cyhwuhx.comRole-playing Inception
(Some very light spoilers.)
© 2010 Warner Bros.
It’s bloody obvious ain’t it? Inception is just perfect as a role-playing game.
Wandering around dreamscapes trying to rob the target of an idea or trying to put an idea in him is great quest material. And it becomes a great group-effort if you try to ‘go deeper’. The film’s premise alone is a good match for a pen and paper role-playing game with dice.
But it becomes even better when you start to realize the film neatly defined the player classes or roles for you. You have ‘Extractor’, ‘Architect’, ‘Chemist’ and a few others. Each one having very specific skills allowing for specific interaction within the game. And that game itself is split into two parts: the preparation in which you use real-life rules and the extraction or inception itself which is where things can go wild.
It’s easier on the game master, but at the same time it’s also more complex. The architect (or the dreamer) is the one guarding the setting, while the game master simply makes sure the players don’t go overboard. During all that, the game master needs to keep track of possibly multiple dreamscapes. The target could be played by the game master as well, but as the film itself showed: why not let him be one of the players?
I don’t know if anyone has picked up the rights already (a cursory Google search only reveals fellow nut-cases agreeing on the fit), but I can imagine publishers being interested at the very least.
And let’s face it: when you strip it of all the rules, the dice and the paperwork, a role-playing game is nothing more than a shared dream. Bloody obvious.