Escape from Tartarus [Interest Check][Extreme-Human System]

[Irvine]

Escape from Tartarus

Early 2020. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, there's an island lovingly called "The Paradise Island". Every year, tourist flocks to this place to enjoy some well earned vacation far from their home. From the kind locals to the beach, everything feels like a dream. Almost everything. As of the past couple of years, its been known that people goes missing throughout the island. They just vanish. People who went missing are usually foreigners who came to spend some time on the island. This fact is obviously never advertised in the brochure that travel agencies hands over to potential vacationer. As such, every year a handful of tourist never leaves The Paradise Island.

This year, [YC] is about to be one of the first victim.

Intro and Game Info

This Group RP/Game is not based on any existing material. Of course I took inspiration from different sources to bring everything together. In a nutshell, I crafted a light system that takes inspiration from Pathfinder and D&D while the concept of the game is inspired by deduction games such as Mafia/Werewolves.

The RP takes place in a prison-like structure where a group of people will try to work together (or not!) to survive and, eventually, escape. The whole endeavor is orchestrated by a mysterious figure known only as "The Host" (played by the GM-me). The Host will attempt to make the players go through various trials that would call upon their various aptitudes which could improve the chance of escape for the group or worsen the chance of survival for individuals bringing me to the real deal: death. Death of character(s) is possible and I'll further expand on this below.

System Overview

The system is meant to be simple and allows for lot of wiggling room. Every character will have three basic stats which represents their Abilities: Body, Mind and Spirit. They will have 15 points to allocate to those stats however they feel like. There is nothing else stat-wise for a character. The abilities will be used when making checks. If the player attempt an action that requires a check, they will roll die/dice while adding their abilities and modifiers to the roll to determine whether they beat the Difficulty Check (DC) of that action.

The roles of the characters in play will depend on the number of people who joins the RP and will be randomized. As such, before starting the RP, everyone will be secretly given (through PM) some background info about their character (like occupation, how they end up in the island in the first place, etc). Those background info will be vague after which you will build your character (write about your full character background & allocate your Ability Points) around these info. This is the part where its inspired around Mafia/Werewolves; roles are allocated and that's where the inspiration stops (meaning there's no two groups working against each other, just a bunch of people with their own drives to get out of a messy situation).

More on this below on System/Roles below.

Disclaimer on GM

While I have some decent roleplay experience over the past decade-ish, I have never run group RP but I have played in non-system group RP in the past. I am confident I have a good idea and general direction where I want to go with this group RP while at the same time I am nervous things might get out of my control. As such, I ask for your patience and feedback if we ever do this group RP together. Even through this thread is for Interest Check, I'm more than happy to hear feedback and change things around.

I'd like to reiterate a point here: this thread is purely for Interest Check, this is NOT a Recruitment Thread. I want to know if this idea is worth running before I commit to it and draft the whole prison.

Smut

I know a lot of you are probably wondering where the Smut fits in here. I just can't give a definite answer here. So far, there will be only one NPC: The Host, a character that will probably never make physical contact with the playable characters. The Trials (which I have NOT crafted yet) will probably not focus on smut but more on making hard choices, toying with emotions, pushing the individuals to accomplish incredible or nightmare-ish feats. This does NOT mean I prohibit smut. Anything can happen in this prison and if something happens, consensual or not, between two or more characters then I, as a GM, have nothing against it. Just make sure to respect the Ons and Offs of the person you're engaging into.

I also want to point out that this is an Extreme RP. While I am not planning some plain rape-type of encounter, I haven't finalized the "trials" and I might get devious there.

Extreme And Death

I'm not used to write scenes that gross out my partner(s) but I'm tagging this as "Extreme" because certain things can happen that could lead to the death of YC or other people's character's death. Severe injuries is also possible. If an action or event triggers someone's death, they will have the opportunity to describe the death or fade to black. On my part, as a GM, I'll describe the death with some details without going in-depth.

As far as Death is concerned, I don't see any alternative for the theme I am going after. As such, character's death also means the player will be out of the main RP but I will create a separate thread (PM or offsite) where our departed friend(s) can have a chat in limbo while watching the rest progress.

System Details

This section will describe the system and actual mechanics in a little more details.

Step 1 - Background:

Each character will have their own vocation and motivation. You will be given very basic details of vocation and some more info which you will need to use to craft your character. Consider it as some sort of origin story for your character while also giving you room to [almost] fully customize the background of Abilities of your character.

Step 2 - Abilities Allocation:

Characters are given 15 Ability Points to distribute between 3 Abilities: Body, Mind and Spirit. While I have not fully formulated the difference between those three Abilities yet, you probably have a general idea what it affects.

Body is the character's physical prowess while also encapsulating constitution and dexterity to a certain extent. How hard YC can punch something, how effective they can push a rusty lever or their capability of just brushing off minor physical discomfort/assault.

Mind is the character's mental intellect, wisdom and their ability to recall surface knowledge related to the world around them. High intellect characters are able to hide their intent through subtlety, they have good photogenic memory and are knowledgeable while they can also be persuasive in conversation.

Spirit is the character's intuition, gut feelings, ability to empathy and ability to read others while also being perceptive of their surroundings. High spirited characters have the mental strength to walk into stressful situation with equanimity, they're able to read body language and can sense people's happiness or anguish.

Your background could give you bonus modifiers to those Abilities if a check is related to their background. Silly example; if two person have the same Body stats and they need to scale a wall, the one who happens to be a Rock Climbing enthusiast is getting a +modifier while the one who does heavy lifting won't have any bonus. Of course, this doesn't mean that someone who writes the most diverse bio ends up getting +modifiers everywhere. Everyone will have some tasteful, and equal, modifiers in various field... to a certain extent.

The minimum Ability Point is 1. You can't have an ability with 0 point.

Step 3 - Your Dice and Modifiers:

For some reason, I spent the last two days with an Excel sheet trying to figure out the best way to keep the system simple while also keeping a balance when it comes to low/high stats.

Higher Abilities gives bonus modifiers but can also change the number and type of dice you roll.

Dice roll resolves as followed: Dice Result + Ability + Ability Bonus Modifier + Background Modifier + Circumstance Modifier

Dice Result = Total of the Die/Dice you rolled.
Ability = The number of points you've put in Body/Mind/Spirit.
Ability Bonus Mod = The bonus you get from having a high ability (see below)
Background Mod = The bonus you get based on your background.
Circumstance Mod = The bonus you get based on previous choice or current environment (if you've played Disco Elysium, think of it as the +/- you get for stuff like talking with someone first or making someone feel good/bad gives you +/- modifier to certain check).

If you want more detail about the maths around the above, I invite you to open the following spoiler. Otherwise you can just ignore the spoiler.

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

The idea behind different dice and modifier is luck vs consistency. Lower ability score have a bigger "luck" factor to it while higher ability score have better consistency in rolling an average result instead of highs or lows. While low ability score allow the player to get higher rolls (9-12) more often, they have equal chance to get lower rolls as well BUT their chance of failure on Medium DC and or more are high to complete failure. On the other hand, higher score abilities are able to overcome higher DC and relying on "experience" (from an RP stand point) rather than luck.

The above explanation was based on the luck vs consistency hypothesis and then I simulated millions of roll to tally Resolving Rolls vs DC success rate. Here are the numbers.

The following simulates 1,000,000 dice rolls for each ability score and counts how many times it resolves between 1 - 24.

The following is the Success Rate after ability score and ability bonus are applied.

Secrets

A lot of of this group RP revolve around information and how those info are being shared. The GM will not openly reveal details of the characters encountered. Each character will need to give information about themselves but various checks will reveal details about characters.

Silly example again: let's say some character claims that they've seen a rabbit in the prison (Easter season and all). Most people will make up their mind whether they believe her or not, some would just take that information at face value. YC, having a high score in Spirit, might automatically pass a check against the character making the claim. In this case, the DC will resolve against the other character's mind roll.

Let's assume you pass the check and find out that, through the person's mannerism and speech inflection, the person is lying. Do you share the information or do you keep it for yourself? This is one example on how information can be power in this group game.

The information through passed checks will be shared with you through PM (or another suitable platform like a Google doc/spreadsheet if its better suited). As for those "hidden" checks, I'm planning to have a bunch of those. I'll share more info once I iron out the system.

Flow of the RP

Will update after I get some feedback on the above. It's getting awful late here.