Wew the Polymath
Viridescent Expo Curator
A bid-based CYOA System
Character Attributes
- Health: A simple status indicator for your physical wellbeing. Encapsulates both physical and mental stability.
- Inventory: Items you possess.
- Equip: Your equipped item. You may only have one. You will choose the best one.
- Class Trajectory: Your development path based on your playstyle. Influences choices.
- Alignment: Your moral tendencies based on your actions. Darker alignment mean darker actions, and visa versa.
- Corruption: How much the world and its forces have changed you. Higher corruption leads to scarier choices.
- Watchers: Powerful entities (and players) who have taken interest in you.
Core Stats
- Physical: Your bodily capabilities - affects combat, stealth, athletics, and endurance. At high levels, you might need to breathe only once per day.
- Mental: Your psychological fortitude - affects magical ability, corruption resistance, and perception. Higher levels allow you to recognize the true nature of reality and even stare into the void unafraid.
- Devotion: Your attunement to Watchers (both in-game entities and players). High Devotion allows your character to understand player bids without rolling and attracts the attention of powerful anomalies. Will also allow multiple bids to chain together.
Bidding System
During voting sessions, players choose from available options (like "1. Hit the goblin") AND have the opportunity to add personal bids - additional actions or outcomes that might occur if their chosen option wins.
Bidding:
Bids are a "yes, and." They can be something your character does in addition to the action you voted on, information, or something that changes a feature of the world. The higher your Devotion, the more these bids can affect the world.
Bidding Types:
- Action Add-ons: “Yes, and then we stab again just to be safe.”
- Meta Knowledge: “Yes, and we know Ohm's law is V = IR, which allows us to solve the circuit.”
- World Features: “Yes, and the sun is eclipsed at that moment.”
- Players vote on main options (Example: "1. Hit the goblin", "2. Kiss the goblin", "3. Run from the goblin")
- When submitting their vote, players may add a bid (a "yes, and" addition).
- If their chosen option wins AND they succeed on a bid roll, their additional suggestion happens. A bid roll is simply rolling a d100 along with your vote. That's it.
- When multiple players vote for the same option but propose different bids, only the bid from the player who rolls highest will be incorporated into the narrative, unless you possess a high devotion stat.
- Your character may refuse player bids that significantly diverge from their Alignment stat.
- Main options: "1. Enter the cave", "2. Climb the mountain", "3. Follow the river"
- Player votes for option 1 and adds bid: "And find a glowing crystal inside." They roll a d100 along with their post.
- If option 1 wins voting AND the player's bid roll succeeds, the character enters the cave AND finds a glowing crystal
- Especially powerful or meta bids simply won't happen regardless of rolls, unless you have a high enough devotion.
Bids can be meta information. Things that are too meta might not take if you don't have a high devotion score. This knowledge will be factored in to future actions, or affect the current one.:
- "This is probably a vampire. Vampires are weak to garlic, and can be killed by staking them in the heart."
- "To solve this equation to unlock the door, I ran this calculation with wolfram alpha. Here is the answer."
- "Here is the wikipedia page to forging steel."
Characters with high Devotion automatically understand even meta-knowledge bids without requiring rolls, potentially chaining compatible bids together.
The Catch:
You aren't the only beings making bids. Anomalous entities, called watchers, can make their own bids with bonus modifiers, and their motivations may not align with your character's wellbeing. A higher Devotion score means watchers can influence your character easier. As players succeed with bids, they may eventually become Watchers themselves, potentially incarnating into the world in mysterious ways.
Last edited:
