How well would it work to have the PCs all play individuals who were part of a greater "over-person?" This is basically a trans/post-humanist concept, worlds where the basic unit of society isn't individual humans, but groups connected chemically or psychically or what-have-you. It works pretty well in fiction, and I think it's a cool idea just on a pure conceptual level, but I wonder how it would work in a game setting?
Partially, it would just allow the game world to really process what happens at a table naturally. Characters can have close to perfect information about what their fellow party members are up to, even in the heat of battle, when when separated by time and space.
But the concept would logically demand less character conflict than most of the games I've seen actually end up with, and are fun with. If the characters are all basically the same person, why would they have different, sometimes conflicting goals? There's probably a way to build an architecture that supports some of that, and still makes sense, but it would probably require some thought to get the reasonable/playable balance right.
Would this be worth it? Or would it be just an intellectual exercise? Seems like something that might make a good hook for a one-shot.
I've always, by which I mean since last year, wanted to write a book in which each of the characters embodies a different aspect of the mind: the eyes and ears, the memory, the social cognition, the motivation, the attention modulator, etc.
ReplyDeleteSo that being partially relavent, I can't decide if this would play best with all the players controlling some aspect of a single physical being, or a bunch of characters that are somehow psychically linked. Either way, I would play this.