[entry] The Many Deaths of Dr. Livingstone and the...

[kenjib]

Title:
The Many Deaths of Dr. Livingstone and the Celestial Council of the Eternal Circle of Suffering

Time:
4. Your Game is completely playable in 10 Sessions of 1 Hour each.

Ingredients:
Glass: Livingstone's glasses, through which players can see through his eyes
Ancient: Livingstone's ancient soul, burdened by the cycle of reincarnation and worldly suffering
Committee: The celestial council that sits in judgement on Livingstone's karmic balance - kind of a Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy meets the circle of karmic reincarnation.

Each game session consists of a player taking on the role of Dr. David Livingstone, the famous Scottish explorer. Well, not really Dr. Livingstone specifically. Rather they take on one of the many lives that his soul has lived through in the great circle of reincarnation. Every session begins with the player whose turn it is (they have the glasses and get to play Livingstone's soul) reciting something like the following verbatim:

"On the morning of April 30, 1872, golden with the glory of the tropical dawn, Dr. David Livingstone leaves this world of suffering. Kneeling at his bedside his head falls to his chest, his glasses slipping gently from his hand onto the floor of the tent as with his last breath his ancient soul departs at long last from his tortured body."

They then pick up the pair of glasses set before them, the same pair being used for each session, and put them on. They must then continue to wear the glasses for the entirety of the one hour session. The player then provides a brief background on the current life that will be under review. It can be set at any point in a hypothetical history of mankind, from the earliest prehistory to the farthest reaches of science fiction future. It may rely on true historical fact, and if desired may also distort and suppliment historical fact to present an alternate fantastic timeline of how things "really happened."

The role of all councilmembers at this point is to take turns inflicting as much suffering as they can upon the soul, with the freedom to jump nonsequentially between different points in time of the current incarnation's life when framing their scene. The person wearing the glasses then responds to the suffering as desired. The council then votes on the response, generating a tally of how much good and/or bad karma resulted.

When only 5 minutes are left in the session, the player wearing the glasses then gets to describe a scene in the actual life of Dr. David Livingstone that is in some way connected to something that happened in the other life that was described. From this scene, the soul of Livingstone acquires a new trait that serves to both limit and augment the narrative freedom of all following turns.

At the very end of the session the player playing Livingstone's soul accumulates points equivalent to the total karma gained, both good and bad. The player then hands off the glasses to the councilmember who inflicted the most suffering upon Livingstone's soul. That councilmember gets to play Livingstone's soul during the next session and holds on to the glasses until that time, taking them home when applicable.

At the end of the very last session, instead of the typical scene, Dr. Livingstone's soul is presented to the council for judgement on his karmic balance. His fate, very ambiguously defined by the rules, is determined by the total amount of good and bad karma acquired throughout the course of the ten sessions. The player with the highest total score wins the ability to bump the fate in either direction by one degree as well as the right to pass down this judgement from the council, narrating the specifics of the fate and how it unfolds.

[kenjib]

I have decided that this game will be diceless and have neither conflict resolution nor task resolution (well, as I understand it at least - feel free to correct me). Instead the authority of each party to present a given happening within the game world is absolute within a few broad constraints. For example, the incarnation of Dr. Livingstone's soul can not be killed until 5 minutes before the end of a session, and only the player wearing the glasses has the authority to kill the incarnation.

The sequence for each turn within a session will go something like the following, though I haven't worked out the specifics yet:

1. The council members whose turn it is to provide a suffering roughly frames the scene and describes what form of suffering the incarnation is presented with.
2. The player wearing the glasses gets to describe the results of the action - what the incarnation does and how it works out.
3. The council members who did not provide the current suffering then assign positive and/or negative karma as a result of the event. As they do so, they describe what positive and negative consequences happen as a result of #2 to justify this karma.
4. The good and bad karma is added to a running total for Dr. Livingstone's soul. In addition, both the player with the glasses and the player who provided the suffering this turn gain points in relation to the total amount of karma gained, both good and bad.

Each such turn represents a highlight of that incarnation's life. The council is reviewing the turning points and highs/lows of that incarnation's existence on Earth to judge his/her karmic fate and they are viewed by the council through Dr. Livinstone's glasses, which act as a conduit into the soul's history of experience.

Rather than the more common game approach of providing challenges and obstacles which must be overcome, or difficult choices which must be made and the results variable, the results of the choices are firmly in the hands of the assigned active players to decide. The arbitration has moved away from the challenge and instead is placed in the judgement that occurs after the act is complete. Furthermore, the judges are all players who were involved in the scene only as observers and yet they are the only ones who get to perform any form of negotiation and game currency manipulation.

My overall hope is that the various players will end up in a battle for the fate of this soul, be it redemption or condemnation. To support this I plan on making it slightly easier to gain negative karma than positive karma yet the total score gained is the same in either case. As a result, those who wish for the soul to be released from the cycle of karma will have to fight harder to win higher point totals over those who push for bad karma. This is intended to counteract what I believe would be the natural inclination of people to push for positive karma. As mentioned in the previous post, the councilmember with the highest point totals in a given session gets the glasses next turn (and then has a great deal of control over whether good or bad karma results from actions) and also the player with the highest point total overall gets to adjust and describe the soul's ultimate fate at the end.

[Doug Ruff]

Wow, that's pretty amazing. And this:

"On the morning of April 30, 1872, golden with the glory of the tropical dawn, Dr. David Livingstone leaves this world of suffering. Kneeling at his bedside his head falls to his chest, his glasses slipping gently from his hand onto the floor of the tent as with his last breath his ancient soul departs at long last from his tortured body."

has to go in the final version, it's beautiful.

I also like the whole karma thing going on. However, I'm not sure that it's safe to assume that players will naturally go for the 'good karma' option.

I assume that you're also aware that, as authors of the situations that befall Dr. Livingston, the players are actually judging themselves?

Which, strangely enough, reminds me of .

[Jason Petrasko]

Overall, this could be one the most awesome ideas I've ever heard for character portrayal in an RPG. A category that can use some more games no less I think the unconventional rules (as presented so far) fit it perfectly.

[kenjib]

Thank you both for the kind encouragement. I've been thinking about Kill Puppies for Satan now too and that's a very interesting comparison that I think is really dead on.

Good point about my assumption regarding good or bad karma. Perhaps playing an incarnation as Vlad the Impaler or John Wayne Gacy would be compelling after all and some interesting results could emerge. For example, would someone attempt to rewrite history and redeem a despised historical figure? I think what I will do is provide a bonus that is inversely proportional to the current karmic balance. So the more positive karma the soul has accrued, the more bonus you would get from bad deeds. The more negative karma is accrued, the more bonus you would get from good deeds. I like that much better. Thanks for making me think about that again Doug!

[kenjib]

Another theme I want to highlight in the game is the manner in which a person's karma from previous lives carries over into and effects their current lives. That is where the traits come in (assigned at the end of each session as described in the previous post). When the player with the glasses is able to successfully bring a trait into the current scene, he gets a bonus in relation to how much karma the original trait netted when it played in a previous session. Penalties also accrue for contradicting an established trait. This creates a feedback cycle wherein the karmic rewards grow greater and greater, building off of previous increases, as the game moves toward the final 10th session. As a result, the stakes contiuously escalate until the game ends.

As an example of how this would work, in the first session a character might decide that a romance that ended in tragedy might become the trait acquired from his session. In the next session, a character effectively draws in a reunion with the past-life's lover during one of the turns in which his suffering is the murder of his brother (perhaps betrayal is involved?) and then uses the bonus from this to boost his karma even higher. At the end of the session he chooses this boosted score to create his new trait for the session regarding the killing of his brother. In the later session, yet another player is able to bring both the murder and the tragic love into play in the same turn, generating an even higher karma reward, and then creates his trait based on this value, which was augmented by both of the previous traits. Finally, as part of the thematic element drawing everything together, Dr. Livingstone has also lived through all of these traits via the last 5 minutes of each session, tying everything together as the game unfolds. Hopefully we will see certain patterns of the soul's behavior repeating themselves in slightly different forms for each incarnation and then the players can consider and judge them all independently.

As a side note, I've realized that I was probably wrong in stating that there was no conflict resolution (I just knew that I would be!). I think that the entire 10 session game is actually one single extended conflict between all of the players, with the end of the conflict being the end of the game as well.

[Jason Petrasko]

[Mark Bravura]

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The arbitration has moved away from the challenge and instead is placed in the judgement that occurs after the act is complete. Furthermore, the judges are all players who were involved in the scene only as observers and yet they are the only ones who get to perform any form of negotiation and game currency manipulation.
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Interesting that game arbitration appears to fall on the players- interested in seeing that elaborated on!

M.B.