Unless someone objects, I'll retire this page. It'll stay for now, for historical purposes, but the contents have been copied to Scale, Immortality and Gestalt. -- Amanita

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"Bono-ta-vada, sentients. Isn't Blue just Tip-Top? Bona-La"

--Danny the Street

Concepts, free to a good home. (More at We'd Love To See and Players Wanted.)

Scale

Nothing says that a character has to be an air-breathing humanoid, of course - or even in the same range of size. But it's quite understandable that most characters are. It's what we as players are used to and can relate to. All the same, there's room for exploration. What would it be like to play a state or a city or a neighbourhood? (There has been a Modulari character along these lines, and at least one living-building character.) Or a microbe?

Obviously, one of the biggest questions is how the character interacts with the rest of the muck's characters - and one answer is probably through "avatar" characters (see Archetypes). It might also be cool to try playing out a single character or group of characters as they interact with a city environment, for example - or to see how two sentient city-states interact with one another.

What do you suppose happens when cities make love? --Sandstorrm

On the micro-scale, it's already been suggested that some Chitins are actually tiny symbiotes controlling a much bigger body. With a bit of coding (and, of course, some willing players), it might be possible to have a character that "possesses" others...

• Kaisho-Kaiju, the Monster Club, and her human-scale avatar Kai-Kai. She hasn't been sighted lately and never opened for business as far as I know, but it was a cool concept - cybered-up mind-shot macro, hollowed out into a living building. I believe her player's more of a macro than a xeno. People seriously interested that particular kind of 'scale' as a factor in a character may have migrated to Bandari rather than PB.
• Some heavy-shifters are nano-collectives, which has a certain level of scale. Nobody's played this up yet, though; the intelligence is usually seen as emerging from the nanochine's clustering. Any nano-clusters willing to do a scene where a few dozen nanochines split off?
• There have been, in the past, half-joking threats of a scene between Puzzlebox and Twin, with hints of flirtation before (she) came to live within {her}. That's a scale difference but like all good power relationships on PB it might be switchy; Twin's multi-galaxy mass, PB varies depending who you talk to.
• Also, I find myself thinking of Earth in Swanwick's Vaccuum Flowers - a whole-planet Plural. There's a more mystick riff on that in his Stations of the Tides, as well. Scale in a different way.

Just some precedents/inspirations that come to mind. -Twin

Post-Mortality

On the same note, nothing says that a character has to have a human-esque lifespan. The narrative curve of Puzzlebox seems to imply that mortality is either a long-lost myth of societies of scarcity, or simply rendered irrelevant by the nature of Puzzlebox itself. Most denizens enjoy a long enough life that mortality is simply a non-issue - and besides, few people want to create a character with the intention of seeing their mortal demise.

However, there's a lot of emotional power and impact in playing one that does. Whether through accident, old age, or actual malice, character death is always a profound turning point in any storyline, and Puzzlebox should be no exception to the rule.

Mortality can be taken to an absolute extreme, as well... what if a creature is born within Puzzlebox, who has exactly one day to live?

Gestalt, for Real

There are several characters that have several minds in one body, or several bodies and one mind, or even are, simply, a small group. Each, however, is played by one human behind a keyboard.

What if two people played one character? You can have more than one connection to a character active at once. Obviously the players have to be a little more telepathic than usual, for it to be coherent, and sometimes it would just be one player, or the other. But you'd never know!

Two minds, one body, literally.

This may or may not be easier if both players live in the same home.

Once elsemuck I happened upon a rather unique feat of MPI/MUF programming. A character that was controllable by anyone, without resorting to having multiple connections. One would enter a room (linked through the character itself), and the room had a @force command built into an action. Anyone in the room could use the action and make the character do things. It was basically a puppet with an unlocked action, but one would be *inside* the puppet since it would report what it saw to the inner room. The difference was that it was a character, not a puppet or vehicle, but the main problem was that the character was usually asleep, the actual owner not being connected. Thus it was called Sleepwalker. But, an intruiging concept anyway....could be adapted for PB. Multi-user-controllable character, or for a plural being, or someone that is also a place. --Coalesce