v1.0
v1.0
The idea behind "Just Trust Me" is to have a short-run campaign wherein the players simply don't know what to expect. At first glance, this is our own world, and our own time - give or take a decade or two. The characters may well be perfectly ordinary citizens. At the very least, they're not spell-slinging wizards, sword-swinging barbarians, caped superheroes, alien avengers, vampire hunters, or any such thing ... at least, not that they're aware of.
Through the course of the adventure, some sort of mystery will be unraveled. Most likely, some sort of strange event will occur, to set off a chain of events. Could it be that aliens are behind this event? Or perhaps the supernatural? Maybe our protagonists don't even know the full truth about themselves ... or each other. Perhaps some strange event will happen that will grant our heroes super powers. Or perhaps they'll find themselves faced with the unenviable task of having to take on an ancient horror from another dimension, testing the very limits of their abilities - and their sanity.
Finding out what in the world (this one, or some other) is going on here is at least half the fun.
created 23 Jun 2003.
It is something of a misnomer to refer to this as a "campaign," or a "setting." Rather, it's more of a concept. The basic idea is to start with what appears on the outside to be our own world, though perhaps with a tweak here or there. But behind the scenes, something is out of the ordinary. Perhaps the protagonists, when they were children, were all subjects of a government-sponsored genetic engineering program. Now, years later, an event will happen that will trigger their super powers. Or, perhaps dinosaurs are not truly extinct from the world, and the "Loch Ness Monster" is more than just a floating log in a blurry photograph. Or, maybe UFOs are real, and our heroes will have the misfortune of encountering one. Or perhaps vampires, witches, werewolves, bogeymen ... they're all real! As much as we've tried to push them into the realm of fairytale, they're lurking in the shadows of reality, preying upon those who won't be missed....
Whatever the case, each plotline is its own self-contained story. There is no experience or advancement of characters, per se, due to the limited scope of each adventure ... and the fact that each of these stories might as well take place in "alternate Earths," entirely separate from each other. This isn't a setting where heroes get more powerful, accumulate treasure and magic items, and advance in "character level." Rather, the point is to figure out the mystery ... and then, perhaps, survive to tell the tale!
One necessity of this "hush-hush" approach on the plot is to keep the matter of character creation fairly abstract. After all, if the characters all have secret super powers, it would hardly be any surprise, if they have to assign points to their special powers during the character creation process.
Therefore, a lot of character creation is in the hands of the Game Master. You get to come up with a character description and back story within the confines of the setting given to you. To help in defining your character, you get a questionnaire of various aspects that might make up your character's "statistics," and then you are given the chance to order these factors in order of prominence. Some of these factors may be benefits, indicating skills, contacts, station in life, et cetera. Some of them might be drawbacks or weaknesses. It's up to the Game Master to go through this list, as you've ordered it, to try to figure out what is most prominent about your character, what flaws might balance out your benefits (if you otherwise would be "over-powered" compared to the rest of the players), and generally to try to make sure that everyone has strengths and weaknesses enough so that everyone has a chance to be involved in the plot ... and nobody has it too easy.
Of course, a list of things like your character's profession, hobbies, religion, political alignment, favorite color, et cetera may or may not fully flesh out the important points (and a lot of them may, ultimately, do little other than to add a bit of color to your character description). So, in addition to the questionnaire, a new player will probably get a list of abstract questions. These questions may or may not relate to the plotline. Some of them may deliberately be red herrings. Or, they may be designed to get certain responses from certain players ... but not in the way one might expect. There's really no telling what the Game Master is up to, so your best bet is just to be creative, and use this as an opportunity to flesh out your character, and have fun doing it!
A lot of the plot is going to be determined by your decisions, and how the Game Master thinks that things should happen in response to those decisions. Some of the time, however, the results may not be entirely deterministic; the Game Host may call upon a random number generator to add a bit of chance to the equation.
Most of the time, this is indicated by the Game Master asking the player to "roll 1d20." On SinaiMUCK, this is accomplished by typing the command "roll 1d20". This will randomly generate a number from 1 to 20, broadcasting it to the room, but with an "OOC" tag, so the cambots won't record the result.
It's entirely up to the Game Master, as to how he or she chooses to interpret the result. As a general rule of thumb, a low number is good, and a high number is bad. A "20" is almost always some sort of critical failure, and a roll of "1" is almost always an outstanding success. After all, if the Game Master asks you to roll a die, then no matter how things look, there has to be some chance of success, and some chance of failure, no matter how large or small.
Now, any time you take an action with an uncertain outcome that may well involve a die roll, it may well be that your character should have a pretty good idea of the chances of success. For instance, let's say that you are playing a sharpshooter who is going to try to take out a terrorist holding a woman hostage. It's a very tricky shot. But how tricky? If you as a player knew that there was likely only a 50/50 chance of saving that woman by doing such a stunt ... would you still take the shot? Well, that's for you to decide. But it would certainly make a difference if you had an idea that on that 1d20 roll, you instead would only succeed on a 5 or less ... or perhaps you were so certain of the shot that you knew that you'd fail only on a 20.
It's up to the Game Master (of course!) to set the difficulty, and to decide whether you have any idea at all what the difficulty might be. In a measured situation like that, it doesn't hurt to ask the Game Master (out of character) before you take the action. You may be told that, no, you have no idea of the chances of success. But you just might get some useful information, by taking the time to stop and think about it.
But never fear! Your success or failure in this campaign is not wholly determined by the fickle fortune of dice. Your choices do make a difference. You may be able to bypass random factors entirely, or perhaps have a bonus to your roll figured in, because of extra time you took, or other favorable conditions.
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