Broken Rainbow would be: Kaputter Regenbogen not Kaputtregenbogen
Kaputtregenbogen is more akin to “Rainbow of Broken”.

- eric

And I thought that was the primary goal of storytelling games anyway.

All you can do is give them the tools and one suggested way of playing it.

So, to be a “proper” iPhone game, does it need to take advantage of more? Platform portability? Geolocation? Internet connection? Voice connection? Camera?

I have an iPhone. I write software for a living. I don’t (yet) have a modern Mac, but I’ve been seriously thinking about what makes iPhone software matter and how to use the platform. And I’m always centering my thoughts on games. So, I’m not trying to call bullshit or anything — I’d play that game! I’m just trying to find the balance between using the features of the platform and forcing the overuse of those features just because they’re there.

Some other things:

I’m interested in how the Fantasies would be distributed if not through the app as a portal. Passing content through “normal channels” seems like a bit of handwaveium.

I like the idea of formalizing Fantasy creation as a collaborative act — modular maps or taking turns or attaching situations to the mapped bits authored by others. But I’m pretty sure that’s totally outside the scope of the game you imagined.

For some reason, as I imagine playing the fantasies, I keep coming back to Otherkind dice instead of freeform or something else. That’s just an interesting note about my own psychology — I’m not sure what about your description is causing that.

What are you envisioning happens with the history of a Fantasy. Is there some kind of AP-display to showcase how different groups played through a given Fantasy? That would be kind of neat.

Even if I predetermine some of the encounters, like — “On the bridge ahead there are 3 Winter Wolves” — that’ll still be more powerful if the players have to describe the bridge, the wolves, and the positioning instead of it being based on my simplistic illustrations, at least as long as there’s support for them making dramatic descriptions. Otherwise they might go, like, “I don’t know, I guess they’re white wolves.” And if there are ways for them to shuffle up or alter the encounters before playing them, that’s even more investment, yeah?

So maybe not quite all the way to what you did with Born To Be Kings, but something more in that direction than what I originally intended. I’m super comfortably way out there in player-generated land, but I’m trying to scale this back and make it more structured than what my usual comfort zone is (like you said before), partially because the relative freeform nature of the mechanics means that the game needs something else to provide structure.

I think you’re right about focusing on the overworld. You want to give players a map, for sure, since a map and exploration of that map seems to be a big part of what you’re looking for.

With that map would come the message, “Here be dragons — dragons that you put here.” That’s constraint + freedom within the constraint, which is where I think the juice really lives.

Take a look at the Born to be Kings atlas some day:
http://www.iago.net/amber/kings/atlas.shtml
(BTBK was the Fudge game I ran long ago that birthed Fate.)

Almost none of that content was mine, as a GM. I drew up a map of the lands of Amber, gave it a few names and some shapes to outline territories — and then told the players they got to define what was out there. The results were pretty astonishing. One player was especially prolific, generating reams of content about a particular part of the map. She also had an especially dark imagination — which motivated the other players to get in there and do some defining of their own just to head that darkness off at the pass! Probably the single best example of player-created content for a campaign I’ve ever experienced.

John, I’m not sure what to make of your response. Sure, sometimes you have to let go of your preconceptions about what a project is supposed to be, but that’s not the problem I’m having right now. I’m trying to deliver a game experience to the players, not throw some sketchy notes at them and say, “Do whatever you want.”

Another observation: I often find that when I stand at a crossroads with a design, where I feel pulled in two directions (e.g., 16-bit and mapped out vs. more abstract, modular, and adaptive), that it’s because I have goals which belong to two different, if related, games, not one. Recognizing when this is happening is key to making sure that a design does not amount to biting off more than I can chew.

Finally, a bit from my personal toolkit. When I was running an early-Fate Buffy game a (great) number of years ago, I had a bit of your problem. I knew how I wanted any one given “episode” of the game to feel like, particularly in terms of emulating the way the TV show might have a particular theme going for that week’s episode, determined in advance. On the surface of it there was no way to really do that as a GM without it feeling contrived or forced — until I started creating explicit incentives for the players. Each session involved me putting together a small deck of cards. Each card had a play-goal on it that, when fulfilled, got the player some fate points. When I wanted a moment in the game that felt like one of those conversations-about-a-supernatural-thing-but-could-be-read-instead-as-a-conversation-about-a-social-issue (see Buffy’s chat with her Mom about why she couldn’t just Decide Not To Be A Slayer that read a lot like a mom having problems with her daughter’s sexuality), that went into the cards, with incentives for the players to have a conversation about one of the PC’s demon-powers without every referring to the demon-powers by name. What resulted was a really entertaining conversation that could just as easily have been about the PC in question having an STD. The players *could* have opted out of doing this — they didn’t exactly *need* the fate points, but the option to get a few more just in case provided the soft-touch incentive I needed in order to get a theme-upholding scene that came organically out of their play — timing, ultimately, was their choice. In other words, I provided a few extra constraints by way of incentives, and it spurred some pretty fantastic, creative, emotionally powerful play.

Fear not thy constraints.