wtf?

Upon Jeff’s recommendation, I took a look at WTF?, a game written by Daniel Solis that was included in the Nopress RPG Anthology.

WTF? is either a minigame or a metagame. I’m not sure if it makes a difference. It might be both. It is billed as a competitive RPG, but I didn’t find the reward mechanics particularly compelling.

What is WTF? It is a game that takes my first approach to what I describe as the lone wolf problem without apparently being concerned about that problem at all. It is a multi-player game that casts one player as the protagonist and the rest as GMs (in this case, called Directors).

It explicitly doesn’t, however, do this to tell a compelling story about a single individual. The game would, I think, work (with a very small amount of modification) with multiple players portraying characters. The primary innovation of WTF? is its treatment of multiple Directors. This treatment is set up so that various people can provide wildly divergent narrative elements.

While interesting and potentially a lot of fun, this probably isn’t a viable road for me to go down given my goals.

To be contrary, though, let’s explore it a bit.

I’ll assume one player is playing a PC with a variety of aspects/agendas/whatever. What if, at any given time, one of those aspects is dominant? What if the character sees the world through somewhat different eyes depending upon the dominant aspect? What if each of these aspects is represented (in whole or part) by a different GM having primary narrative control?