Xindaris's Idea Dump/Discussion Thread

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Xindaris

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I think it's about time I made something like this, so I don't keep annoying the cbox and I also don't clutter this subforum with my ideas. So I'm just gonna use this post to outline a few random ideas I've had that might work for RPs, and see if anyone has anything to say about them.

Idea 1: Graphworld
Most fictional worlds, even fantasy ones, may be assumed to take place on a planet. You can map locations in them with your typical kind of maps, topographical, political, etc. But I think, what if instead you had a world that would be best mapped out with a graph (I mean the kind with vertices and edges)? What I'm imagining is a world made out of a bunch of floating chunks of earth, each of which exists in a separate void from the others, and which are only connected by portals that go from one such "island" to another. I'm putting the word island in quotes because even sections of this world with water would still be considered "islands" floating in this void.

The thing that occurs to me as most intriguing about this concept is the idea of a massive war. Obviously, strategy would have to be extremely different when you travel via portal from one place to another. A plot that could form for such a world would be the idea that the world wasn't always in such fragments, and perhaps there is a group trying to destroy the portals under the belief that doing so will cause the world to be rejoined and become whole again.

The main issue to work out with this world would be the logistics of how day/night and weather work, and whether there would be any rules to how the "islands" are arranged in their connections.


Idea 2: Wish
This is an idea I had quite awhile ago for another world, I just don't exactly know what sort of plot to make for it. The idea is that this world started out much like our world, but for one thing. For some unknown reason, every single sentient being that is born, is born with the ability to make one wish. When the power is used, something that must be of one's own free will, that wish always comes true with only a few very specific exceptions like "I wish I could steal that person's wish". The RP would take place a long time after the beginning of the world, at a point where it's become a very insane sort of sci-fi-fantasy that keeps chaotically changing due to the more major, world-affecting wishes. As I said, the only thing really holding back an RP taking place in this world is I'm just not sure what sort of plot to give it.


Idea 3: Cost
This is an idea that I'd classify as a "ruined fantasy" sort of world. The backstory is that there were once two gods, and humans. Some kind of fight erupted between the gods, and it ended with both of them being killed; one of them, however, entrusted his power to the humans under the condition that they always paid something for it. The idea with this world is that the humans can now use magic, but it always consumes something that one would consider valuable. For example, one's magic might destroy food or corrode wealth, or require one to wound one's self or kill an animal to cast.

I have a pretty good sense of the rules system for this world. Ultimately the problem would be that it costs more of physical stuff to get magic than you would get from the same amount of magic; in other words, the overuse of magic in the world is leading to less and less of the valuable stuff that fuels being around. The most powerful, or perhaps the word should be "efficient", source for magic would probably be a human's mind/soul/sanity. Due to this, the most powerful mages of this world would be people who have literally stolen someone else's soul using a piece of their own, and bonded it to their own, and now use it as fuel. Naturally their lifespan, due to insanity, would be rather short.

Overall, I think the plot to go with this world would perhaps involve seeking out the battleground where the two gods fought, followed by some terrible revelation that requires the heroes to make some kind of terrible choice and live with the consequences.


Idea 4: Diety
Yet another world-type idea I've got. Another world that at least began with only humans; in this world, humans have the power of "faith". Basically, if a group of humans get together and believe that a given god exists, and claim to worship that god, then he/she/it comes into existence. The gods don't live in the same world as humans, instead existing in their own realm, but they are able to grant their worshipers powers that are based on what they are a god of. To give a very vanilla example, a god of fire might give his worshipers fire-controlling powers.

The beauty of this idea, I think, is that there could literally be a god of anything imaginable, and thus the powers that humans might gain from them could be very interesting. For example, a god of gluttony might be able to give his followers the power to stay hungry forever, and perhaps the ability to store the energy from all that food very efficiently or even in a magical way, and even channel it through their body to gain temporary super-powers or the like.

This is another idea that I have mentally marked as one I don't have a specific plot plan for. I'm not even sure that a plot plan would be necessary, though, as the characters of such a world could themselves form some interesting events. I do know that I don't want any god-player-characters, I'd rather the player-characters be humans, and the players indirectly control/create the gods that those characters worship.


Idea 5: The "Orbital" System
This isn't even a world idea at all. It is actually an entirely different concept on how to organize and use characters. I have come up with two different world/plots that would work very well with this system, but I'd like to outline the way it works first.

In the most stereotypical of RP, you have a small group of heroes or people in a ship or in a house or whatever, and they do stuff. You have as many unimportant NPCs as you need, maybe enemies for the heroes to fight, but overall, the heroes are in some way the focus of the story. The traditional system for making characters works extremely well for this sort of RP, I think, because you put a bunch of detail into one or two characters and hyper-focus your post onto said character's perspective, thoughts, and so on.

However, what if you have instead an RP that involves a place like a city or a college, with thousands of people in it? It doesn't make sense to portray a living, breathing community with only a few highly-detailed characters and then some NPCs to try and fill in the gaps. The Orbital system is for precisely that. Essentially, the idea is that while your traditional RP involves just one or two characters, the Orbital system is supposed to encourage the creation of as many characters as possible by one player. In the orbital system, you have a "Central" character, which is the only one you give a detailed character sheet to, and then you have the people that character knows, and the people those characters know, and so on. The characters closest to the central character, or the characters who the player wants to focus on the most, are in "orbital one" and the story may be narrated from their perspective at any time. "Orbital two" characters might have their perspective given every once in awhile, but usually it's another character's presence that makes them important. Orbital three characters would almost never have their perspective shown, primarily only coming into play when a more central character comes into contact with them.

This is a system where it's perfectly okay for each individual player to tell his/her own character's story for as long as needed. It's okay for the characters of different players to not be in constant contact; but of course, it would be unnatural for them to never come into contact. An interesting feature of this system is that it's perfectly possible and okay for one player's orbital 3 or 4 or more to another player's central, orbital 1 or orbital 2, as long as they have some agreement on who that character is and how he or she is to be played.

The ideas I have for this system include, indeed, an RP that takes place in a college, and an RP that takes place in a city. Some of you may even remember my attempt at using the system in the "Magic College" RP, which of course fizzled out after a while due to lack of activity. The idea I have for the city-setting RP is a modern-day-world being slowly invaded/infused by magic and a magical world being consumed by a great and powerful darkness of some sort that forces them to flee into said modern-day-world. It would be called 'Change', and it would have a bit more of a central/heroic plot, although it would still hopefully be slow in coming.


Idea 6: Apocalypse/Rebirth Trilogy
This is actually a somewhat detailed idea I've had, and attempted to run in the past with little success. It is essentially a story that spans generations and could easily make at least three different RPs. The idea is that a fantasy world with a pantheon of gods gets nearly consumed by some kind of dark creatures that its people have never known nor fought before. They are creatures of chaos, and a mage first summons them and becomes the ruler over them in an effort to "save" a world he believes has too much order to it. Essentially, the world's various kingdoms and whatnot just don't take the threat seriously enough until it's already too late, and pretty soon it gets to a point where it's clear that all of sentient life is probably doomed. I should note that these creatures are kind of like zombies in that any person one of them kills becomes another one, and their numbers quickly become seemingly endless. It is at the breaking point of the world that the first part of the trilogy, called "The end of a world", would come; it would involve a group of player-characters escaping to a central location which then gets built up into a city, a massive fortress designed to last for a very long time against the dark creatures. The second RP would take place centuries later, probably with a title like "The city at the end of the world"; it would just be the day-to-day life of the people living in the city, which by then would have developed some rather high technology or such. The final part of the trilogy would be "Rebirth of a world", in which the city gets destroyed, but its inhabitants go on the attack and finally destroy the source of the dark creatures, freeing the souls they stole and essentially starting the world all over again.

This idea actually has a single character who I would have to play, a tragic hero of sorts who is the only person to live through all three parts of the story. He would not necessarily upstage the other characters, but his existence and actions would have to affect them. This character would be the mage who first summoned the creatures; by the time the world starts falling apart, he would regret his actions but be unable to undo them, instead putting himself into a deep sleep to quiet the dark ones. The gods of the world would give his unconsciousness a body of its own, which they would then order to build the city and save the world. He would become the leader of the city, but eventually be forced to wake up (in the third part of the trilogy), which would destroy his "dreaming body". The main characters of the "Rebirth" story would have to actually kill his body, now completely imprisoned by the dark ones, in order to free his soul and everybody else's.


Idea 7: The "Nobody" Light Warriors
This is a very recent, sort of vague concept, so bear with me. Most traditional fantasy RPGs have some characters who go on an adventure because they want to, or because their town gets burned down, or whatever. The point is that usually, it's people who are interesting and have histories of being trained as warriors or mages or whatnot in some way. The idea of this RP is, say that the big bad comes and kills tons of people, and among those people you have four to seven complete nobodies. I mean the kind of people who would be the least important NPCs ever in your typical final fantasy sort of story. Things like potato farmers or that random guy who you see running from the wave of impending doom in the intro cutscene, and never see again. Let's say that these people get killed by the big bad, but then get reincarnated by some kind of diety, like a demigod or something, and are told they have to be the heroes. It's important to this idea that these are not people who ever really dreamed of adventure, who simply had their normal lives and were fine with them, and they get drafted into it.

What I'm not sure of is what kind of setting to use this idea in. It would work fine in a traditional sort of fantasy setting, but it might be interesting to make this a modern or sci-fi fantasy of some sort. For example, maybe some version of the "real world" gets hit by an extremely powerful, high-tech and magical final-fantasy kind of villain and most of civilization gets wiped out, and these are ordinary modern-day people who get pulled into the light-warrior style roles. As I said, this is a pretty new idea, so not too much is hammered out yet.


Idea 8: You don't make your character, you make somebody else's
This is more of a meta-RPing idea intended to make for some challenging writing practice more than anything. The title practically says it all; in this freeform-styled fantasy RP, you make someone else's character and someone else makes yours. The rules would allow a person, when requesting a character, to make a few requests, like asking that their character not be evil or be related to cats or whatever, and if a person feels they absolutely cannot play a character made for them they can ask for some kind of rewrite. It's just something that I think would be kind of fun to do for a freeform RP.


Idea 9: Experiments
This is pretty rare for me, it's pretty much a sci-fi idea. It goes like this: You have a facility in the middle of nowhere, where an old mad scientist takes on extremely intelligent students to teach them to be more mad scientists. It's sort of an institute/internship sort of thing, with education and pay. The other people who this man hires are the homeless, the unimportant, the kind of people who won't ever be missed. These people become those who are experimented on, given various superpowers possibly and told to fight against each other. I'm not completely sure where this RP would go, but I believe I'd want both the students of the master and the experiments to be playable characters.


Idea 10: HBaW
If you know what that stands for, you might as well quit reading now because it's the same thing. If you don't know what it stands for, this is a really old idea of mine, "Her Boyfriend's a Werewolf", which has seen at least three or four attempts at remaking it. Its setting is the modern times of a world which has always had humans, werewolves, and vampires (the latter two always fighting, with the former caught in the middle). The basic plot outline is the title, a human girl has a boyfriend who is a werewolf, and while everyone is aware of the existence of both other races a lot of them hide and pretend to be humans; he is one such, and his girlfriend doesn't know what he is. Also necessary to the plot is the girlfriend's best friend, a vampire, who she also thinks is human. When I originally conceived the plot idea, I thought it could go in the direction of comedy or tragedy depending on the leanings of the players, but in the first run of it I eventually came up with a much more convoluted plan involving reincarnation and vampire-werewolf halfbreeds with the power to see the future and past, and a disease that humans engineered to wipe out both other kinds, mostly to use as a threat to force a truce that's now in place, not to mention some kind of weird deities with some power over the world who are debating over whether or not to let it destroy itself.

There are still some people here who seem to want me to try this again, but I'm just not confident I can keep things interesting for everyone if it goes in the direction of that convoluted and confusing plot plan. Plus, the idea has matured enough in my head that I'd need to come up with a different set of characters entirely in order to play out this idea without said plan.


Idea 11: Death of a Prince
Where I have it stored, this idea is named "Robin Hood dies", but I've come to the conclusion that it really has nothing to do with Robin Hood whatsoever. The idea goes like this: There is a vast kingdom in a traditional fantasy world ruled by an evil king. His only son, who would be a just ruler, was banished on dubious grounds in an effort by the father to prevent succession. The prince, who has a strange kind of charisma and the ability to pull together all kinds of people for a common cause, gathers a relatively small but effective rebel army and eventually they storm the castle. To make a long story short, they beat the king, but the prince dies too. Obviously this poses a problem: Who will rule the kingdom? Then the prince's last will and testament is discovered, one that was written when he was still a leader of a rebel band, and it specifically states to share his property, whatever it is, evenly among said band of rebels. That means that the people the prince gathered together are supposed to each have an equal share of the kingdom. The RP begins the morning after the death of the royals, shortly after the will is discovered.

This is a very different sort of RP, one about intrigue, politics, and infighting. The idea is that many of the people the prince took on in his rebel band are quite unscrupulous; they all joined him for different reasons, and it was only his charisma and knowing just how to treat each person that kept them together at all. Obviously I'd want each player to be a member of the prince's little army, and have a distinct personality and motivation. I'm not really sure where the RP would go from there, but I think with this idea characters and situation should be able to write the plot just fine on their own.


Idea 12: Elderan
I want to make a serious crossover RP, and this is my idea for it. Elderan is a basic traditional fantasy world, almost DnD-like in its setup. About ten to twenty years before the story of the RP begins, an attempt to summon a great and powerful evil is thwarted, but the spell was far enough along that when it dissipates, it tears up some of the interdimensional walls of the world. The effects are not immediately seen, but the end result is that people start being pulled into Elderan from other worlds and realities, mainly ones that are similar in nature (that is, mainly fantasy-type worlds). I actually have an overarching plot in mind for this story, involving Zophar of Lunar 2 using a disguise to steal a piece of the Triforce. It sounds silly, I guess, but with good enough writing it would make a fun RP and interesting story.


Idea 13: Dream World
This is a pretty old idea for a plot that I still think could be quite interesting. Basically, it is about a version of modern Earth with a dream world. The dream world has certain rules and such--it is divided into separate pieces, each of which belongs to a single person, and that person is basically the god of that area most of the time, when they're dreaming. There are also creatures known as Nightmares, which are able to take many different forms mostly depending on how much power they have, which feed on negative emotion. Finally, there are the Keepers, basically the moderators of the dream world who keep everything running smoothly; they are the Keepers because they keep up with the nightmares, only allowing them into dreams when there is a good reason, generally something to communicate to the humans. Keepers are also actually dead humans of a particular kind, and while they know their task none of them really knows why they were brought on to be Keepers rather than going wherever dead humans normally go.

But all of that is backstory. The main plot of this idea is that the nightmares get free and start tearing apart the barriers between people's dreams. When the barriers are removed, a lot of bad things happen: In particular, people lose control of their dreams and forget that they had any control to begin with. Each human who dreams wakes up in a single body, with only a single power. The fake people who exist in dreams remain, left over from various dreams, and that is exactly what they're called by the Keepers: Fakes. RPers might play any of the three: Humans, Fakes, Keepers, and perhaps even low-level nightmares that look like Fakes.

This RP would take place in both the real world and the dream world, and to be honest I've never really worked out a good way to handle the duality. Perhaps there could be two separate ICs, one for the real world and one for the dream world. I do know that time operates differently between the two worlds; that is, the amount of time that the dreaming consciousness is awake need not be the same amount of time that the real-world consciousness is asleep. Hence, it's essentially possible to perform a small bit of "time travel" by experiencing a moment in time while sleeping one night, and then telling someone else about it before they experience it. The kicker, though, is that when humans wake up they remember little to none of what their dream was about, especially if their dreaming self was injured or drained by the nightmares.

My eventual plans for this RP involve nightmares finding a way to enter the real world, with dreaming humans, Keepers, and Fakes following after in an effort to contain or stop them. That would have to be something that happens much later in the story, however, and I'm sure anyone who's been in an RP of mine knows just how far my storylines tend to get (not much).


More ideas to come as I find them or am struck by them, and type them up!
 
I'm enjoying the sounds of ideas: 2, 5, and 6.
 
i love the idea of 8 that would be super fun
 
Please discuss what you like about them, what could be done with them...or...something? A lot of these are not-fully-formed ideas that may need improvement before they can be made into proper games.
 
I'll start off by announcing which of these are my favorites: 1, 2, 3, 8, and 9! ^-^ They are just absolutely intriguing! :) Now time for some of my elaborations:

Idea 1: Graphworld
I can see that there is no night or day, that there is only in-between, and what creates the "night" and the "day" is actually the weather! And indeed, there would be rules, though I have not quite thought up the rules that are more likely, but maybe you could create a few species or something with their own religions and that could be what creates the rules?

The weather exactly, well... I guess it depends on the hemispheres, that and how populated that spot is for the weather to be more severe or soft. I am not sure what you are looking for in the weather area, but I think our everyday weather is best.. Just focus on changing the intensity of it.

Idea 2: Wish
I can't really see this being a single element for a plot to wrap it's intricate web around, to be honest. In fact, this seems more like a back story and helper. So instead of focusing what type of plot to give it, focus on which plot you already have for a game you could add it to. Like, I can see you being able to add this to Idea 8: Experiment or Idea 1: Graphworld..!

This just really seems to make the society rather than the story and routes for development.

Idea 3: Cost
You pretty hit this one on the nail, at least with the basics. With some refining and polishing this would be ready to start playing with! ;P This one has great potential for many, many plot twists..! But you could also have it end nicely, maybe something like someone was born with the magick that actually doesn't take, but give?

Idea 8: You don't make your character, you make somebody else's
Now, this sounds like so much fun! >:) I think that you'd have to make a special system though, to choose who makes who's character and how. That's about all that I can see this needing.

Idea 9: Experiments
Can I just say, I absolutely LOVE this plot idea? ;) Almost makes me wanna marry it, haha! Anyways, yes. Both experiments and experimenters are playable, that would be what adds the tension. But what helps to add the tension in this would be to have an experiment become an experimenter or vice-versa, hell you could also have an experimenter develop a soft side and try to end this facility! There are so many ways you can take this one. :)


Pshaw. That's all I got right now, hope I helped~. I hope to see these turn into games sometime soon~ ;P

 
I actually have detailed the rules of the "make someone else's character" thing, I just didn't put them down here. Basically, a request is put in when a player says they want to join, along with a limited number of vague to specific details they want included in their character. The exchange is basically, for each character you request you agree to make a character. Though in my previous attempts at making the RP there were people who didn't want to make characters, and people who didn't want to play, only make someone else's. The hope is if one of those two happens it'll balance with the other, or someone might volunteer to pick up the slack on the former end.
 
Aww, sad that you couldn't get it to work the first time.. But hey! They say to try and try again 'till it happens~. ;P I'd certainly happily pick up the slack if needed, hehe. :)