-“All artists search. I search for stories, in this post-self age. What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course?”
+“All artists search. I search for stories, in this post-self age. What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course?”
A perfect combination.
In this setting, your story takes place more than a hundred years in the future in a time where humanity has figured out how to upload consciousnesses to a digital world called at first simply the System (a holdover from its early days of secrecy, so vague a name as to keep discussions hard to trace) and later, after a launch of two smaller copies out of the Solar system, Lagrange, Castor, and Pollux.
-Contrary to fears, by the end of the 2100s, System capacity had far outstripped its actual usage. As space grew and grew, the cost of forking and creating sims dropped further and further almost to the point of becoming negligible.
+“Cost”, though? Why would such a thing even exist in such a world?
+Before this rapid expansion of technology, the trend was headed in the opposite direction, with usage increasing faster than capacity. In order to keep the System running smoothly after the advent of forking, a reputation market was set up. One gains reputation (denoted Ŕ) by a variety of means, from creating new objects, sims, or content to interacting with others. The process is largely transparent
The System is not a purely digital haven. It’s not a construct bound by our ideas of some virtual reality. They tried, at first, and some remnants remain from that — new creations or instances are still tagged with a unique hash in the form of eight hexadecimal digits and System denizens still speak of sims and avatars — but that’s not how the System ended up working. When it was first created, those who remained phys-side couldn’t conceptualize it in any other way. Those sys-side, however, knew better. Rather than an analogue to virtual reality, it was more like a consensual dream. What was possible on the System was limited to that which all minds could consensually dream.
+This was, at first, pure chaos. That limit alone was not quite enough: what all were able to imagine did not guarantee that all sys-side actually experienced the same thing, and it wasn’t until late 2110s that work was put in place to ensure that experiences were truly consensual.
+The fact remains, however, that the world has more in common with dreams than with a dream of the physical world than the ‘net.
Each player chooses three Virtues for their character. They pick two that the other characters know but one that they keep secret.
-Note: The MC may ask for the character’s secret virtue, but doesn’t have to!
+Note: The MC may ask for the character’s secret virtue confidentially, but doesn’t have to!
These virtues are things that the character holds to be the most important thing to them, whether it helps them live a fulfilling life or is a goal they strive to achieve. Here are some examples: