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Complex game concepts; as players and GM/DM/ST
Topic Started: 6 Sep 2008, 12:29 (269 Views)
Ankhanu
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Dark Lord
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Some game concepts are pretty straight forward; make character, character has some encounters and/or puzzles, find success, keep going. But there are some games out there that are more complex, either due to the nature of the setting, alien character concepts, complex character interactions or psyches or what have you.

What are some of the more complex gaming systems you've played? What games have made you break down into a gibbering pile trying to wrap your head around its basic concepts? What's given you the most challenge to play?

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For me, the most complex games I've played have both been White Wolf, Wolrd of Darkness games; Changeling the Dreaming and Wraith the Oblivion. Both games are difficult mainly due to having to play two characters at once, and interacting with different forms of reality at the same time.

Changeling is based on the fea folk; fairies... but faeries inhabiting human bodies/souls. In this sense, you're playing in two interwoven, yet distinct realities simultaneously; the "real world", and the fae "Dreaming", a fantasy world quite literally built upon the creative energies of human dream/inspiration/imagination. Balancing these two aspects of the character's life can be something of a challenge... for example, say your fae knights are battling a dragon... that's all fine and cool, but chances are, in the real world they're running around in a city street acting like maniacs, and that sort of behaviour brings on undue attentions and or injury.

Wraith, on the other hand, involves playing as dead souls in the afterlife... which has some capacity for interaction with the living world. This isn't so bad, even if it is heavily psyche-centered; belief has a strong effect on reality, and the dead lands are highly mutable. The idea is that your wraith is stuck in this in-between dead/ghost state due to some sort of unfinished business or something else anchoring their psyche in the living world, whether they realize it or not... but the wraith psyche seeks transcendence to a higher state (where other souls go naturally when not fettered by whatever is keeping them a wraith), so your character is trying to finish up and move on.
This can lead, on its own, to some very rich game/character play.... but there's a twist. Within every wraith seeking transcendence, seeking to finish their business, is a shadow, the counter to their psyche. This shadow seeks one thing: oblivion; to move on from their current state into a state of nothingness... to simply cease to be (and there are many ways this can happen in the dangerous dead lands). The twist upon this is that each player plays someone else's Shadow aspect, tempting them to just give up and release control of the wrath's corpus to the shadow, while the psyche tries to assert its dominance. Occasionally the psyche must fail and the shadow will take over, usually causing the wraith serious harm and bringing it closer to finding oblivion.
Transcendence versus oblivion; psyche vs. shadow; character versus setting, character versus its own flaws... there's a lot going on in Wraith.
In Real Life ™, people who aim to maximize their potential for lethality are called "dangerous psychotics" and are typically avoided by everyone who isn't forced to endure their company until someone has the opportunity to put them away or else put them down. No one likes that guy. Don't play that guy.

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Neraeos
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Have you tried the SAGA edition of Dragonlance? Freeform spellcasting, using cards instead of dice, was so inanely time consuming that it ground our games to a halt.
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Ankhanu
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neraeos
Oct 29 2008, 12:59 PM
Have you tried the SAGA edition of Dragonlance? Freeform spellcasting, using cards instead of dice, was so inanely time consuming that it ground our games to a halt.

The only Dragonlance I've played has been the 3.x rules; your current game and one I was DMing for a couple sessions. I never really liked D&D systems before 3.x.
In Real Life ™, people who aim to maximize their potential for lethality are called "dangerous psychotics" and are typically avoided by everyone who isn't forced to endure their company until someone has the opportunity to put them away or else put them down. No one likes that guy. Don't play that guy.

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