System
Like most roleplaying games, InSpectres has a method of conflict resolution using dice. However, InSpectres uses an adversarial system in which the player describes what happens if the result is good and the game master if the roll is bad. If the player succeeds, they earn "franchise dice", and when enough are collected the current case is solved. Players can at any time use confessionals, in the style of reality television, to add traits to other players' characters or steer events their way.
InSpectres was written as a solution to the whodunit problem in role-playing games. In any kind of investigative adventure, the players follow a series of clues provided by the game master, which eventually enables them to find out what happened and "who done it". Managing the injection of clues into such a game can be quite difficult; if they come too fast or easy, the players will get bored or simply sit back and enjoy the game master unrolling the plot for them, if the clues are too hard to find, the players will become frustrated and spend their energy following dead ends. InSpectres deals with this problem, by allowing the players to invent their own clues, while the game mechanics regulate the flow of clues to give the players time to develop them and come up with an interesting story.
Read more about this topic: In Spectres
Famous quotes containing the word system:
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“While the system of holding people in hostage is as old as the oldest war, a fresher note is introduced when a tyrannic state is at war with its own subjects and may hold any citizen in hostage with no law to restrain it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“It is not easy to construct by mere scientific synthesis a foolproof system which will lead our children in a desired direction and avoid an undesirable one. Obviously, good can come only from a continuing interplay between that which we, as students, are gradually learning and that which we believe in, as people.”
—Erik H. Erikson (20th century)