Those all sound useful. One thing that might be important to agree on–how are we going to do dialogue, if at all? We should be consistent across stories. I’m a fan of Threaded Conversation for playing, but less so for writing with it.
Not going to be of much help, here. My system for dialogue is heavily dependent on tracking which scene of the story you’re in. I’m not versed in Threaded Dialogue, but I’ll check it out.
Why not do basic Ask/tell/show dialogue? It’s easy and consistent.
That’s fine. We want to keep the systems simple enough, so there isn’t any problems between stories. If there’s heavily story-based narration or character dialogue, scenes work great for that.
That’s what I had in mind.
Okay, that works.
Craftian, what is the basic idea of your setting? Mine will probably be fantasy as well and I’d like there to be significant differences between the settings (so that they actually seem separate from each other).
I changed my mind. I wanna make a castle.
Ah, so you want yours to be fantasy as well? In that case there will need to be radical differences between the settings. If Craftian’s is Lovecraftian horror then one of ours could be Vancian low fantasy, perhaps, and the other Tolkein-ian high fantasy. Do you have a preference?
Tolkein-ian fantasy. totally
Okay, I’ll try to come up with something more Vancian. One nice thing about low fantasy is that in some places it can easily cross over into slight science fiction, which will serve to distinguish it even more.
I’m thinking dark fantasy for me – more Michael Moorcock’s Elric series than Lovecraft, but it will have some of that. There’s going to be a pretty cool mechanic right from the beginning, that will affect the player character, and will be different for every player. I don’t want to talk about it too much, yet, because I don’t want to influence what you guys are doing.
As far as setting – do whatever you want. I don’t think there’s going to be too much overlap in our content, until we start getting further into the story. What would be cool is if we end up having fantasy, steampunk, modern, and sci-fi settings, and somehow tie everything together.
Yeah – there’s no reason for you to take a backseat on this one, just because you’re editing it. You’re probably trying to keep the workload on yourself lighter, but since we’re doing stand alone stories rather than a patchwork project, that job is going to be a lot lighter, anyway. If you want to just craft settings, go for it – someone will use it, somehow. If you want to do your own story, go for it!
I sent both of you a PM with some of my ideas. Please tell me if you think they’re viable, I don’t want to get too far before discovering that the game mechanic doesn’t work.
One more thing to consider – should we allow player customization at the beginning of the game? I think we could have a faceless, Myst-like protagonist, but that’s somewhat limiting in NPC responses. We might want to allow gender choice and some RPG customization at the beginning, to broaden the field of possibilities.
I like games which have at least a choice of gender, but I’m not sure what RPG stats would be selected at the beginning. Do you mean something like a choice of strength, dexterity, intelligence, constitution, wisdom, or charisma as your main talent?
Hokay, where and how do we sign up? (Only later will I ask for elaboration into just what I have signed up for 8)
As far as I can tell, just post here. 
Yeah! We’re still ironing out some of the details on this, but it looks like we’re going to have some sort of RPG system, with different powers and abilities gained in each story. The coolest thing about this idea is how these carried over abilities will alter puzzles and character interaction in completely unconnected stories. For example, without going into any specific detail (on the public thread), an ability Draconis is coming up with will be a possible solution to one of my puzzles. If you haven’t played his story, you can’t use that solution.
The abilities will have a toggle to disable / enable. I’m going to write a disabled effect for mine, so that if it is called on in another story that doesn’t enable it, there is a mental effect, at least, but it won’t affect anything else in that story, so the author doesn’t have to code for it. However, if they do want to code for it, it opens up new doors and possibilities. So, it’s complete freedom on what you want to write, and freedom of how you want to integrate other people’s stories into your own. The last thing we want to do is try to eventually come up with a main plot to tie everything together, no matter what genre the story is in.
Also, just wanted to throw this idea out there: abilities don’t necessarily have to mean magic, or powers, or anything supernatural. An ability could be as mundane as car repair – if that’s what your story calls for. The point is that no two players will go through the story in the same order, so unlockable solutions will vary, depending on which order you play the stories in. It could be entirely non-linear, and each player’s character will be completely different from other people’s characters, depending on the choices they make, the stories they’ve completed (or failed at, if they offer permanent fail states.) Finally, we can take all of those threads, after the player has won victories on different worlds, in different settings, has made friendships, lost them, fought the good fight, and then put them into three endings, maybe a blue, green, and red one… 
Nah, not exactly. I think we should try to keep this more IF than RPG. More of an RPG-lite. Gender is a must, though, because otherwise there can’t be any romance stories, which is an important genre to have available. Since people have complete control over their worlds, I don’t want my protagonist to shift gender in different stories, or not have one, because I want the feeling that I’m truly building a character as I go, and that its not a faceless avatar, but someone I can identify with. So, I would hope that each story has some branches for each player’s chosen gender.
Anyway, for customization, I think the ability to write in some character details, such as appearance, would be ideal. This appearance might change, based on what happens in each story, though, so the appearance description of each player should have a dynamic element. (Scars, wounds, tattoos, etc., can all be permanent effects, that shouldn’t be lost between stories.) Indexed text would work for this.