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 <small> |
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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.)
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.
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...
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?
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.