Well, things haven’t been going as well as hoped for in this new year of 2008. I have been thinking a good deal about Vegas After Midnight, but work, yeah mostly work, has prevented me from feeling creative enough to actually write much.
I write when I can on it, but I feel that the thoughts I put down are disjointed and fragmentary. Nothing really solid or worthy of going into the game. I write them though, because if I don’t the good stuff won’t work itself to the surface.
Like yesterday, I finally got to talk with Mick on the phone for a while, and he and I came up with some cool ideas that might make it into the game. They are very Story Game-esque in their feel, but I think that the ideas add to the feel and flavor of the game. That didn’t come out quite right, so let me back up. I like immersion in my gaming, the kind where you become the character as much as you can in a tabletop game. Story Gaming breaks that for me, but it trades that for a movie or book style immersion, where you watch the characters and enjoy the story.
The two styles are not mutually exclusive in my mind, but they will take some finesse to get them to work. Ok, so what we came up with was a way for people playing VAM to not only play their characters, and for the GM to craft adventures for them, but to also have the players (GM included) have a say in how the overall story goes. With the players on the Hope side, and the GM on the Despair side, each side ends up playing poker for the fate of the story. Depending how the game is set up at the beginning of the campaign (since we want it to be run in several sessions at least, not just a one shot), the game could last a predetermined number of hands, or it could end when one side goes all in, and loses. Each hand would determine how ultimate outcome of the last set of games went, and it will flavor the next set of games until the next hand is played.
There is still a great deal to work out, and depending on how it fits with the rest of the feel of VAM, it may or may not even make the final cut. I’m not cutting it until we’ve tested it a bit though.
I got a little off track from where I started, but that just seems to be the way this year is going. I am hoping that I have some control over where it is headed, and I intend to try my darndest to get it going where I want it to go.