Pitch:
Man dreams of the future apocalypse and watches it unfold through his dreams and his daily life.
The game is meant to feel grim, but with hope for the future. Although it centers around the world ending and the apocalypse, it also should show hope for the future and a chance to restart. Hence the problems with the dreaming man's life, and not all of his dreams should be terrible or frightening.
Overall Arc:
A man experiences dreams that take have similar themes to what happens in his life. The main thing that connects these dreams however, is that they all take place in a post-apocalyptic future, and they all chronicle the lives and hardships of those living there.
The role the players would take is in the characters in these dreams. They would slowly learn what the end of the world is like through the man's dreams, and they would learn how it came to happen through the man's life.
As the game goes on, signs of approaching war become more apparent in the news. Conflict between the world's major powers starts slowly escalating until eventually the dreaming man sees the world's demise through his own eyes, and he is torn apart.
He experiences a flashback in the moments before his death where he sees the characters of his dreams. And at that moment, the scene cuts from him to the people he saw in his dream, who are deep underground scrambling to get into their cryotubes.
After an unknown amount of time, they awaken to a changed world. The same one seen through the dreams.
Flow:
The game takes place in two main streams: One is through the life of a main character, "the dreaming man"; one is through the characters chronicled throughout his dreams.
This allows for many tales to be expanded on, because although he is dreaming, these are actual events that happen, and the way the players deal with the different "stages" affects what the world in the aftermath is like.
Function as a VN:
For this to function as a VN, but still have invigorating combat, it would be a good idea to break gameplay into two sections: Normal mode (functioning like a normal VN), and Combat mode (over the top turn-based strategy). This could likely be implemented in 2D with Unity (this is expanded on in Mechanics).
Mechanics:
The original system I intended to be used with this idea is a percentile based system with detailed hit locations for combat, and degrees of success and failure based on how close the rolled number is to the target number (between 1 and 100).
Changing this to work as a VN switches the focus moreso to the story and the actual choices made, rather than action. Because of this, an overhead-view combat mode could be implemented to keep the game exciting. It could use a computerized version of the system originally intended.
To summarize, the system uses initiative and actions for turns. Players have between two and four actions, and their turns are organized by what they roll for initiative. Their actions are merely a counter of how many things they can do in a turn, and they can spend these actions at any point on their turn, or on people's turns below theirs (holding actions). They can reserve actions to use in retaliation to other people, such as dodging out of the way, or parrying a blow, or throwing back a grenade.
Attacking uses only the attackers skill and outside factors, and damage is determined by specific locations (ie right ankle, neck, left shoulder etc.).
The system originally intended for this game is immensely detailed, and I (Reilly) can demo this at one of the meets if anyone is interested in how it works. Either a meeting for this specifically, or a club meeting. This wouldn't be a true demo with story, but rather a utilitarian demo of only the system and how it works.
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