The Machine (Rules)

Nice 👍 it is very interesting, though it feels more of a shared writing experience and less of a game experience :)

The machine has to be something musical and we write after the previous player "dies 3x" right? Meaning the characters are sequential and (mostly) independent if I got it right

I read it as the person working on the machine hears music and/or machine sings to them telling them what to do but it's lost in translation, maybe it needs more snare drum I dunno maybe it's all distorted tunes. I think characters are independently working on the same machine that 'travels' from tinkerer to tinkerer. I agree it feels more writing and passing then gamey but I don't think that's a bad thing yet. Due to the magic of modern interwebz we can probably discuss the posting, week for a post might be pretty lengthy post.

To me the premise with the system above we take turns writing vignettes about how randomly unrelated and possibly unqualified people are told to build this 'machine' that drives them to their deaths or a dark place.

What did you have in mind when you read this, Phil? I'm happy playing it straight as designed, but faster (PBP is the high speed certain of nothing but play by mail, heh).

The song aspect struck me more as metaphorical, like the siren calling out to Ulysses in the Odyssey. Any actual "Machine" is really just an obsession dragging the character onward towards their demise, but not that of The Machine. Just my interpretation.

For the more practical sake of playing, I saw it as if one of us (as a character) were to find Da Vinci's notebook containing sketches for a Time Machine to bring the great artist into the future. A brilliant invention, but one that never saw fruition. The first person to find this outline tries to pick up on Da Vinci's work but fails. Someone else finds the notes of Da Vinci's successor, and proceeds on with their work, but also fails. And so the process continues until the game ends when there are no more players.

This is how I understood it.

I ran a game like this for myself called The Sealed Library. (Solo-gaming and PbP have been good to me during the pandemic.) You keep a log until the game ends, and the character meets their demise. It was played with a deck of cards and a Jenga tower. When the tower falls, the game is over. You basically wrote a journal entry prompted by a card drawn from a deck, then pulled pieces from the tower. You pull the number of pieces from the tower equivalent to what you rolled on a d6. Roll a 1, take one piece. Rolle a 6, take 6. You get the idea.

It's not gamey in the traditional D&D sense of the term, but as characters, we take part in a simulation of sorts. It is very much a shared writing experience, though, that's definitely my understanding if The Machine as well.

While I was playing this I thought it would translate to PbP really well because it's just writing. Since you can play the Machine by mail, I don't think it would be an issue in a PbP forum. I'll put up two other threads to put some bits of the other games up so you can get an idea of what they look like.

Sure, shared writing is not a problem ( well, my non native lack of creative vocabulary might be 😆)
just a different experience :)

I agree it fits nicely to pbp but I think as written it may take a few months between players. That feels like the most difficult bit to manage :)