Mirrorverse!

[firstfrost]

The Star Trek run last night sent us to the Mirrorverse! Yay! In addition to the traditional "Hmm, why did all the buildings get more spiky?" sort of question, which has a fairly obvious answer, there was a mysterious and complicated thing going on with our captain (mjperson's character), that finally turned out to be that for the entire campaign, he's actually been not him, but his mirrorverse self accidentally brainwashed into thinking he was the this-universe self.

I've been sort of boggling over that ever since. Role-playing is all about pretending to be someone. So what does it mean to find out that you weren't actually pretending to be the person you thought you were, you just thought you were? Plus, there are clearly players who you can do that to, and players that would mind more.

The whole rotating-GM aspect of Star Trek is very different than anything I've played before (except maybe the crazy storytelling paranormal investigator thing arcanology did). It's mostly episodic, but everything is a lot more open to revision, because anything that didn't come out in a run might get overwritten by someone else's plot later (and, sometimes, things that did come out in a run getting forgotten, oops). It's an odd mental shift, sort of like the one between tabletop and LARP, though I guess Ars Magica people do this all the time. It's interesting.

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

In theory, all the players could GM. In practice, it's the players who have GMed other games who have GMed so far, but the others might in the future. quillion is in charge to the extent that he made up the rules, but he doesn't so much do the alpha storyguide thing that dcltdw was talking about.

Ars Magica is the only system I've read that directly talks about shared GMing, but I haven't read all that many. For this, quillion just said something like "we'll take turns GM'ing" and we said "Hmm, that's interesting, sure." :)

[merastra.livejournal.com]

Oh ok, Ars Magica. I was thinking that Spirit of the Century would also work great with this.