In a Tines game (from Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep), would it be more fun for each player to be a separate composite individual, or would it be more fun to play the components of one individual (finally, a party that can't split up...) I imagine part of the fun would be a certain amount of reshuffling and recombining of characters via the deliberate or inadvertent swapping of members, so I would lean towards the former...
Yeah... and I think you have to follow the narrative lead of the book here — a pack of Tines is one character, in novel or RPG. The question is, then, what kid of mechanics are you using? Tines aren't going to be handled well as a straightforward drop-in content module for any system, since you need some pieces of character data to map to packs, and others to members.
but that would be a *lot* of bodies to track in a combat situation...
Well, remember that in close combat, Tines can't act as packs anyway, so if you're actually having to track all those bodies among each other, the character of the game will shift. I think you'd want to handle melee with a simplified board- or miniatures-based system almost like the battle system from Titan, and not devote to much detail to the resolution of individual melee attacks. After all, during melee, you're not playing your character, so who wants to spend a lot of time in melee?
I'm totally interested in working with you to design this system — you know how obsessed I am with FotD. And I really should finish writing "Red-jackets and the Numerous Bad Wolfpack" one of these days...
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Date: 2009-05-04 06:05 pm (UTC)Yeah... and I think you have to follow the narrative lead of the book here — a pack of Tines is one character, in novel or RPG. The question is, then, what kid of mechanics are you using? Tines aren't going to be handled well as a straightforward drop-in content module for any system, since you need some pieces of character data to map to packs, and others to members.
but that would be a *lot* of bodies to track in a combat situation...
Well, remember that in close combat, Tines can't act as packs anyway, so if you're actually having to track all those bodies among each other, the character of the game will shift. I think you'd want to handle melee with a simplified board- or miniatures-based system almost like the battle system from Titan, and not devote to much detail to the resolution of individual melee attacks. After all, during melee, you're not playing your character, so who wants to spend a lot of time in melee?
I'm totally interested in working with you to design this system — you know how obsessed I am with FotD. And I really should finish writing "Red-jackets and the Numerous Bad Wolfpack" one of these days...