Posit: Social Game

Using my previous post, here's an interesting potential social game. See if you can come up with a better one:

As a science-fantasy world was annihilated, the village of Arbitrary City was tossed into the infinite winds of space and time. They were joined by one person: Arbitrary Hero. Arbitrary Hero, a powerful Arbitrary Bizarre Job Name, survived because his escape pod crashed in Arbitrary City even as it was tossed into the maelstrom.

Arbitrary Bizarre Job Names are selected for their ability to bring out the hidden Arbitrary Magic Power in everyone. However, this ability has many psychological restrictions and is powered mostly by people facing their fears and/or limitations and overcoming them.

The idea of the game is that the player plays Arbitrary Hero and basically tries to keep the village safe as it kareens through all sorts of unlikely situations - such as landing on Dinosaur World and War-Torn World and Hurricane World and so on and so forth. Each time he has to do some Arbitrary Magic Widget Hunt to dislodge his adopted village from whatever horrifying place it's landed today. And each time, hoping that the next leap... will be the leap home. Or at least to some place that doesn't try to eat their face.

The way he accomplishes this is by building a party out of the villagers. Instead of gaining experience by killing monsters, any given villager will gain power by facing their fears and/or limitations and overcoming them. Of course, the first few times they defeat a monster or something, they're probably overcoming a fear, and will therefore gain power fairly rapidly at the beginning.

But! Even getting a villager who is willing to leave the village and venture into Nightmare World is rather difficult. Let alone getting them to face Generic Demon Boss 13! Yowza!

However, improving villagers, even if they never leave the village with you, is generally very useful - improving the infrastructure of Arbitrary City provides you with better equipment, more defenses, more time, and leverage on other villagers.

The way you get people to face their fears is, of course, the social game. Convincing them to work with you, or tricking them into having to face their fears, or whatever. It's not simply a flat scripted set, though: everyone has lots of fears and limits at widely varied levels, many of which are shared. For example, nearly everyone is scared of being eaten by monsters, and almost nobody can jump fifty feet between tall buildings. Your job is to use any means you can to get them to face whatever fears you can manage to convince them to face.

There is no "done" - there are always more challenges, more limits, more fears. The trick to the gameplay is that whenever you start interacting with someone, they have a "heat" - a level of social attachment they form. Heat fades with time, but if you keep the heat up, you're more effective at convincing them. Other things can cause heat, such as peer pressure and alcohol. While "hot", you get regular feedback from them which clues you in as to where your relationship stands. Commentary and gifts, mostly. Most of the important steps, when taken, result in an actual gameplay-affecting response, focusing on more global gameplay, rather than character stats (since that is rendered useless if the player has a favorite party). Character stats are upped incidentally.

The other trick to the gameplay is that there is no "empty play" - it's impossible to get into a situation with a villager where there is just nothing you can do. At the very least, you could beat the hell out of them. But more commonly, you're allowed to buy, sell, trade, and employ a wide variety of threats, suggestions, compliments, and insults. Every character has interests, wants, likes, dislikes, and so on, and you can leverage these using the social engine. But these are not "scripted events" - or, rather, a few of them are, but there's always a less efficient but still workable method for building a relationship.

Think it'd work?