Mnemosynis/Memento

Memento Gaming

Gaming in Reverse

Not so much a chronicle in and of itself so much as a style of play I'm curious about trying out someday if I can find some willing lab rats. I thought of it last night after about 40 hours of playing Megaman over the weekend. Needless to say, my brain-box was a bit fried.

Basic premise: Get a group together and write up some characters. Give them all XP depending on how long the game is going to be at the start. Then, start from the last session and work backwards every session afater that.

For example: Session 1: The characters start off with, say, 400 xp. The session begins at the hidden underground door to the Silver Prince's citadel. The character's stand over the remains of the massive guardian they just defeated, the 7th and final trial that needed to be passed in oder to get in. The session consists of the characters storming the Citadel and challenging the Deathlord once and for all after all the suffering they've been through, and ends with a dramatic duel on the parapets.

Session 2: All characters lose 5 XP, converting traits into XP if they need to. The session begins at the murky entrance of the tunnel that'll take them into the citadel. They found out there'd be trials they'd have to pass to get through. They venture inside.

Session 3: All characters lose 5 XP, converting traits into XP if they need to. The session takes place in Onyx with the characters dodging the Deathlords forces, trying to remain undetected while finding a way into the citadel.

Things proceed this way until the final session, during the climax, in which the characters, now mortal, finally receive their Exaltations! How heroic of them! A grand adventure must await them indeed!

As long as too much history wasn't revealed during play, I think it could be fun. Like in the above example, as long as the ST didn't actually tell the PCs what the trials were, the next session still remains a suprise!

And the players would have to manage themselves smartly as well. Do they want to get rid of their bureaucracy now or later? Maybe they needed it in the past. But then, experience is something you generally don't have until after you need it. The character could break down a dot of investigation only to find the in the next session they were trying to solve a murder. Also though, the ST shouldn't take advantage of knowing what people were giving up.

And in the end, you could take the starting characters that resulted and see if they were actually viable and something you'd actually build. And then, if you wanted, you could run an actual game with them. Character reuse! Brilliant!

And, if someone drops from the game, you don't have to figure out where their character went, because they never even met the group in future sessions! If someone dies, they'll still be there next session, -5 XP, but they'll have a creeping feeling that something's gonna happen... Granted, that means people could potentially die more than once if you're not careful, but still. The only really bad sessions are where a character discovers one of his artifacts...  :P

It'd be an interesting experiment all around, I think.

Comments

I once did a somewhat similar gimmick in a Mage game. It was a solo game. The main character kept on being murdered by a mysterious assailant, then waking up back in his bed. Each time, he'd get a little further. (It turned out his attacker, who was trying to kill him for reasons connected to the overarching plot of the series, was suffering a serious Time backlash, and was travelling back in time to stop his earlier self from killing the PC.) It worked out fairly well.

I think the way to handle players dropping out is to just say that the session in which they dropped out was the session in which they met the rest of the group, or have them meet the group at the very end of the first session in which the player does not play. Character death is trickier. The only time characters can rationally die in a Memento-style game is the very first session. This might bother people who are uncomfortable with the concept of script immunity in RPGs. At the very least, you'd want to make up reasons why characters killed in subsequent sessions (which, in-game, occur prior to the first session) can come back to life or turn out to just be seriously wounded.

Fun idea. I like narrative gimmicks. I like them a lot. _Ikselam

This is a really great idea. I would love to play in a game like this, although it might be weird, but it would definitely be worth trying.
One problem I can see popping up would be healing times. If someone is wounded in a previous session in such a way that even all the combined medical expertise of the group isn't enough to get rid of the wound penalties in time for the next session, then ... well, you see the problem. Just insert more downtime I guess? I think that such a game would have to be pretty flexible -- oddly, it'd have to be even more flexible in a lot of ways than games proceeding along a normal timeline.
Like I said -- awesome idea. Sounds like it'll be a ton of work for you if you do it, though -- not just the logistics, but also keeping the players engaged without the kind of narrative buildup people are used to. You should post session summaries if you do this, I'd love to see how it goes (and believe me, that's a high compliment!).
~ Shataina