If it ain't Broke How can You Fix It?

People make the world they live in a complicated place. Not to get philosophical or haughty, but people draw lines of separation based on ideology, appearance, location of birth and familial history. We aren't discussing the rights or wrongs of this, we are noting that it fractures the people in the world and so breaks the "world" itself. This was the mindset that we took when designing the setting of our game.

With the system in place, we knew what the limits of mankind were and expanded on the potential of the players who will in all likelihood have powers that cause mankind's potential to be left in the dust. We noted how with the full bodied social conflict system in place, we could have a silver tongue politician slide into power based entirely on charisma or emotional manipulation. That leader, with greater than human charisma and intellect, could possibly create drastic, sweeping changes to the hearts and minds of people and save the world from itself!

So we broke the world.

We took proverbial pipes, chains, whips, hammers, whipped cream cans and bottles (again, entirely proverbial) to the structure of the world. We created organizations that wanted multiple, sometimes opposing, results and rewards. We created people that were polar and opposing, wanting what others found detestable and tried to block things that others found to be beneficial.

Then we corrupted the world.

We corrupted those in power and polluted the morals of those that make decisions, we made a zero-sum game of most decisions so anytime someone "wins", everyone else loses. Finally, we put characters of equal skill working in all directions, opposing everyone else.

The result is a world that teeters on a daring and dangerous event horizon.

The corrupt threaten to bring people down into the dirt, forever blinded to their potential for greatness. Starving for more and more, thrashing like monsters of myth and legend, for scraps.

The selfless seek to save the world from itself and to move the people to their greatest possible futures, on this world and beyond! Moving past a world of consumption and quarreling over resources and instead devoting the heights of mankind's thoughts and efforts towards a future rivaling any science fiction setting.

Either result is currently a valid possibility in game. For a short time, we regretted it. The corruption, the fear, the frustration in and outside halls of power, they echoed too much the complaints of politics in the real world and who wants to play a game to get more dashes of real life?

We let those feelings pass. The methods of power have to buckle and bend, bloated ideas that crush those beneath itself are absolutely the way for us to go because we realized, it is only when the world is broken that those who truly want things to be better can rise to fix it (or go out in a snuffing blaze of EXP riddled glory).