I'm not sure what the etiquette is about posting RPG ideas, I realise this forum is for board games but sometimes RPGs can be lumped in there as well.
Anyway I got inspired by reading Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, not by the space part of it but by the wolf creatures around which most of the book centered. To give a description, the wolf creatures are composed of about four or five seperate wolves but have one mind. The connection between them is formed by sound waves that they give off with neural information somehow embedded.
So my question is, how would one go about making an RPG with characters spread out over multiple bodies. I figured physical characteristics would be largely independent to each "part" with possibly the exception of dexterity if like in the book the different parts have to work together to manipulate objects. The mental qualities would have to be some sort of sum of the different parts, so if the parts were seperate they wouldn't be of a human level intelligence.
An interesting possibility of this is "switching out" parts. So let's say for example a player takes damage sufficent to kill one of their parts, that player might then be non-sentient until they get a new part and when they get a new part it would fundamentally change the character.
Other things that could be used other than wolf packs could be robots, or some sort of hive mind, live the borg possibly or more like some sort of alien insect creature or whatever else you could think of.
If you think this is an interesting idea maybe you could suggest how it could be implemented, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the problem. Also if I'm commiting some sort of faux pas by posting an RPG please tell me right away.
Multi Body, One Mind RPG
One of the Tiffany Aching books by Terry Pratchett had a character who had two bodies as well. It was the second book, and I want to say the character was Miss Treason - but that name I'm fuzzier on. Just mentioning if you want more research material.
I assume from your description that you mean one player controls multiple bodies in the game, thus the "one mind" is controlled by the "one player". (The alternative, of each player controlling one body and the "one mind" being the sum of the players' wills, would not be distinctly different from a typical "party" in most RPGs.)
I think this kind of setup would work fine. To cite some examples of RPGs that use multiple bodies in some form:
- Orkworld (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkworld): Although each player has an individual character, collectively the players control a whole clan of orks. If your character gets killed (and they almost certainly will!), no worries -- another ork steps up to fill their place in no time. The clan is almost a character in itself, with the players just controlling individual members within it.
- Big Eyes, Small Mouth: Although for the most part BESM is a generic fantasy/sci-fi system, it contains rules for Mecha and Servants which could be used to create the effect you describe. Essentially, you can pay character points to have a Servant (or Mecha), which is in itself a fully created character. You could, if you wanted to, spend almost all your character points on Servants to create a team of moderately powered characters rather than a single powerful character. Or given the way that a character could be a Mecha itself, you could use this system to create host of Mecha all controlled by the same player.
Taking a step back, almost all wargaming systems are "one mind, multi body" systems. The player takes the role of the army commander, and the individual soldiers march out and fight under his direction. You could use this type of system for a cooperative RPG (rather than a typical competitive wargame). For example, the players each control a whole family / clan, rather than an individual. The clans might be working together against a common adversary (e.g. Scottish clans vs English), with plenty of scope for intrigue and other roleplaying. The "attributes" of the clan refers to their size, power, skill specialisations, knowledge specialisations, etc. Gaining or losing key members of the clan could raise or lower your clan's attributes. E.g. you convince Umgar the Wise to join your clan as an advisor, giving the clan +1 in agriculture and +1 in tactics. Meanwhile Gronk the Bloodthirsty got captured in battle, so you lose -1 combat until you can rescue him. Losing a major battle gives you -1 population, but you get +1 population at the end of winter, etc.
The same concepts would apply on a smaller scale. Have some basic action resolution system, with bonuses for the skills which you have available at the time. Then each "part" or "body" has its own list of skills. If all the bodies are together in the same place, then you get the sum of their skills/attributes. Any body part which is absent cannot be used. This would be particularly easy to track if you had cards to represent each body part.
- E.g. A Hive Mind creature has 3 Drones (+1 Construction, +1 Harvesting), 2 Guardians (+2 Combat, +1 Scouting), and 1 Seer (+2 Intelligence, +2 Crafting). Given the shared mind (telepathic, maybe?) each individual can speak for the whole, thus allowing the player to use any or all of them to interact with other characters in the game world. The function of "levelling up" in a typical RPG is replaced by acquiring more creatures into the Hive Mind, thus gaining more skill bonuses.
- If the wanted the creatures to have sub-human intelligence when working individually, just make "intelligence" one of the skills that they have. Say "human level" intelligence is 6, and each creature has "+1 intelligence" as a skill.
Anyway, I hope that some of these ideas help to get your own ideas flowing.
Regards,
kos
This idea has really become two ideas now. First one is HIVE which is a wargame based on an alien version of ant colonies, second is a game called Spare Parts which is an adventure game where groups of linked robots have to delve into ruins to find spare parts. Thanks for your help, I'll try to get seperate posts going for each of these games.
Thanks a lot but I think I'm in the clear. The Hive game is basically just a wargame with a slight twist, I'm more worried about accidentally ripping off the Zerg than the game you linked to.
Ok that's really fantastically helpful. I think I want some combination of the BESM approach of full characters under one player combined with the sum mechanics used in wargames. I want some attributes to belong purely to one part of the body, strength for example, but all skills and intelligent actions would use a some of the parts' skills. It's interesting that you mention cards because I was thinking a traditional pen and paper RPG but I think the modular nature of cards seems more appropiate for the game I want to make. Thank you a lot, now I just need to think up some rules for a HIVE card adventure game.