I Am John
Last week, my home gaming group played a round of a game titled "I Am John". I went looking for the rules online and came up empty, but the concept is straightforward enough. I'll attempt to explain it here.
John is a person who has multiple personalities. The game has one narrator (the gamemaster) and a group of players who each roleplay one of John's personalities. The game begins with each player recording three items on a piece of paper. Each player first writes two skills that his personality possesses. Then each player writes one goal that the personality is trying to accomplish.
For example, here is what I wrote:
Skill: escape artist
Skill: combat driving
Goal: escape to Canada
This is what my wife wrote:
Skill: talk with cats
Skill: leadership
Goal: build an army of cats
Skills and goals are kept secret from the other players. If players manage to figure out each others goals, they may cooperate or work against each other.
The players take turns controlling John. Control is determined by bidding tokens. Each player has ten tokens at the beginning of the game. Whenever control of John is up for grabs, all of the players make their bids, and the player who bids the most tokens gets to determine John's actions. The winning bid of tokens is surrendered to the narrator.
Any action that the player declares becomes a die roll. The Narrator rolls her single D6 to determine the outcome of an action. Typically, any action succeeds on a roll of 3 through 6. If the player is using a skill or spending an extra token, the action succeeds on a roll of 2 through 6. A roll of 1 is always a failure.
When the Narrator's die roll comes up as a failure, she declares that the attempt fails. Furthermore, that player's turn ends immediately. Failure is a trigger for a personality change, so another round of bidding begins.
When we played, it didn't take long before we had John escaping from a riot (which he started) in a stolen ambulance with a pack of mountain lions in the back.
The game can end in one of two ways. John dies. Otherwise, every player runs out of tokens, and the final player's turn ends when a failure is rolled. I am told that John usually dies.
This game would require some rules tweaking before it could be used here. The token bidding mechanic would be very awkward in this medium of game. Maybe we could use the thread's post count in place of secret bidding. Like, I could post if the previous post ended in a 3 and some other player could post next if the previous post ended in a 4. Maybe the turn could belong to whomever claimed it first each day or claimed it after another player lost control due to a failure.
Suggestions?