Interest Check - Drama focused RPG

Probably a based-on at-most would make sense, then. Yeah, I’m still open to Pantheon with a fresh lesser goddess.

If you’ve seen something not work, I don’t want to come in like "I can make it work," then end up proving history right (as history tends to be).

Cool cool. Adapted from or based on would probably work. Everyone comes with ideas; no reason your ideas can't be from a previous character. :)

The more I think of it, she’ll be *loosely* based, if that. I have a fun idea for a lesser goddess.

My Top-Three List:
🥇 Pantheon
🥈 Uploaded
🥉 Dream Ship

I'll have to go back through that list and see which ones sound fun for me to run, and which have more detail behind them. I think some of them are older and I don't have much more than an elevator pitch written down, so I'm not sure what I was thinking for a few.

I'm interested in dramatic interplay. I took the liberty of making a ranked choice voting ballot for the concepts, for those interested.
Link to voting ballot.

Anyways, my top 3:
Time Travel: Probably a bit harder to run than the other premises, but it clicks with me. I'm imagining a guy who finds that everything (especially the people he knows) are better in the alternate timeline than the original timeline.
Transhumanist: I love pondering our nature. Inject it into my veins.
Supervillains: I enjoy the idea of deconstructing why these supervillains became villains, especially if those reasons still exist.

Bottom 3:
Alien Contact: For some reason, doesn't click with me.
Pantheon: A classic drama, for sure, but I'm wary of keeping the gods' drama relatable when operating at a scale beyond the human.
Dreamship: I'm not clear what the stakes are here at all.

Thank you for setting up the poll, that website is super handy. I like your idea for Time Travel, it reminds of me It's A Wonderful Life. I think it'll definitely be hard to implement, but with the right combination of players and the right amount of communication, I think it'll be the most fulfilly.

My other personal top 2 consists of the crime family and kingdom power struggle scenarios. I think they lend well to the proposed game systems, and I think they're probably the easiest to slot people into.

Well, it looks like there's plenty of interest.

Just a quick +/- system ended up with:

4 Transhumanist++++
3 Pantheon ++++-+-
3 The King Has Died+++
2 Criminal Empire++
2 Time Travel++
1 Dreamship++-
1 Isolated Space Station+
1 Supervillain Support Group+
-1 Alien Contact-

5 people interested in the Pantheon, 4 in the Transhuman.

Weighted Voting has the Time Travelers coming out on top, but boy, that one's going to be hard to run. I feel like I'd need a custom mechanic of some sort to alter the characters as they alter their own histories. I love the idea, I'm just not sure how to handle it mechanically and keep it fair for everyone.

So it's going to be one of those three. I'll kick around some Cortex trait sets and see if I can get something together as a pitch for one of them.

Thanks, everyone, for your interest!

Is the divine court already filled up (and if not, is it worthwhile for someone unfamiliar with Cortex except by skimming to try joining)?

More interest for Pantheon?—nice!

That one has the most +s but also the most -s, and has been expressed as the best and worst by more than one person… which at the very least makes it the most interesting/controversial!

Though a quick opinion on the minuses… I don’t know about others, but I have a tendency to focus on the positive. Even though there are some scenarios that I would not want to play, I wouldn’t "downvote" them.

I did the minuses based on "I'm not interested" comments and the pluses based on "this sounds cool" comments.

@vicky_molokh - It's not open for applications yet, but there's been a lot more interest than I expected. I'm working on creating a custom Pathways chart as well as custom Distinctions, Abilities, and a new set of Values and Stress tracks. I'll have a summary of the rules available, and details for all the custom stuff I create. It's not hard to pick up, the system is pretty simple.

The game is posted, but I'm still developing the custom content. If you're curious about what the content might look like, I posted the first step of character creation on the game page.

https://gamersplane.com/games/4617/

Loving what I see so far!

Oh this looks super exciting. I am trying to read up on the Cortex System, but there seem to be a lot of different variations out there. Is this the correct one?

Yes, that is the base system ThatTaoGuy is referring too. At least, the description of it.

The first Cortex Plus game and the only game to use the CortexPlus Dramatic system was the Smallville roleplaying game, which I believe is out of print. But the basic rules of Cortex apply across the board, and all the moving parts are described pretty much the same in Cortex Prime.

There's not a SRD anywhere, but there is a Cortex Lite document available as Pay What You Want over on itch.io. I'm hesitant to link it because I'm not sure if it will help or confuse, as many of the rules used in the Dramatic version of Cortex are different from the Lite version. But it does have the basics of dice rolling, building your dice pool, the effect die, and how stress works. Other than those things, this game won't look a lot like Cortex Lite, so if you do decide to go find it, be forewarned: different builds of Cortex can look like entirely different games.

The questions are fun! …though I’m "trying" not to get too into it since I don’t know if I’ll get in the game, nor could I know who else besides me has a fun celestial creation idea.

But, @ThatTaoGuy, about the Celestial Creation’s questions… would you *want* the creation to be created by another player’s god(dess), or would we collaborate on a Pantheon of NPC elders and the creation would be of an elder (or two)?

EDIT - I realize there are options for the creation, so I guess what I’m really asking is if PCs being involved in other PCs’ creation stories is a desirable option/possibility (assuming more than one player would want that)… or if your preference is that the PC-PC relationships are entirely post-creation. (That way we have pretty solid characters, presumably to be tweaked as needed.)

Okay, yeah, gonna admit this is looking even cooler than I had anticipated!

I personally wouldn't care if the Celestial Creation was created by another player's character, an NPC, or spontaneously created. I have no preconceived notions about this game. I just tossed out some questions to try to get people to think about their character, the backstory, etc. You don't have to answer all of them; the goal is to make the players think about who they are, where they come from, and how they fit into the greater pantheon.

The way the Pathways system works is that you go through steps of character creation together. The first step, you choose your origin, and you add to the relationship map.

The map starts with all the PCs, all connected to each other. In step one, you add one NPC who you have a relationship with and define that relationship. Later, someone else can link that NPC to their own PC, or to another PC, or to another NPC. It gets a bit convoluted, but it builds a web of interconnected characters and locations based on everyone's creative input. So I don't usually worry too much about defining characters and their relationships early on. It tends to change and grow during the creation process.

Well I for one have a very solid idea for an Elderborn, in case that helps.

Just so everyone is aware - there are no limitations or restrictions - everyone can start with the same origin and it wouldn't hurt the game at all.

I'm not sure how appropriate commentary is before I know whether there's enough slots to join, but a thought caused by those questions (particularly in the Outsider and Celestial Creation context) is what is the world like? A lot of that will influence what sorts of pantheons are available, and what sort of forces are at play.

E.g. the possible pantheons and the context of relations between cultures and deities would probably look very very different in a futuristic Battlestar Galactica setting where gods rarely interact with creation directly, an ancient-classical Hellenic setting where Olympians are displacing the Titans and/or Cthonics, in America where the local pantheons are being driven underground by the Abrahamic one, in old Japan when the government is trying hard to prevent Shinto and Buddhism from mixing, and so on.