In one of my RPG designs, I have the main character land (maybe crash land) a small starship on some exotic planet that they weren't expecting to, they are alone and must at first try to survive. They may be in the future from time-dilation. I have a bunch of the main game story at least somewhat filled out, including your old starship getting retrofitted with a new faster than light engine, so I can cover several planets in my in game (The FTL travel and any problems it may cause are a different subject). However I don't have any reason why the main character was on this starship to begin with. Some of the ideas I have thought to pursue include No backstory: Explain this away with amnesia or something. Unless I come up with some twist I am not going to go with this since it is so overused and seems like cheating. Another one I am seriously considering is that the character is a brilliant inventor, and one of your test runs went wrong. However this wouldn't make any sense if the character you made doesn't have good technical skills. There's also the scenarios where You stole the starship You snuck into someone else's starship and accidentally launched it off. You hitchhiked on the spaceship and the pilot died. I have also thought of just allowing the player to chose the backstory from some list during character creation. I'm not sure if the effort is worth it, and if I will be missing something that can add to the emotional appeal by focusing on just one.

Heya!

Quote: In one of my RPG designs, I have the main character land (maybe crash land) a small starship on some exotic planet that they weren't expecting to, they are alone and must at first try to survive. They may be in the future from time-dilation.

Sounds like a crash land situation. I don't really see a "maybe" there.

Quote: The FTL travel and any problems it may cause are a different subject.

I think it's been used enough that you can be fine not explaining it.

Quote: No backstory: Explain this away with amnesia or something. Unless I come up with some twist I am not going to go with this since it is so overused and seems like cheating.

Er, Kind of. It gives a "mysterious past" feel, but the character suddenly doesn't feel like a character. If he has a blank memory, something must be done very quickly to establish his personality, or else he'll seem like a numbskull. That's just me talking.

Metroid's Samus Aran normally ends up obligated to go to an alien world normally to prevent something from becoming too powerful and disrupting galactic order. She normally lands her craft cooly before getting out to shoot the hell out of wildlife, refusing to go back until her work is done. (Or until you realize there's a power up you need to get on the other side of the damn planet. [disturbed]) Leela, Bender and Fry from Futurama just make deliveries with comical obstacles to overcome. Why do I bring these up? Because it might help your story if you make your characters have some reason to even be obligated to get on or off their ship. You subconsciously knew this, but it may help to stress it.

Quote: You hitchhiked on the spaceship and the pilot died.

Something like this seems fine. You could imitate the fantastic series that is Red Dwarf and have characters that simply work with the ship's crew with little idea about the suits they actually run things. Kill off everyone but these characters and crash the ship. Make the characters try to find out what happened. Red Dwarf's Lister and Rimmer were only going to work before their lives changed. How it happened was that Lister act of bringing his pregnant cat (which hasn't been checked for bacteria, endangering the sterile crew) earned him suspension through cryogenics. The crew died from a radiation leak, and Lister wasn't let out until the machine holding him was released by the ship's dimwitted computer, Holly. After realizing everyone he knew was gone, he was greeted by a hologram of his pompous superior, Rimmer and an evolved descendant of his cat that actually ended up human-like. Their life goes on from there in hopes of the ship making it back to a planet for them to live on, preferably Earth. Since the ship was drifting, this proves difficult.

I feel that Red Dwarf is your best bet for seeing what I think is some of the most clever writing of the 80s and 90s. I suggest you see it both for your story and a good laugh. (I'm not saying your story has to be a comedy [smile])

Quote: I have also thought of just allowing the player to chose the backstory from some list during character creation.

It would be an exorbitant amount of work for programmers, but that sounds like a cool idea for future games.

Hope this helps, and cheers!
-Zyro

[Edited by - zyrolasting on December 12, 2009 3:08:46 PM]

Thanks Zyro

You nailed what I am trying to do. I need the character to be motivated about something at the beginning of the game. The backstory is just one part of it.

I like your example of Samus from the Metroid series.

I'm not trying to be nearly as comical as Red Dwarf, but it does give me some more ideas.

I'm glad to have helped. Good luck! Fire over a PM if you'd like if you have any more questions. [smile]

The first thing I thought of is that it was just a routine cruise that swung too close to a black hole and experienced massive time dilation before it pulled out. The player's character could have been doing anything at all before this cruise. In the first couple minutes of the intro movie or something, you can build up an aura of tension from the player not wanting to abandon their project, but having some other responsibility somewhere else. On the way back, they have the black-hole encounter, and when he gets back to his original planet, its 150 years later and he doesn't know what has happened.

A lot of plots and "projects" will fit into this framework. This is the point where I usually work on something else and wait for inspiration. Something like this, maybe: The PC was working on preventing the political takeover of the world by some basically evil group. There is some task he has to do to complete this, like unearthing a relic, or foiling some plan of the organization. There are other people helping him, but he is the nucleus of the team. But he has to leave temporarily to go to another planet to fulfill an official obligation or something. On the way back, one of their engines explodes, sending them careening and .9c towards a black hole. When they bring emergency engines online, they've swung around the black hole within hundreds of yards of the event horizon. When they arrive, the organization has successfully taken over. The only hope of overturning the evil regime is to pick up the threads and finish his work, but he has no idea if any of the threads survived, or if the regime found out about the work and destroyed all traces. As he investigates, it turns out that it was rescued by rebels, and the essential pieces are in hiding somewhere. He could have friends from the ship, who will have nothing to do but help him, if they dare, and if they survived the black hole. Off goes the plot...

Oops, I see now you wanted them to be alone. They could actually land on the wrong planet, and have to get themselves back to earth, or they could land on an uninhabited portion of Earth. Hope this helps a little bit.

Ocelot, I like the way you think.

The black-hole idea can also help in some other areas of my setting that don't seem to fit.