a period of time- the dice will roll his way, he'll be the recipient of random acts of kindness, he'll achieve the life goals he set out to do no matter how convoluted or ill-thought out they actually were- right until a suspicious looking team of scruffy nobodies shows up and tries to ruin his life.