I have several one-shot scenarios that I wrote waaaaaay back when I put together a small D&D convention in 1981.  These scenarios were 3-4 hours long, with pre-generated characters that were handed out to the players at the start.  They had a point system and the teams that scored the most points moved forwards to the next round.  The points were also tracked by player, where appropriate, so there was an overall individual winner announced at the end, as well.

I'm thinking of updating one or two of these to run here.  Since I'm not going to run it multiple times with different teams, there will just be an individual winner.  (No prize, just "You're the winner!  Yay!")  In order to add more scoring opportunities, I'm going to add a points for a "narrative quirk."  Each player will be assigned one secret narrative quirk.  Each time they use the quirk in an *in character* thread, they get 5 points.

At the end of the game, the players will try to guess each others' quirks.  You'll lose some number (or probably some fraction) of points for each player that guesses yours.  The point of this rule is to prevent annoying spamming of your quirk.  You need to be subtle enough that it is not easily guessed.

One possible quirk that I have considered but am not going to use (but it gives me an example) is "Foreign Phrases Adopted into English."  So, the person playing Markov (if they had this quirk) might write the following, which would earn them 10 points.


Is there any interest in such a game?  It will require players to spend a little more effort on what they write, as opposed to a typical game.  If you're one of those who asks the GM to colorize all spoken text because that's all you read, then this would not be the game for you.  This is more for people who love the written word, where style is important, and you'll have to read not only GM text but the other players' text, as well, if you want any chance to guess their quirk.
This message was last edited by the user at 21:29, Sun 10 Nov.

So, I think there's two concepts here which might be better on their own rather than mashed together.

On the one hand, adding a more competitive edge to a game could be fun.

Equally, having a game where the GM gives you quirks and you've got to put them in could also be a good way to work.

Combining the two, however, sounds really risky for the following reasons:

 - So, I'm not sure what the judging for the 'winners' would be - you've mentioned points, but is this in a PVP combat situation, or which party can optimise a combat strategy the best, or something else? Under the circumstances, I would be very sceptical that you could run such a scenario without either players objecting to the scoring criteria, the characters they got, or indeed that you wouldn't end up with a gulf between more experienced skilled players who would romp to victory and those who would be being romped.

 - Equally, if you're judging a player based on their ability to include written quirks into their character pieces, you're adding both a fairly subjective and personal judging measure into the game (it sounds like a recipe for people getting offended about how they write) and you're potentially forcing players to compromise the flow and quality of their posts to cram in as many quirks as possible for points, especially if certain quirks are easier to pull off than others.

There's also the question of interpretation of a quirk, because, just to give the Markov example, I think two different players could look at that and come to wholly different conclusions about what the quirk was - the obvious would be the borrowed phrases translated into English (which, again, might not be great for players on the site without English as a first language or who speak American English rather than British English) but equally a player could very easily suspect the quirk was to write the character as insufferably as possible!

So, yeah. I think with the right group and in the right environment, it could work but I think you'd be better off either dropping the quirk angle and just running it as a much more 'scientific' competitive game with clear numerical goals, or to have a game which is less competitive but where the quirk aspect is sprinkled in more for a bit of fun or as a hidden bonus thing at the end of a session rather than as something to judge an author by.

Thanks for the feedback!  You've highlighted a couple of things I was concerned about, as well.

It is definitely not PvP that I had in mind.  The competition for points is just a meta-game thing while the regular game is going on, and I don't really expect them to interfere with one another.

I guess it's a little too odd, which is why it's gotten too little attention here.  I suspect that most people are less concerned with narrative style than I am, so I think it's not worth moving forward with.