Triple Play Worlds

I just had a thought for a world that you could put together. It would be an ideal starting world to see what kinds of players you've got. You could, with some minor changes to setting, run the same player through the same world 3 different times in a row, and they would never even know it.

Dancing Princess is the first part of this. Do you go to the castle, or do you stay back and learn blacksmithing? Well, what if there was another castle? Or a few more castles? Dancing Princess is the chance to rule and become rich. There's another castle, they're looking for people who like to party, and that know how to produce some good music/art/anything else the player is interested in. This castle promises wine, women and song if you go. Yet another castle is looking for men to recruit as generals of the army, if they can pass a series of physical tests. Given the options of "Becoming King" "Wine, women and song" OR "Combat Training." Which motivates him? Or does he just stay back in the village? If so, what happens to him there?

Modify it a tad. Now, it's the same thing, on a space world. Does the player become the hero for gold and glory, or does he decide to learn new skills? Again, the player who does nothing has opportunities for adventures of their own.

There's no pressure, there's not even a perception of force. They would hear about all three offers and decide which to take. Same world, same characters, same things. Just a little tweaks. One world becomes three.

Dancing Princess and Quest for the Vorgo could be combined like this. When you land, you hear about both choices, or stay back in the village. Either way, the option you don't choose will resolve itself. The Dancing Princesses will turn out to have been suffering from insomnia and sleepwalking, and the Vorgo undead will turn out to be drunken villagers who got carried away a little too often. Stay in the village option is open to the player.

It happens that Triple Play is already the name of our not-quite-yet-released new series of worlds, but it has nothing to do with this. It's collections of three worlds in one package; I thought this thread was going to be about that.

Generally speaking, the kind of world you're describing is used for gather worlds--there are a lot of things that could be going on, and you can pick which of them you want to do. You were in a gather world when you first arrived, one of the few real gather worlds I've run online, and it gave me all the problems which lead me not to run such worlds--notably the irregularity of player involvement, as some players dropped out (with or without mentioning it to me), some were very erratic, and some were extremely active. However, player characters chose their own adventures in that world, and I moved with them and tried to keep their timelines loosely connected.

Of course, there are worlds like what you describe, but there are a lot of quirks to this. Here are some ideas or insights.

• You've mentioned The Dancing Princess. You would like there to be an alternative, that I've got several different possible adventures, and the one the player picks is the real one. Of course, the other day you were yelling about how what happens ought to be based on dice, not on referee fiat (the technical term for when a referee makes a decision simply because he thinks it is for the good of the game). So if I have put three adventures in one world, why shouldn't it be the dice that decide whether you've correctly guessed that the real danger is the dragon in the mountains or incorrectly gone after the dragons while the demons take over the kingdom? Apart from that, you think I could then run the same world multiple times with the same character, but could I really? If you went after the dragon last time, what's to say you won't go after the dragon again this time? Some scenarios don't do terribly well if you run them twice even with the same group--and this is a good example. If you had married Olivia, and Scott later also married Olivia, what happens if I bring you and Scott back into another gather, and each of you brings Olivia? That's terribly confusing (and with the mischievous Olivia, there's no guarantee they wouldn't play some really confusing pranks on the two of you). I usually try not to use the same scenario twice with the same gaming group. It doesn't work with the forum game for a variety of reasons--number of players, influx from convention demo games (where I do use the same games because they work well in that context), lack of time to develop that many ideas--but I still try to come up with new stuff. If I stick three scenarios in one world, I've wasted two scenarios; I'm going to have to strip them out to use them later anyway.
• On rare occasions I run The Last Starfighter. It is one of my favorite movies, and it's a great gamer story as the nobody kid from a trailer park Alex Rogan becomes the last Starfighter who alone with his navigator Grig defeats the entire Kodan armada and saves hundreds of worlds, including Earth. Yet the story depends entirely on beating that Starfighter video game, and that means I've got to induce the player character to play it. (This is one reason I don't run it often--not too many versers, particularly experienced versers, are willing to pick up an indigenous quarter off the ground and waste it on a video game.) So I figure there are four possibilities: the character plays the video game here, or he stays here and does not play the video game; or he leaves here, in which case the video game that mattered was never here and he encounters the video game somewhere else, and either he plays it or he does not. If he does not play it, someone else plays it. If he's the guy who plays it, he takes Alex Rogan's part in the story and is replaced on Earth by the Beta Unit--either at the trailer park or wherever he goes. If he does not play it, then the guy who plays it mysteriously disappears but is replaced by the Beta Unit ("an exact duplicate of you, only not as loud") who then becomes the target of the Zandozan assassins, and you're in the middle of a quiet invasion of Earth. You get to pick what part you play in the story, not because you know the story but because your choices will put you in one of those four positions.
• I know that John (4) Mastick follows your game; I don't know whether you follow his. He keeps asking me (by phone) what's going to happen in his world; I keep telling him I have no idea yet, he hasn't even burned up twenty-four hours of the world's time. (He also keeps asking me whether a certain girl we knew in college is somehow going to appear in his life so he can pick up the relationship that fizzled, but I think that unlikely.) But remember when I versed you into Columbus Ohio, all I knew was that this was Columbus Ohio within a few years of the present but with something different that I would figure out as I went. That's the kind of world I'm using for him: I know it's New Orleans in 1920, and that everything we think of as major bits such as Prohibition and the major Jazz players are all in place, Storeyville just shut down, the hit parade is pretty predictable. Just how that's going to play out I don't know. I know that John is a drummer who loves to play, a retired cop, and a heavy drinker; that creates a lot of possibilities in the scenario of created, including that he would become a major player in the jazz world, or in the bootlegging world, or in the revenours world. He's making those choices; I'm building around him as he goes. Now, maybe I'll throw in a curve--like that the Louisiana bayou pagan cults are real and there are zombies out there, or that someone gets murdered and we're all suspects until we solve it--but at this point I don't have to make those decisions. When I do, I will. The problem with this approach, though, is that I really don't know what's going to happen. It could become very boring, if John never does anything unusual and I never hit the right shift (not to be confused with the left shift). To some degree he flounders, not merely because this is his first role playing game, but because the game is not offering him any direction and he's hunting for it. He thought the several mentions of Chicago were my hints that he should pack up and go there. That certainly would be interesting--very challenging for me, because really all my research has been on New Orleans, but it would put him in Capone's territory and make his life considerably more dangerous. But I figured New Orleans was a good place for him to be, so I started him there with no real intention that he should go anywhere unless he wanted to. (I also gave him a character who could help him significantly as long as he stayed where he is, but that again is up to him.) It's wide open. Because it's wide open, I have to do more work to keep up with him, but really I could dump a dozen other people in exactly the same world parallel to him and not have any problem with duplication.

I tend to use worlds I've used before. That's because I don't have time to create enough worlds for all the games I'm running, and I know these pretty well. I also tend toward worlds designed to hook players into a story of some sort, because they're easier. Despite that, of the four worlds you've seen, only one of them fits that category. The current world is one I've used in a book and which I started players in twice only to lose them. Some of my stories are very narrow, and some are very broad. If I drop you in Race Wars, I'm expecting that you will realize that the conflict between the Neanderthals and the Cro Magnons is growing worse and headed toward a full-out genocidal war if a solution is not found, but I don't care what solution you offer or if you simply attempt to avoid it somehow until it catches up to you and kills you (you do look a lot like a Cro Magnon as far as the Neanderthals are concerned, although the Cro Magnons have no idea what you are).

So you really have a good idea for how to burn up more ideas faster. I need good ideas for how to create more ideas faster.

Thanks, though.

--M. J. Young

I know one successful SF writer said he realized people were reading his short stories for the ideas, and so he started putting in more ideas. He found that his worries of running out of ideas were not an issue.

Now, you may be talking about the time to develop an idea.

And two, this is a natural moment for me to mention....I have about a hundred worlds created. Feel free to use some of mine (although I think you did use Northgate City.)

It made more sense to me when I wrote it. What I was thinking is use the same theme as the basis for multiple worlds.

You land in this world. You hear about princesses that are sleepwalking, (The chance for power and glory) you hear about a castle that needs knights, (A chance for combat skills) and you hear about the Vorgo undead (The chance to battle monsters)

Take that same theme, and set it in a space world. Now it's the Galactic Star Emperor's daughter who is having such and such problems (The chance for power and glory) a Pirate vessel recruiting people who aren't afraid of death (The chance for combat skills) and you hear about a race of aliens that is trying to take over a world (The chance to battle monsters) Which will your player choose?

With a few tweaks, one world with these kinds of choices could become multiple worlds. The player would go through it 3 or 4 times, with the changes of scenery, and never even realize it would be the same world. It's not burning up ideas, it's stretching them out.

A1Nut - The problem is, you go from, let's call it "Fantasy Triple-Play World," into "Sci-Fi Triple Play World." It doesn't take an experienced Verser - or even somebody who has read lots of speculative fiction - very long to realize that this is the same world with a palate-swap. I see what you're trying to do, I really do, I just don't think it would work.

You know, i was once involved in this late-night discussion of various wild-west versions of other stories, like saving the mayor's daughter from the giant snake, or running away from general Vanderbilt in the decennial eagle at full gallop.

in our defense, we were tired at the time.

I think doing 'palate-changing' is a cool idea.

We've come up with a number of differing versions of Mary Piper (Merchant sailing ship, and Merchant interstellar ship were MJ's....and Graeme came up with the idea for an Old West caravan, and I've done in part a nuclear powered train in the near-future in a lawless Siberia).

And each of these 'ships' is named 'Mary Piper'.

I sketched out about ten ideas all told.

And doing weird ideas is fun...
1. Hadrian is currently in Red Shirt Terror World.
2. I've done a world packed with puns...the Pie Rats live in La Goon aboard their ship, and sling pies at their enemies. Sand Fleas are now Sand Flees and their bites make you 'save vs. fear', and Pi Trees have pies on them, and are 3.14 feet (approximately, you can never accurately measure them) tall....
3. Tall Tales of Mythica has about five Grand Canyons(since a number of Tall Tale Heroes created the Grand Canyon), Paul Bunyan and at least a dozen other American folk tales including Sally Whirlwind Thunder Lightning Crockett (or something like that) who threw Mike Fink five hundred paces without breaking a sweat, and Pecos Bill who roped a tornado.