Publisher blurb:
Life is a constant struggle to meet your mortgage obligations at the same time as you are helping your parents with Windows, and in the middle of it all your expected to find time for "living."
Lives, Births, Deaths is about "life". From a kind of dramaturgic perspective, life is the ultimate story — inherently conflicted (mortgages/Windows/living), but it is also impossible to see this when you are in the middle of it. And maybe it is a little bit too all over the place. So as a story, life generally sucks. At least from a first-person perspective.
Lives, Births, Deaths is in its own way a continuation or extension of Doubt, which was a game about relationsships. We want to keep using similar models for collaborative storytelling, and experiment with other ways of creating a story than having a very narrow theme.
The game is also a feeble attempt at cross-breeding Jeepform with The Sims — an attempt at everyday drama and kitchen sink realism with minimalist methods and outsourcing the kreative process on the players. We are setting up a few entry parameters and the basic premises. But other than that, the players are calling the shots on this one.
We expect about 1 hour of preparation, and 2-5 hours of playing time, totally depending on the group and the "story" they are going for.
Players:
6 players, 0-1 game master
Duration:
3–6 hours, depending on the players
Capsule definition:
Content created by players, about lives, births and deats. Can be about whatever basically. Needs some fixing.
Premier:
Fastaval, 2008