Hmmm. How do you make it possible for more than one player to win, but not all of them? I mean, if none of the goals are mutually exclusive, it would seem awkward to say “And the last person to not complete their goal loses as the GM gets bored and declares the game started” or such.

Working with existing games and books might be tricky from the “actually winnable” method. I mean, how do you arbitrarily judge who has the most combat power, if Bob is a fighter who can consistently swing a sword, and john a mage who can throw powerful fireballs, but at a cost? It seems designing a universal “pseudosystem” with the goals of the metagame in mind would be the best option. IE: “This flaw costs you 4 combat strength, but adds 3 to coolness!”

Yeah, I’m thinking the pseudosystem is the way to go–you can build a trait out of anything you find in a splatbook, whether it’s a class, a kit, a skill or an example (”Can catch flies with chopsticks: 3d12″). The value of such traits would be determined by their group-consensus coolness, as set by bidding wars–maybe something similar to Rumble?

I like the idea of being able to build splatbooks in a group without actually, y’know, having to have bought it first. But if we allow for the use of examples, why not let players buy in novels or short stories as well? “Rastafarian astronaut: 2d6.”

As for the multiple-but-not-everybody victory thing, I’m thinking you need a certain number of Cool Points from a finite pool to claim victory; if you get above the threshold you win, if not you lose. Say, if the threshold is 25 CPs, there are five players, and there are only 100 CPs to get… (I know this is getting away from the individual “build character with most X” goals, but I think those could just let you get bonus CPs.)

I should add that in the 5-25-100 CP model, you’d be allowed to get CPs above the threshold as well, thus enhancing the value of your own value and ensuring that there wouldn’t be only one loser every time.

Actually, using poker chips for CPs would present a nice bidding mechanism.

(Er, “value of your own victory.”)

Hmmm, so maybe rating characters in “Combat Strength”, “Magical Power”, and “Social Fu”? Alternate futuristic settings could have “Science!” instead of “Magical power”, perhaps.

Maybe these ratings should be secondary things, IE not modifiable directly, but influenced by other values (Your Combat Strength being the average of your physical attributes, which is then averaged with your single highest Fighting skill, say)

Awards could be given for Most Combat Strength, Most Magical Power, Most Social-Fu, and Most Versatile, which is an award that only goes to someone who isn’t lowest in any rating, and changes hands whenever someone eligible gets any two of their ratings higher than the current holder’s?

Also, an interesting note, in an old version of the Traveller RPG, it’s possible to die during character generation.

Maybe “Arcane Knowledge” instead of “Magic / Science.” I really want to keep this more as an obvious metasystem than something that looks like a generic RPG character sheet, but tracking things like “combat power” and rewarding them really does make it seem like the latter. I’m not sure there’s a way around this.

Most Versatile is nice, though. And yeah, this is sort of my answer to Lifepath systems (like Mechwarrior and Traveller and lots of weak games), which are just deterministic games you play in chargen that pretend not to be games at all.

To combat the whole ‘generic character sheet’ thing, maybe you could come up with a table of generic formulae that determine a rating from three stats, but in different ways. Eg, “a^b /c”, “a x (b - c)”, etc. Then the players randomly select a formula for each ‘rating’ at the start of their game.

The stat system would be constant, of course (which could require another workaround if it seemed to ‘generic rpg’), but it would add a random element to the game so that players are required to come up with different characters each time, rather than simply following a template to get the prizes.

Tangentially, the whole “combat power, magic power, social fu” thing kind of reminds me of KoL’s Muscle/Mojo/Moxie system.

Hmmm, I don’t think I understand what you mean by “obvious metasystem”.

Well, really I just don’t want people to look at the results of this game and think “oh, Strength and Intelligence and Charisma.” I want it more abstract than that, but maybe that’s the wrong thing to want. Hmm.

Something I thought of today: maybe the scales that allow you to win the game are created by the players at game time, the same way splatbooks are brought into play. Like, if most of your source material is going to be D&D, you and a couple other people might buy Combat Murderingness, while one of those guys and two others might bring in Flexibility or Magic Mojo. Every attribute automatically has an award generated for it, for the player who ends up highest in it.

The more I talk about this the more I think it needs to be a limited-scope, real-time variation on Nomic.

This is a cynical view of things, but I kind of think the most successful way to do this might be a competitive card game, sort of like Munchkin. Try to build a really good character while giving your opponents disadvantages. Only instead of the character being built up in the context of a sub-game it’s being built up before the subgame even begins. Instead of a card representing a magic item, it represents a splatbook. No real gameplay innovation, just a cute concept exploited to the max.