DB

Near the end of OVER/UNDER, there were quite a bit of projects going on. Specifically, I’m looking at the public works projects that had been proposed, approved for budgeting, and then worked on by several players. The EDC was one of the many approved public works projects, and its headquarters was set up in a former casino.

More specifically, I was working on not just setting up the EDC for roleplay opportunities surrounding in-game crises, but I had planned a text-based hide-and-seek game to revitalize parts of the server. This is a peek into that game that was never played.

Cred Bounty’s Goals

I wanted to design a game that would make people run around the O/U Discord server and refresh old text threads. I also wanted room in the design to nudge players to socialize with characters they’ve never spoken with before.

In Discord, threads are a feature that allow for the creation of a different type of text channel which are the children of their parent channel. In physical space, it would be like moving a discussion from the living room where everyone is talking openly around the couch to circling up next to a lamp in the other corner of the room with a few folks from that group.

Functionally, threads were used for the same reasons you would move a conversation to the lamp in the corner of the room. Sometimes you had other things to say, and sometimes the lamp was just dope. Threads were used to denote not just moving side conversations to their own place, but also as a means to define a physical space. Threads became hallways, closets, businesses, entertainment venues, restaurants, wet rooms, radio frequencies and group chats. Many were private and couldn’t be seen by the general retinue, but a good number were public. There were more than a few threads that were tunnels, small businesses, and abandoned buildings that were used once and then abandoned.

As the game was winding down, I thought it was a shame that a bunch of these places didn’t see as much activity. Maybe I could design a scenario that would encourage activity in “dead channels”?

The second goal was to get people interacting with characters that they haven’t interacted with before. Cliques and social groups will naturally form where there’s a lot of folks, and it would be nice to see pairings and interactions we hadn’t seen before.

Now, how do you get people moving all around and interacting with new, unfamiliar people?

Cred Bounty’s Frame

If this game was to encourage people to get out into the rest of the play space and interact with others, I needed to figure out what rules/fiction could facilitate that sort of play.

The fiction came to mind first. What did I have available to me as a player in O/U? Well, I played Thoss, and any of their belongings, assets, and properties sort of felt like fair game to play with in terms of what I could puppeteer and use as a facilitator. Thoss established and was pretty much the parent of the EDC, so I could think of that space as one of my own play spaces. The EDC was built on a casino…money? Creds?

Oh no, heists? That one movie that was tag, with money? The one with Awkwafina? People love creds? Hate creds? Hell, it looks like all of the Dream is basing their events around gambling. This can sort of be like gambling!

The Cred Bounty, as it was coming to mind, consisted of two groups. Hiders and Seekers. Each party would be competing to win a significant amount of creds (I wanted 96,000, just for that In the Heights reference!) in a secret, pervasive game that would be played throughout the rest of the Dream.

Hiders would consist of a group of characters who stumble upon a hidden, super loaded credstick under the floor of the former casino during EDC renovations. There were a few problems with this credstick though.

1. It won’t allow for the immediate transfer of its credits (96k credits) to any of the characters’ personal credsticks
2. It is actively sapping the credits of people’s (willing players, probably unwilling characters) personal creds into its own pool
3. It is coded with a custom firmware and will take 1-2 hours of passive decoding to transfer those credits back to available parties

Seekers would consist of a group of characters who are tasked by an anonymous hacker who would like their creds back. They would know that there is one, or a group of people who were in the possession of a modified credstick with 96k credits…and that sum is still climbing, if they can claim it!

Hiders and Seekers would both be placed in respective private threads with facilitators. If a Seeker engages with a character (conversation, or a physical confrontation like a shakeup) for a period of 5 minutes, they can confirm with one of the facilitators if that character is a Hider. If a Hider engages with a character for a period of 7 minutes, they can confirm with one of the facilitators if that character is a Seeker.

Both Hiders and Seekers would be required to have play occur in public threads and channels. The last character holding the credstick at the end of the time would be able to decide how the creds are split, and who they go to.

It would sort of be a LARP like Red Dawn Zombie, which is played in the real world where everyone who is wearing red is a zombie. In the case of Cred Bounty, the Hiders would see everyone trying to talk to them as a potential Seeker. And for the Seekers, anyone being a little weird, or just moving actively between locations might be a Hider.

I figured it was a fun way to re-frame social interactions on the Dream for those playing, and also to encourage my ultimate goals: getting people moving and looking in unused text channels, and getting people talking with new characters.

Why the game never left port

While planning the event, there were a few hurdles that ultimately stopped the ship of the Cred Bounty game from ever sailing.

This was near the end of O/U. People were feeling burnout from task roleplay. The text channels weren’t ever as active as they had been prior to the Chokespawn incident. And on that last weekend before Monday, November 10th, the last day of O/U, people were wrapping up their own story lines and threads. Characters were saying goodbye.

For one, there wasn’t a crowd for possible players of the Cred Bounty to hide among, which was part of what the scenario was designed for. If there’s only a few characters moving around or chatting in public threads at a time, it’s going to be pretty easy to track down these Hiders. Additionally, there’s not as much of a paranoid feeling for the Seekers–they can pretty much see who’s around them in a location in terms of player characters.

And for another, I didn’t want to take away time from what other people had planned. The problem of Cred Bounty was that I pretty much had to have players for both players established for any sort of play to happen. I think 3 on 3 could feel decently fun, but of course bigger teams would be more fun!

And with the secret nature, and sort of that surprise element being a part of the experience I wanted Hiders to have, I couldn’t outright say what was happening. I wanted it to feel very different than some of the monster hunting roleplay scenarios that people were opting in for. I wanted to find some players down for some mundane task roleplay, knowing that they would have to be committing for an hour or two, and surprising them with a heated situation. How would they handle it? Would they immediately fold, or try their best to hold those creds for themselves? I had an initiation, an idea for a game, and I wanted to see how people engaged with it!

As the atmosphere was panning out though, I saw that I was designing for an O/U of a few weeks ago. Energy was settling towards the end. O/U didn’t need a last revitalization! It wanted to go to sleep, and I wasn’t going to get in its way.

But hey, maybe this game will live somewhere else on another text based LARP some day.