RPG Ideas and Wishes

[DVB]

I have an unusual RPG idea. Due to an all-powerful but mad god, certain characetrs end up being bound to certain beings from the Lovecraftiain mythos. Rated R for gore, violence and so on, out characters must struggle as the old world begins falling apart around them and they began to ascend morality

[Samantha Sparks]

Eldreitch Abominations you say, DVB?
Is it alright if IT'S reserve Nyarlathotep in advance? It isn't everyday we see Lovecraftian RPs.

[DVB]

Well, I still need to develop it, but I will make a list of which Great Old Ones are available. Nyarlathotep is an Outer God, so he can't be playable. Though he will appear...

[Samantha Sparks]

At least we get to see old Nyarly.

I have an RP idea about gods being capable of possesing your body and using your bond with them to enhance their capabilities.
There are evil gods and good gods. Evil gods possess unwilling victims and good gods cooperate with their hosts.
Of course, two seperate RPers are allowed to play the host and god seperately.
I'll post more details when I get home.

[DVB]

Mine's kinda like this, but its more like the ones have been forcefully bound and they end up becoming one figure, the great old one and the human

[Chaos War Reborn]

So is mine. In mine, powerful deities (Gods) possess the player. Cool, hu?

[Samantha Sparks]

Ah well, so here's what I intend to include in my final plot. Here's the prototype plot... I probably messed with mythology a little... And include random shiz.

Ragnarok - an event in Norse Mythology which marks the end of the gods.
These very events of the great war known as Ragnarok had already begun. Most notably, Fenrir had consumed Odin's body to appease his hunger for vengeance. This only increased discord within the Asgardians.
Seeking aid, the son of Odin, Tyr, ventured out of Asgard to recruit outsiders from many other divine lands to aid in fighting against Loki's army in the battle of Ragnarok.
Loki too, had a similiar plan. By gathering spellbooks he could find, he summoned many allies and evil gods to join his cause.

Inviting more troops only resulted in a bloodier battle between the Tyr Faction and Loki Faction. This resulted in the fall of many gods. These gods have fallen to Earth, in hopes of restoring themselves sometime to continue the war...

---

You play a regular human with a regular life. One day, a mysterious being falls on you. Little do you know, this being is a god who seeks you to be its 'catalyst'.

---

Yeah, that's just a Prototype plot. On to the mechanics. Loki and Tyr are unplayable and I got dibs on Hecate.

God - on Earth, the gods will generally take human forms, although you are allowed to use animalistic or inanimate forms if you like. It is a seperate being from you, although it can fuse with you and use you as a 'catalyst' to become stronger. How much stronger the your fused form will be depends on your bond with the god

Catalyst - a human vessel that a god can use to fuse with to enhance its power.

Loki Faction - the evil faction. Gods of this faction will often use an unwilling catalyst in hopes of tainting them beyond return. They tend to take full control of their catalyst, especially if the catalyst has weak willpower.

Tyr Faction - the good faction. Gods of this faction try to find worthy catalysts and tend to cooperate with them.

Mecha Mode - a mode that can be activated when a god is fused with a Catalyst. A giant mecha with enhanced capabilities forms around the god-infused catalyst. This form can only be activated if the bond between god and catalyst is extremely strong.

Yeah... that's what I have for now. I'm trying to keep the mecha mode, but I feel that the requirements to activate it are ridiculous.

[DVB]

My Cthulhu one I think I will save for the summer and I will come up with a short one for now.

[Tasslehoff]

It's a start, but I recommend building on it a lot more. At the moment, there just doesn't really seem to be anything unique about the scenario that really distinguishes it from being typical zombie apocalypse fare. I've seen RPs like this before and no one lets their character come even close to becoming infected. Everyone will pretty much have guns that never run out of ammo, escape vehicles in easily found spots, and plenty of zombies that might as well have targets painted on their faces. By the time most people have finished off their fifty-third zombie with a buckshot blast to the face, they'll probably be looking for some new RP to get into.

Also, Sector 9 needs better and more believable motives for what they're doing. If they destroy the world, well, they're pretty much dead too. They'll have no one left to farm food, no economy left to fund their operations, and so on. Instead, they should really be trying to find a way to leverage their weapon for control and compliance from other world governments. Even the most deranged and evil of terrorist organizations still have lofty motives. And yes, even the Nazi regime envisioned a better world after what they hoped would be a successful campaign, regardless of how downright wicked the means were.

As such, Sector 9 needs a similar approach and mindset. If you want this faction to continue spreading the zombie bio-weapon, then it needs to be for a reason that they'll feel will better their situation than what it currently is now. Maybe the bio-weapon targets certain demographics/locations that Sector 9 feels society would be better off without, or so on. Or, Sector 9 already has the cure to the zombie virus, but only those who they deem worthy to survive will be allowed to have it. This would work because if Sector 9 just wanted to destroy the world, they don't need zombies. Nukes would do the job even better.

Here are a few things I'd recommend for an effective zombie RP:

- You being the narrator. You, Tasslehoff, determine what kinds of zombies and creatures are going after the characters and who/how they attack. If you leave that to the players to decide, they'll never face anything even remotely dangerous and will likely never take so much as a scratch.
- Player character inventories and health statuses. This is so people don't pull guns/tools/first aid out of nowhere and have to account for how much ammo/supplies they have left (ignore reloading aspects, as that's a pain to account for). Limited inventory space will also force players to decide what is worth keeping and what needs to be discarded.
- Scavenging for supplies. Allow characters to search areas and discover supplies/weapons/ammo. Players may perform search posts, but you, Tasslehoff, determine what exactly they find. Since you're controlling the antagonists anyway, they have everything they need. It's the players that have to struggle to find what they need to survive.
- Hunger levels. Finding food and having a hunger status will put a little more pressure on people and add onto the challenge.

In essence, players would declare each of their role play posts to be one of four types:

Traveling - Moving from place to place. If they're busy driving, running, or whatever, they're not doing very much else.
Searching - Looking for supplies. If a person writes a very nicely detailed search post and searches wisely, you, Tasslehoff, reward them. Also, make their searched items relevant to where they're searching. Searching a police station will probably yield weapons and ammo, a supermarket will result in food supplies, a hardware store with some melee weapons, and so on.
Communication/Exchange - Conversing with another character and/or trading supplies (if the conversation lasts longer than 3-4 minutes, realistically). Cell phones should be dead, so the person can't exactly talk and search/drive/fight at the same time. The only time I wouldn't count a post being spent entirely on communication is if they're traveling and both conversing characters are in the same vehicle or walking together.
Fighting - Any post where they attack or fend off any kind of zombie or creature. Sure, a character could attempt to fight from a moving vehicle, but they won't be making much progress in terms of traveling and distance.

You don't need to implement HP values or that kind of thing (I've tried this before, it very quickly becomes a complex headache with chance to hit, armor, attack rolls, weapon damage, and that kind of junk). Keep things simple, but add to the challenge and leave some things within the control of the players, but leave a lot of other things out of their control.

I'm not saying you HAVE to do something like this, but I'd consider the idea of making survival a struggle for the characters, and throw surprises in their faces. A risk and reward system will very likely make the role play more interesting and will make people want to keep on exploring further rather than get tired after killing two dozen zombies that never had the chance in the first place.

This helps more than you could imagine. A few of the ideas I had actually thought of myself, mainly when I was reflecting on Sector 9 motivations and scavenging for supplies and limited inventory spaces. Because as you had said, no RP that allowed people to purely do anything and everything they wanted is very interesting. The idea of hunger levels will be somewhat of a tricky thing for me to figure out for the fact that scavenging would take a post, moving to a new location would take a post, and any other agendas the person have would take more posts, the idea of hunger will be a little difficult to keep track of.

Upon reading your last subsections and to prevent god-modding humans, I am going to implement a noise meter of sorts. Zombies would be attracted to noise because primal instinct would tell the brain that noise comes from some sort of object, so obviously: moving around, scavenging materials, talking, and fighting of any sorts will cause noise. Different types of material and voice fluctuation will be taken into account and depending what a character does in a previous post( i.e. screaming at a comrade for doing something or starting a car will cause a lot of noise and that would attract hordes of zombies to the character).

[Avenger Angel]

This helps more than you could imagine. A few of the ideas I had actually thought of myself, mainly when I was reflecting on Sector 9 motivations and scavenging for supplies and limited inventory spaces. Because as you had said, no RP that allowed people to purely do anything and everything they wanted is very interesting. The idea of hunger levels will be somewhat of a tricky thing for me to figure out for the fact that scavenging would take a post, moving to a new location would take a post, and any other agendas the person have would take more posts, the idea of hunger will be a little difficult to keep track of.

Upon reading your last subsections and to prevent god-modding humans, I am going to implement a noise meter of sorts. Zombies would be attracted to noise because primal instinct would tell the brain that noise comes from some sort of object, so obviously: moving around, scavenging materials, talking, and fighting of any sorts will cause noise. Different types of material and voice fluctuation will be taken into account and depending what a character does in a previous post( i.e. screaming at a comrade for doing something or starting a car will cause a lot of noise and that would attract hordes of zombies to the character).

Scrapping the hunger element is totally understandable. I honestly wouldn't know exactly how to manage that, but I figured it wouldn't hurt as a suggestion.

Noise is probably a better element to focus on. Sure affects quite a heck of a bit with Left 4 Dead.

[Oshawotter]

There is an RP I've been wanting to do and figure out a good system for a Pokemon journey set in the Orange Islands, something I've never done. I thought it would be fun to do a nice RP with 3-4 others traveling the Orange Islands and competing in the Orange League, as well as coming up with an overall plot for the RP.

[Scriptor Scorpio]

I usually have a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head, even more so with existing fiction, where I can easily add thoughts as to create an alternate universe, a merger, a storyline that happened to take place in the established fictional universe, a world building project inspired by an existing world and so on. But problem is if not that many people are into that particular fictional universe, the RP idea or both, or the plot's boring, who knows, then I'm basically just scattering people over my several SU's, making all those RPs too small to continue.

But what to do about it? I'll just post some franchises and the ideas I got from them and we'll see which one gets the most, if any at all, interest.

Note: I did read a lot of recent pages here, but I didn't quite know if I liked them (usually involving the franchise not being that familiar to me, a common problem I think) as well as some RPs going on and SUs... So without further ado, let's give this random inspiration machine idea a try.

Pokémon: well, we are on the largest Pokémon forum as far as I know, so I'd imagine that's pretty interesting.

A CHA-05 RP (cyborg teens under the order of an evil organisation being programmed to act like a real teen, but think like an obedient robot with organic skin) might be interesting to me and maybe others.

A Pokémen RP perhaps as well, though there hasn't been that much interest in my two fanfics (I enjoyed writing my fics; if I didn't enjoy writing them, well that would be pretty strange so hence the fanfic-derived ideas).

I had another idea about Mew having come from another planet where there were a lot of them along with several other species and events play out so he becomes the progenitor of Pokémon. You could have a lot of fun thinking up other species and Mew's culture pre-Earth, where the humans would appear, while the normal animals got outcompeted by the Pokémon (or maybe transformed by Mew, like wolves into Houndour).

Also, how legendaries came to be (other idea). Perhaps it would be that they could attain power and responsibility, but only for a high price, like being one of a kind or only with a few or like what happened to Enti & co. (perhaps they were once Houndour). What would the consequences be of a 'new' legendary and so on.

Mass Effect: Biggest question: what's ME4 (fan nickname) going to be about?

Maybe it takes place during the Prothean cycle (The Metacon war, the final preparations for the next cycle as the Reapers destroy them or some other conflict involving unifying all the races instead of the council of the next cycle). This would involve a lot of worldbuilding though, if anyone's interested.

Or during humanity's first contact with aliens and moving along from there? The bitter feud with the turians even when the Council puts an end to the first contact war, the events that lead to humanity being admired and getting an embassy so quickly, humanity getting access to the Citadel races technology, ships and so on. A sort of extremely justified start from level 1 scenario, possibly.

Original, yet inspired: What if everyone started with a fictional alien race which they independently develop, with a certain evolution towards sentience (which is necessary, while a humanoid appearance isn't necessary, opposable thumbs perhaps), a tech tree, cultures, etc. untill they meet and cross-breed (not in that way xD)

Mergers or cutting of parts of ideas are possible^^ Thoughts anyone?

[Avenger Angel]

Mergers or cutting of parts of ideas are possible^^ Thoughts anyone?

I would say anything that's either purely original or Pokémon is a safe bet. Anything from an outside franchise and you're taking a risk. It's better if you take that franchise's ideas and themes and just translate them into something original and not be too formal with interpretations. Such as taking Avatar's fire, earth, water, and air benders and just making that an ability to control certain elements via a martial arts style. But I find mentioning a particular franchise name is a fast way to discourage anyone who doesn't know anything about it to join it

I had another idea about Mew having come from another planet where there were a lot of them along with several other species and events play out so he becomes the progenitor of Pokémon. You could have a lot of fun thinking up other species and Mew's culture pre-Earth, where the humans would appear, while the normal animals got outcompeted by the Pokémon (or maybe transformed by Mew, like wolves into Houndour).

This I would have to see more of to really get an idea for what's going on. It's an interesting situation, but where does the struggle lie? Is there some kind of clash or conflict going on?

Also, how legendaries came to be (other idea). Perhaps it would be that they could attain power and responsibility, but only for a high price, like being one of a kind or only with a few or like what happened to Enti & co. (perhaps they were once Houndour). What would the consequences be of a 'new' legendary and so on.

Expanding on this, you could have some kind of situation where old legendaries come face to face with new ones, or some kind of civil war among legendaries arises. Some may refuse to see others as "authentic members of the council" for these kinds of reasons, and as a result, you've got inner fighting going on.

[DVB]

I have been wanting to do a One Piece RPG for a while. My current one I am waiting for someone to sign up and I am losing interest in it admittingly.

[Scriptor Scorpio]

I would say anything that's either purely original or Pokémon is a safe bet. Anything from an outside franchise and you're taking a risk. It's better if you take that franchise's ideas and themes and just translate them into something original and not be too formal with interpretations. Such as taking Avatar's fire, earth, water, and air benders and just making that an ability to control certain elements via a martial arts style. But I find mentioning a particular franchise name is a fast way to discourage anyone who doesn't know anything about it to join it



This I would have to see more of to really get an idea for what's going on. It's an interesting situation, but where does the struggle lie? Is there some kind of clash or conflict going on?



Expanding on this, you could have some kind of situation where old legendaries come face to face with new ones, or some kind of civil war among legendaries arises. Some may refuse to see others as "authentic members of the council" for these kinds of reasons, and as a result, you've got inner fighting going on.

I could make a RP that happens to contain the elements from an existing franchise and make the story with them that I would like to tell... A little worldbuilding would be necessary though in order to keep the plot and goals coherent, which is probably why writing fanfics and RPs is so interesting; you already have a 'codex' to draw rules, history and concepts from... I'll see what I can think of.

For the Mew idea, I guess it would be about those several species competing to be a progenitor of Pokémon, maybe they only get that power after becoming the dominant species, somehow. Maybe those Pokémon like Arceus, Dialga, Giratina and Palkia that must've existed before Mew bestow this progenitor power as well as their genetic code as to explain the discrepancy. Maybe Deoxys is from the same planet as Mew, Clefairy are their servants when they first landed on the moon, then on Earth.

Basically an origin story for Mew and the first Pokémon species (and perhaps explaining why humans could've survived competing with Pokémon: they came from outer space when humanity had already evolved to homo sapiens and perhaps Mew changed dogs, cats, bears, etc. into the Pokémon species we know now).
Only problem is how this becomes a story or RP since it sounds more like an epic of thousands of generations... unless Mew live an incredible long time. But then their time struggling for survival on their home planet would seem quite short, not too mention trivial compared to their progenitor acts...

For the legendary creation idea, it would also be a sharp difference between the normal Pokémon dealing with becoming a legendary (origin story) and their epic responsibilities and fights. Maybe normal Pokémon look to them as leaders in carving out domains for them to rule over, a struggle of the most brutal to gain power (for example, how did the stronger legendaries become so strong? Sacrifice, worship, them becoming the personification of time or space, lightning, the northern wind?). What role do humans have in believing in them, creating them (think the legendary dogs) or fighting them? It is very interesting, but more vague than ideas I can usually work into fanfics.

So RPs with a decent amount of worldbuilding I'd be very much interested in making and participating in, though I can be picky


@ DVB: Sorry, I know little about One Piece:s so I can't really comment on a RP.