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# System prepended metadata

title: 'plorQuest: Core Elements Outline'

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# plorQuest Project Overview
*As of September 14, 2023*
![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/HyNdH3gk6.jpg)

## Foundational Principles

- **Purpose**: 
  - Return to the motivating principles behind the project.
  - Map the relations between various variables for creating an MVP.
  
- **Initial Motivations**:
  - **Central Character in RPG Universe**: 
    - The aim is to place **plor** at the center of the RPG universe. 😛
    - plor has strong but loosely held opinions, ideal for generative discussions about web3.
    - plor is extremelty entertaining and informative when approached with a certain kind of objective distance.
    
  - **Disentangling Web3 Metaphors**:
    - Address the idea of web3 and crypto as a 'game' and its relation to game theory.
    - Explore the compulsion to gamify on-chain mechanics, economics, and social dynamics.
    - The idea is to literally play a game as a starting point for elaborating web3 metaphors, rather than the other way around.
  
  - **Community Building and Education**:
    - Aim for public, fun building as a framework that could serve as educational scaffolding for various communities.
    - Gather a community around these first principles, akin to how crypto communities formed, such as around the Moloch meme.

  - **Deep Inquiry and Fun**:
    - Continue asking deep questions about identity, purpose, and meaning while avoiding distractions present in the web3 ecosystem.

## Primary Elements of plorQuest

1. Game Components
2. Character Creation
3. NFT Variables

### Game Components

- **The Game Itself**: 
  - **Purpose**: To allow players to "speed run" a scenario involving coordination complexity.
  - **Scenario**: 
    - Created and written by the Game Master (starting with plor)
    - Provides enough detail to guide meta-level action and immerse players.
  - **Real-Time Dynamics**: 
    - Both players and the Game Master are improvising in real-time.
  
- **Ultimate Goal**: 
  - Achieve successful coordination or learn from failure/stalemate.
  - Create and archive replayable scenarios.
  - Serve as an allegorical or archetypal model for web3 coordination.

#### Artifacts Related to the Game

- **Game Board**: 
  - Informs the space where actions and events occur.
  - Creates an objective space to align GM with players.

- **Game Scenario**:
  - The story written and told by the Game Master.
  - Includes objects, creatures, and world events necessary for progressing the story, set before game play begins.

- **Game Master Role**: 
  - Initially a single person guiding the game (plor).
  - Could eventually be decentralized into:
    - A council.
    - Multiple "schizophrenic soothsayer" voices.
    - A DAO.

## Characters, Creation, and Development

### Character Components

- **Purpose**: Players need to create an avatar to embody in-game.
- **Skill Attributes (Mechanics)**:
  - Skills, mobility, perception, actions in the game.
- **Backstory Attributes**:
  - Origin story that informs orientation, motivation, and decisions in the world.

### Character Creation Process

- **Onboarding Stepper Flow**:
  - Inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons character creation sheet.
  - Consists of questions determining mechanics and backstory.
  - Initial design to be simple and fast; future iterations may offer more complexity and customization.
  
- **Unresolved Issues**:
  - How to limit backstory elements to ensure they have utility for LARPing.
  - How the backstory will guide player performance. Some guidelines for how backstory turns into roleplaying constraints, either on-chain or according to game rules somehow.
  - Accountability for deviating from character performance, ie: identifying when a player is out of character and how this affects gameplay, if at all.

### Player Motivations and Scenarios

- **Interaction with Game Master's Scenarios**:
  - Direct mechanical correlation with backstory elements.
  - Social dynamics where the Game Master improvises to suit characters.
  
### Visual Representation and NFTs

- **Initial MVP**:
  - Limited artwork, superficial visual differences between characters, e.g., color filters.
  
- **Future Considerations**:
  - Visual representation of skill attributes.
  - Visual representation of backstory attributes.
  - Visual changes based on in-game actions (e.g., scars, emotions).
  - Visual changes based on leveling up.
  - Visual representations of items, new skills, factions/alignments, traumatic experiences, etc.
  
## On-Chain Mechanics / NFT Considerations

#### Essential Considerations

- **Ownership of Content**: 
  - Unique NFTs created for each character, containing all relevant character information.
  - Accumulated experience of that character that provides level-up utility.
  - Unique games/maps that may belong to a particular character.
  - World artifacts like weapons, armor, and inventory items that provide in-game utility (modify attributes).
  
- **What is On-Chain and What isn't**: 
  - Deliberation on the necessity and significance of on-chain elements. Does everything need to be on-chain?
  - How on-chain elements facilitate deeper thinking about web3 principles, utility, waste/excess, UX of non-web3 natives, etc.
  - Goal is to selectively decide what elements need to be on-chain.
  - Evaluates how on-chain elements serve the primary goals:
    1. Having fun while "speed running" game-theoretical scenarios.
    2. Challenging and refining web3 metaphors.
    3. Increasing fidelity in the design of gamified web3 applications across the whole ecosystem.

## Afterward & Secondary Considerations

While these are secondary considerations, they are nonetheless important aspects that should be borne in mind as the project evolves. 

#### Governance and User Empowerment

- **Moloch DAO & DAOhaus Interface**: 
  - Encourage familiarity with on-chain governance through DAOhaus and Moloch DAO contracts.
  - This is under the hood, empowering governance. The game is not literally played via the DAO UI though.
  
- **User Experience**: 
  - Make the onboarding process smooth and accessible for new users to web3, ie: account abstraction with integrity.
  - Reduce number of transactions to optimize for gameplay.
  - Introduce guides, tool tips, and other educational elements at every stage.
  
- **Ownership**: 
  - Ultimate goal is for players to own part of the protocol, fostering a sense of ownership and stake in the world they are helping to build.
  - This is a core principle, but largely happens under the hood.
  - Need to incorporate these principles into the lore of the game scenarios.
  
#### Security and Trust

- **Decentralization & Forkability**: 
  - Start from an open-source and collectively-owned IP model but explore ways to manage bootlegging, canonization, permissions, and trust.
  
- **Security**: 
  - Focus on building just enough security to mitigate major risks so the project team and/or players cannot rug each other, allowing the core team to focus on gameplay and community building.
  - This might involve progressive decentralization and/or some rigid permissioning.
  - Goal is to avoid making the game about locating security weakness, but to take these considerations off the table completely.
  
#### Economics

- **Monetization**: 
  - Fair launch NFTs for sale, encouraging open-source development beyond the core team, and supporting secondary markets for the generated content.
  - Must avoid the perverse incentives distracting from the primary social/cultural/educational goals!
  
- **Balance & Restraint**: 
  - ***The core team aims to make just enough to potentially focus full-time on this project.*** It’s about balancing sustainable funding with ethical considerations against greed.
  
- **Play-to-Earn or Play-to-Own**: 
  - Incentivizing players to engage with the game, perhaps even making a living out of it, thereby fostering a deeper investment in the world and the community.
  - This is a design consideration from the beginning, but likely a future feature state that we work towards.

## First Use-Case - Raid Guild

### Introduction and Alignment

We identify Raid Guild as an ideal first community to engage with this project for several reasons:

1. **DnD Aligned Lore**: Raid Guild's existing narrative and cultural investment offer a fertile ground for the game's initial incarnation.
2. **RG Experiences Numerous Coordination Failures**: While tailored for highlighting and solving problems for Raid Guild, the game is not limited to, nor primarily for, Raid Guild's branding.
3. **Resource-Rich Community**: From development to design and testing, Raid Guild's community offers a ready pool of talent and participants.

### Game Scenarios & Coordination Failures

Raid Guild experiences frequent coordination failures. Leveraging these in the game allows us to:

1. Make these failures explicit.
2. Conduct high-fidelity retrospectives.
3. Transform these learnings into playable scenarios.
4. Engage the community in pseudo-UX testing.
5. Facilitate a sort of oral history where the community reflects back their own narrative, negating the need for formal written reports.

**Next Steps**: Understanding Raid Guild's coordination failures and transforming them into game scenarios.

### Character Development

RG already embraces a D&D aesthetic, we have classes and attributes ready to define:

1. **Class Definitions**: Decide on the game roles based on the classes.
2. **Artwork**: Determine the SVG layers needed for the initial art and choose an artist for creating these. Horacio? Felipe?
3. **NFT Utility within Raid Guild**: Further utility could be extracted from these NFTs within the Raid Guild community.

**Note**: While character attributes may appear as a chicken-and-egg problem with game scenarios, we propose focusing first on the latter to inform the former. ie: The character trait customization will be determined by the utility that they offer in playing through specific game theory complexities and avoid cosmetic features.

#### On-Chain Mechanics

- We have Raid Guild’s DAO, tokens, and a Discord server already operational to experiment with the NFT utility.
- Lots of potential overlap with the RG Character Sheets RIP, to help them define and address problems.

**Note**: This section is left intentionally vague as the technical specifics should follow the game's social and character-building needs, avoiding the 'engineering-first' bias commonly seen in crypto projects.

