A multi-media fantasy RPG

By Mike Holmes

With help from Shreyas Sampat, Kirk, JB Bell, Charlotte Irrgang

Fair Play is a work in progress, currently. Generally the design is meant to create role-playing in a fantasy world that grows from nothing at the start but our commonly held memetic notions of what fantasy worlds are like. As play proceeds, various extant bits of media (likely mostly pictures) are added to text play to create information about the world. This new information, then, creates routs for further investigation, and growth of the world.

Below are the goals that have been identified, reflecting Mike Holmes' vision for the game, and constraints on what the design will attempt and how. These may change over time.

• The game is an “RPG” in the traditional sense that there will be players playing characters through events in a fictional world.
• The world will be designed by all of the participants of the game. This distribution will likely be inequal, but hopefully done in a way that makes the players all feel ownership of the evolving game world (at least enough to obtain greater feelings of interest and engagement with said world).
• The game will have a GM, but their role is mostly as facilitator of play, and player of all characters who are not the responsibilities of the other players.
• Invention of information regarding the world will be primarily textual or verbal as usual (we're envisioning play on the RPG Refuge Discord server and the like), but will seek to incorporate a lot of stationary visual media (mostly art from the internet).
• To avoid analysis paralysis of selection of such media, there will be collections put together so as to create limits on what can be perused, allowing (hopefully) faster selection. (Currently I have Pinterest boards set up to accomplish creation of collections of pictures).
• It is understood that the nature of the media placed into the collections will impact what tends to exist in play (may even constrain it significantly). This is hopefully a feature, not a bug. (Yes, the author in inflicting his collections in the playtest will selfishly be having greater control of the environment, but hopefully the players will be OK with this, or even enjoy working within these constraints).
• Character definition in terms of their expertise in certain things will result in the player of said character having additional control of world-building of elements related to that expertise. The notion being that the exclamations of such experts are likely to be factually correct, from an in-game perspective.
• Character definition will revolve significantly around the character's relationships with entities in the game world. This does constitute “expertise” per the above bullet, but exists also to link the character solidly into the game world, and hopefully as the world evolves, so to will the plot as the characters deal with these relationships.
• Character definition will also be about ranking in terms of “fictional positioning.” Inspired by Game of Thrones (even moreso by ASOIAF), this means that we will at times know which character is the best in the world (or thought to be), and who challengers to that title might be. This is a relatively tentative goal.
• Travel, or some other themes, should exist in play to encourage world growth. This is a relatively tentative goal, and may be found to be unecessary, or just optional.

During this phase players will create certain basic concepts about the nature of play. The concepts should probably involve the characters being peripatetic or some other explanation of a way in which the characters come across enough elements of the world to keep play involving discovery of new things.

Before creating characters, players select roles for the game. This is done first, as selection of roles my influence how players generate characters. The roles that may be selected are:

• Facilitator - this player organizes play, and maintains media caches for the game.
• Main Character Player - this player will play one or more of the main characters of the game. Main character here defined as ones who the players agree to keep the plot revolving around.
• Secondary Character Player - this player will be assigned to play characters who are not main characters. The plot does not revolve around non-main characters and the action rarely, if ever, follows them solely.
• World-Builder - this role involves the player being involved in the world-building mechanics, and making up details about the nature of the world as needed.
• Event Creator - this role involves coming up with events to be played out in scenes (typically involving one or more main characters).
• Host - if playing online, the service admin is the host in effect. As are event coordinators if playing FTF at an event. Otherwise if playing FTF, somebody must be a host.

The default is that all players are either main or non-main character players (or both), and world-builders. A player may “GM” by opting not to play a main character, and other players may do the same, essentially. Though they may well want and have secondary characters that are of significant importance.

Play may begin once every role has been filled.

At certain times in the game, a player may drop or add a role. They may not drop a role, however, if they are the last player who has that role. They must instead wait until somebody else takes up that role before they may drop it. Note that a player may petition the game to have one of their secondary characters become a main character, which then makes them a main character player. And characters may be similarly demoted, with the player no longer being a main character player if this is their last such character. But this may not happen, again, if there are no other main character players.

WIP

Players invent characters that make sense given the concepts worked out above. These should include one main character or one secondary character for each player in the game, and one additional secondary character for each main character who is somebody important to the main character. Normally the player most involved in creating a character will play that character, but players may decide to swap, up to and including changing the player role if necessary to accomplish this.

Generally the player of one of these designated characters has the usual prerogatives of a player of a Player Character in most RPGs.

Players of main characters should indicate if the character is a protagonist or some other type of character. There must remain one protagonist among the characters for play to begin, and players can negotiate which characters these will be.

Play is conducted using the usual scene-setting procedures and so forth.

Ongoing with this normal play, players are compelling each other to add elements to the setting, and/or doing so voluntarily. In many cases, the additions will be accomplished by placing a piece of art into play inline with the text (or showing it to other players for FTF play). When this happens, everything in the picture presented is created in the shared imagined space, unless a player goes further and “edits” the picture. Pictures are selected from specific galleries.

Other types of media can be entered voluntarily, but only compelled if somebody creates a “gallery” of that sort of art. A playlist for music, for example.

If a participant in the game finds that an entered piece of media changes details from previously established egregiously (especially if established by previous media entries), they can protest to the facilitator who will make a call on whether the submission is suitable, or if the player must edit it or select another.

Once a piece of art is exhibited, players may interrogate one another about the piece. This can be accomplished by having a character investigate, or at the player level, in which case the information may simply be player knowledge. In the latter case, a player can use a knowledge test to figure out if the character knows the information already, making investigating unnecessary.