An opposing voice

It’s always wise to challenge your own assumptions. A strong design can withstand scrutiny, and playing devil’s advocate is the best way to find potential weaknesses before they’re set in stone.

This perspective is delivered here through the voice of a pragmatic producer, focused on player experience and the practical challenges of development.

This is done for the purposes of framing a particular aesthetic perspective.

Excellent work on the GDD. The passion is evident. However, as we move from high-level concept to practical implementation, I have some serious concerns about the core premise. The conflict you’ve identified between your grounded sci-fi setting and your metaphysical ruleset isn’t a strength; it’s a fundamental contradiction that could jeopardize the entire project.

1. Do you feel this conflict I’m perceiving is real?

Yes, and “conflict” is too gentle a word. It’s a schism. You’re essentially trying to build two different games that are actively hostile to each other’s premises, and forcing them to share the same space.

• One game is a grounded, relatable sci-fi RPG. It’s about “a blue collar captain of a freighter,” “a botanist… in the immediate aftermath of a starship crash,” and a “galactic empire with all the pitfalls of exercising power at scale.” This game relies on the player understanding and relating to human-scale motivations: survival, greed, loyalty, fear of death, the struggle for a better life.

• The other game is a high-concept philosophical simulator about transcendent beings collecting metaphysical essence (Eidos) across lifetimes. The stakes are cosmic, the timeline is eternal, and the concerns are abstract.

These two games are not in a productive tension; they are in a constant battle for the player’s attention and for the narrative’s soul.

2. Is it significant?

It is so significant that it risks making your world incomprehensible and your gameplay weightless.

Your friend’s note about “full awareness” of reincarnation is the critical flaw. If everyone, or even a significant portion of society, is truly aware that they are immortal souls on an endless journey, then the entire foundation of your “grounded sci-fi” setting crumbles.

• Motivation becomes nonsensical: Why would a “blue collar captain” care about making a living if they know their true purpose is gathering Eidos and that this life is just one of thousands? Why would they fear pirates? The worst the pirates can do is kill them, which is just a cosmic inconvenience that leads to a new life. The struggle you want to portray becomes trivial.

• World-building becomes impossible: How do you write a compelling political thriller about a galactic empire when the emperor could reincarnate as the janitor cleaning his throne room, and everyone knows it? All the structures we understand—dynasties, laws, social classes, economic systems—are predicated on the finality of a single life. Without that, you can’t have “grounded” anything. You are forced to create a society so alien that the player has no point of reference.

The metaphysical system is so overwhelmingly powerful that it doesn’t just “influence” the grounded world; it annihilates its premises.

3. Is it positive or negative in its implications to the cohesion of the overall vision?

From this perspective, it is a major negative that undermines the cohesion of the player experience.

1. The Problem of Stakes: Your core loop states that players will “survive by any means” and that death is “almost inevitable.” But the metaphysics tell the player that survival is temporary and death is meaningless progression. This creates a massive dissonance. The game asks you to care deeply about your Incarnation’s life while the game’s rules simultaneously scream that this life doesn’t matter, only the Eidos you extract from it. The emotional stakes for the player are gutted.

2. The “Everything is Faith” Escape Hatch is a Trap: Your initial reaction—that awareness is “subject to Faith”—is a dangerous one. If every time a logical inconsistency appears in your world-building, the answer is “a wizard did it” (or in this case, “a Faith re-interpreted it”), you create a world with no solid ground. It becomes an excuse to not do the hard work of building a consistent, believable setting. Cohesion requires rules. If Faith can arbitrarily change how people react to a fundamental Fact of the universe, then there are no rules, and the world will feel flimsy and arbitrary to the player.

3. The Narrative Cohesion Paradox: You are setting up a paradox where the more a player understands your game’s “true” metaphysical rules, the less they will be able to believe in the “grounded” stories you want to tell. The story of the desperate botanist is compelling. But the story of a timeless cosmic entity, who is just pretending to be a botanist for an afternoon to farm some Eidos before their next life as a god-king, is not. Your system encourages the player to adopt a perspective that makes your own narrative scenarios feel like a hollow charade.

In summary, the devil’s advocate position is this: You are trying to have your cake and eat it too. You cannot have a “grounded, modern” setting and also a “universally known” truth of reincarnation. The two premises are mutually exclusive. You must choose.

• Option A: Embrace the Alien. Ditch the “grounded” aspect. Fully commit to building the truly bizarre society that would result from this metaphysical reality. Make the game entirely about navigating this alien culture.
• Option B: Obscure the Truth. Make the Anamnesis cycle a mystery. A contested Faith. A hidden truth known only to a few, or something the player only discovers over a long arc. This preserves the stakes of the “grounded” world and makes the metaphysical discovery more impactful.

By trying to do both, you risk creating a game that is neither a relatable RPG nor a coherent philosophical simulation, leaving the player confused and disconnected from a world at war with itself.