I had a thought for a con-game or short-arc, perhaps devoid of system, but based off of JRRM, and posted it on Story Games. It's Philip K. Dick-esque in nature.

I later posted the memory-swap rules, made "Plug-and-play", so you could put them into any game, or have them as your sole rules. I seem to be heading currently in the road of looking at older designs and seeing what can be taken from them and used elsewhere.

Anyway, these are reposts.

The idea and some background is as follows: In a future-world, there is a war, an alien invasion, rebels fighting against Earth Prime, what have you. People sign on to the army to pilot mecha in order to fight the enemies of Earth (go Voices of a Distant Star!).
There are two catches: Interfacing fully with the Mecha requires a drug which has the side effect of your memories mixing with those of others, both other pilots and random memories caught from the collective subconsciousness. The other catch is that if you volunteer to pilot these mecha, you cannot retire until you earn a large sum of money (in the form of bounties, go Area 88) To combat this, some of the people piloting mecha are "Prisoners", who as their sentence are sent and forced to pilot these mecha, being injected this drug.

Since no one has returned from the front yet, or if they have, they are sequestered from the public and media (often by their own choice, perhaps by a semi-martial law restricting the flow of information), and some rumors circulate about many such prisoners being people who have been framed, or committed very low-key crimes (theft? neglect?), one character will be a news-reporter who volunteered in order to find the truth of the matter, and get it back to Earth.
Complications are abundant: First, the prisoners will have been there longer, and not all their memories will be their own. The reporter will also have to remain there for a period of time after getting his interviews, and his memories may not be something he could trust after a few missions; is he a reporter or a murderer, is he an innocent, a framed person, or guilty? Would he even retain memory of his mission? Perhaps one of the Prisoners would get his mission, and what are we if not our memories? If a murderer loses the memories that made him a criminal, is he still a murderer? Is an "innocent" person with the memory of a murder he committed not guilty?

After I had the idea, especially the original mission, I thought it reminded me of Philip K. Dick's Lies Inc. which I oddly enough remembered as "Truth Inc.", and on further reflection, the whole game seems very Dick-esque to me, A Scanner Darkly, anyone?

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( Plug-n-play Rules )

Unlike some of my other designs, Juiced Rider is designed to be an RPG; a game which also has role-playing in it. And while the game portion is certainly fun, or so it seems to my quite Game-centered mind, I thought that perhaps there isn't enough RP going on:
You go on missions, and those who don't go on missions get to set a scene to RP, but what about fall-out from missions, or if you're a Prisoner and thus go out on almost every mission, or have a hole in your pocket that needs to be filled?

Here's another sort of scene, designed for that purpose: Washing the Tears:
After a Mission, the pilots which participated in it may engage in a limited number of scenes. The player who went last picks 1 or 2 players who will be in a scene with him, after the mission debriefing, then the next person, who went next to last picks 1 or 2 other people who may be in a scene with him.
Each pilot may only be in one Washing the Tears scene. This is where you confront someone or thank them for their deeds during the mission.

How does that seem? As cool as Painting the Fabric?

The rules as they stand state a couple of things:
While on missions, Zero Mind must be higher than Temporary Self.
When Temporary Self goes to 0, reduce (permanent) Self by 1.

As the rules stand, there's no reason not to have Temporary Self at 1 and put all the beads into Zero Mind, which translate into Control (effectiveness in combat).

There are two options I'm thinking of:
1. For every bead you move from Self to Mind Zero, you roll a die after the mission, and on a roll of 1 you lose 1 point of Self. This seems a little steep to me and would turn the game into something more fatalistic than grim.
Possibly solution, lose 1 Self for every two dice which end up with 1, but then moving 1 dice is absolutely risk free.
2. For every bead you move, you roll a die after the mission, If you rolled one 1, switch a memory with the memory pool, if you rolled two 1's, delete a Morality trait and write a new one. If you rolled 3 1s or above, do both and lose 1 Self.


Hm, maybe take the second but alter it, no dice rolling. You know what you're going to risk, what you're going to give up in order to be in the mission, and afterwards you pay the price, not the risk.

Thoughts, ideas?