---

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?

OMG that sounds hilariously awesome!

Well, first off, I'd assume there'd be some sort of timer or number of failures before John just dies. And I'd think players should have a way to refresh their tokens, albeit at a rate of diminishing returns.

But before any specific suggestions can be made, I'd have to ask, what other rules were there? WERE their any other rules or did the GM just make stuff up on the spot?

The dice work in place of a timer. A player can keep going so long as the dice agree. Yet every action requires a dice roll. The GM might call for a dice roll to cross the street. As such, turns pass very quickly.

In the version I played, there is a scoring system. Each time a player achieves the goal, that player scores a point. My goal was Escape to Canada. I managed to get John out of his neighborhood and then out of the city, but I finished the game with zero points. My wife managed to recruit a cat army twice, first from alley cats and later from a pack of mountain lions, so she received two points. If goals are worded well so they contribute to some greater ideal, that player puts oneself in a position to score quite a lot. If I had stated my goal as "Escape towards Canada", I would have scored at least twice. The player with the most points wins. Nobody actually cares about winning this game, however, in my experience.

"Not caring about winning" is one of the fundamental aspects of making TTRPGs fun.

I suppose the idea of "steps towards a goal" needs to be incorporated more clearly.

Yep, I ask potential players what the single reason for gaming is, and I'll literally accept any answer but winning, any of its synonyms, or something that seems dodgy. Winning itself catches an automatic banhammer in the face though.

We could strip out the point system entirely. The game does not actually need scoring as far as I could tell.

The main question, however, remains. How do we adapt this to gameplay in RPOL?

Each post allows the player an action and a dice roll for success/failure.

They act X many times.

The GM sets the DCs retroactively and cuts off the players actions at some point, declaring it then someone else's turn. If somehow the player succeeded on ALL their checks, they would be given another turn with only half X actions. This would repeat until the player finally failed at something. ALL DCs should increase by 1 for each action taken, so even easy stuff becomes progressively harder.

Repeat until everyone has acted.

In addition, everyone posts what they do in PM to the GM and the GM explains what's going on to the new player during each turn transition (since each personality is unaware of the others).

Items acquired can be added to an inventory list that everyone can see. They don't know how those things got there, but they know what they have on them. Or maybe a player has to take an action "check pockets" to see their inventory (only failing simple tasks on a fumble but still risking it every time).
This message was last edited by the GM at 07:01, Sat 29 Aug 2015.

I'm not sure how I feel about handling so much of the game in PM. Otherwise, this looks like a system which would work.

That's only if you want to keep the "mystery" of the personalities not knowing about each other.

Honestly, I think it would be more fun just letting everyone see it and use the honor system so that everyone simply roleplays as if they didn't know what the other personalities were doing.

In such a simple game, people probably shouldn't give too much trouble with metagaming, but PMing is an option for a GM who just REALLY wants that mystery.