A little while back I posted about how a lot of people seem to want a Myers-Briggs tabletop game to exist, but there isn’t really one out there. A littler while back I posted that in 2016, I would be attempting to create that RPG myself. Well I’ve started the process and I thought I’d post about what I have so far to whet the world’s appetite a little bit.
SETTING
The setting is corporate America. The players collectively represent one character, a character that we’ll call the Protagonist. The Protagonist is a powerless man or woman in a middle-level position at a big business. Just enough “authority” to fire people and make them do some paperwork, but in reality a puppet of the higher-ups at the company. No real power, no real choice in his or her actions.
The Protagonist’s home life is not much better. The Protagonist may be unmarried, or in a boring marriage, or in a good marriage but with unsatisfying conditions in other ways. Lousy house, unable to have kids, struggling to make ends meet – this is a person who wants a lot of things, but has no power to achieve any of those things for his or her self.
Luckily, the Protagonist has a power. In the real world, yeah, he or she has nothing. But in the world of dreams, the Protagonist has the ability to affect change in the real world. In the dream world, rather than all controlling the Protagonist the players each have their own character. These characters are fantasy versions of characters from the real world. One person might be the Protagonist’s dream self, while another might be the dream version of his or her spouse, and another the best friend, and maybe another a child or even a sibling. The dream world is where the players get to have a more traditional party system, go on adventures, and overcome villains and puzzles.
For every challenge that the players overcome in the dream world, they open doors for the Protagonist in the real world. Suddenly, his or her job is a little better. Maybe now the Protagonist meets someone and falls in love, or is finally able to conceive. Every adventure in the dream world improves the real world. Conversely, the Protagonist can find details and meet people that add color and challenges to the dream world. This exchange between each world, between fantasy and reality, is the core of the game. Spending time in one world makes the other one grow and change. The interplay between them is where the fun of the game lies.
MECHANICS
I don’t have the mechanics of the game completed as of yet, but I do have some planned out already. In the real world, the players all work together as one Protagonist. This is to encourage cooperative play and to give the players common goals to work towards. The Protagonist does not have “stats” in the traditional sense. Instead, the Protagonist is ranked in each of the eight preferences: Extroversion, Introversion, Sensing, iNtuition, Thinking, Feeling, Judging, and Perceiving. Each of these preferences begin at 1, and increase based on the Protagonist’s scores on a Myers-Briggs personality test. The players work together to answer these questions. The Protagonist’s stats increase by 1 for the number of answers that match each preference. So if the players answer 4 questions Extroverted and 3 questions Introverted, the Protagonist would have a total of 5 Extroversion and 4 Introversion. The highest preferences of each pair will create the personality type for the Protagonist. So if the character has higher scores in Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, and Perceiving, then the Protagonist will be an ISTP personality type. Naturally, players will be encouraged to roleplay these types when making decisions for the Protagonist.
In the dream world, stats will be more traditional. Something along the lines of the stats from Apocalypse World or FATE Core, where rather than definitive stats like strength and dexterity the stats are more abstract like “hard” or “careful.” There will be sixteen different classes to choose from, each based on the sixteen Myers-Briggs types. The player representing the Protagonist in the dream world will have the option of playing as the Protagonist’s class (in the ISTP example above, a Crafter), or choosing a different class. After all, the Protagonist’s fantasy of him or her self may be very different from the reality.
That’s about as far as I’ve gotten for now, but in the future I’ll be posting in more detail about the dream world classes and (hopefully) the core mechanic of the game. If you enjoy the idea of this tabletop game, be sure to honor Multiplayer Week by sharing on social media. And remember to look up Adventure Rules on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr in order to enjoy exclusive content not available on the main blog!
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