The Blog of Roon

Let’s see how much Game WISH catching up I can do in one post. As usual, I’ve not read the responses so as not to lose my initial gut reactions.

While I’m at it—I know there are Game WISHers who are not using either trackback or comments to point to their entries from Perverse Access Memory. Please do so! I know I’m missing responses I want to read.

WISH 27 asks what a sci-fi RPG has to do to work, and why most current-gen sci-fi RPGs don’t work.

I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with our expectations that “science” will be rigid, cut-and-dried, one-right-answer stuff. That is a bad paradigm to take into roleplaying; it leaves no room for rules fudging and lots of room for rules-lawyering, one of RPGing’s least-enjoyable components.

That said, I can see a sci-fi RPG working. Just not a hard sci-fi RPG. I could see a Hainish RPG (you, too, can be an Observing team on a new planet!), for instance. Could work well. I also think that when some of the ideas regarding emergent behavior and networking percolate through popular culture a bit more, sci-fi RPGs will have a better paradigm to build on.

Sci-fi RPGs, however, will simply have to get past the pages and pages and pages and pages and PAGES of rules regarding gadgetry. If I want to keep track of umpteen statistics about a cool gadget, I’ll play a computer game in which the computer keeps track of them for me. Gadgetry is not what I role-play for. Every single sci-fi RPG I’ve ever seen goes totally overkill on the gadgetry. Is that why they don’t work? Could well be.

WISH 28 asks for three movies that might inspire gamers. Drat it, I don’t watch enough movies to answer this question. I will, however, mention The Dark Crystal, because of its gorgeously-designed setting. I think it important for GMs to keep in mind that setting as well as plot and character can be used to boggle and delight players. The next time you dive into the Monster Manual, don’t just check hit points and attack bonuses. Ask what’s weird and wonderful about a given critter.

I want to do something like this with a character, actually—make the other characters wonder about her, find her opaque, curious, weird—but I haven’t the opportunity at the moment. If, however, Afletana doesn’t survive, I have a character concept in mind along these lines… which is not to say I’m planning to kill Afletana, as I’m quite fond of her and happy with where her story is going; just that our Temple invaders have been dropping like flies lately.

WISH 29 asks about preferred campaign style: long-term, goal-directed, episodic?

Er, all of the above? I think the different options require different gaming strengths, but they can all be enjoyable. The shorter-term the campaign, ironically, the more planning the GM has to do, in my opinion, because s/he won’t have much by way of character hooks to play with. The action had better be nonstop, or players are likely to get bored.

One-offs and short-runs are great ways to try out unlikely characters, exorcise the min-max demon, or test campaign ideas. I actually particularly like one-offs or short-runs in which I play a character somebody else generated, provided always that the character fits the scenario (something I once had difficulty with). Jolts me out of the usual, never a bad thing.

(In fact, now that I think about it, a longer-term campaign running a character designed for me by someone who knows me might be quite fascinating. I’d like to try it sometime.)

The single-storyline campaign is fine; it’s a nice balance between flat characters and overfamiliar ones (not that I have ever had much trouble with the latter). Room for development and plot twists; minimal risk of boredom.

Many campaigns turn out to be chains of single storylines; the most obvious example is the campaign based on a string of modules. I find (and you are welcome to disagree with me) that these campaigns run the highest risk of boring me. The GMs who run them all too often forget to involve characters; they ignore character hooks, forget what happened to characters previously, fail to create a consistent game setting, and generally treat the party as disposable cogs of zero individual interest. Hate that.

I don’t have anything in particular against modules, mind you; properly used, they’re great tools. Properly using a module, however, requires work, the work of integrating it into the campaign, altering it as needed to fit.

The best campaigns in my book are the long-running, multi-layered ones. But you knew that already, and this post is getting far too long.

So that’s the answer. One, two-hoo, three. *crunch* Three.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 27th, 2003 at 10:19 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.