About a brief holiday break we return for “Year Two” of the
Play on Target podcast. This week we look at games which really aren’t a
particular licensed property (we swear, I mean it just looks like that and you
shouldn’t sue us…). We find a surprising number of games offering popular
settings with the serial numbers filed off. We also have several points where
we get particularly stupid and those listening at home may find yourselves
shouting out answers we’re unable to come up with during the recording. I’m
sure we forgot a number of these pseudo-simulation games; feel free to mention
them in the comments.
The delay for ‘season two’ came from technical shifts and
problems. Last year Skype opted to remove support and functionality for
third-party applications (as I understand it). That meant we had to find another recording set up. As
you’ll be able to tell from this episode, this is among the first we did using
the new program (Mumble for anyone interested in the details). In the show you’ll
hear we’re still getting things settled with the microphone
sensitivity. That’s more than a little trial and error for us. More notably you’ll catch some overtalking and precognitive commentary towards the end of the
show. We’re still playing around with multichannel editing, especially since we
had to pair that with fixing some of the problems from our bad mic
set-up. Bear with us, we’ll be getting that in order soon enough.
GAMER METALLURGY
I should also mention the nice support we’ve gotten for the
podcast in the first year. We had a number of great comments and
suggestions. If you have ideas for future episodes you’d like to hear, please
send them on. We had the great fortune of being nominated for Best RPG Podcast this
year in the Golden Geeks. You can see the nomination and voting list here. Users
came up with an amazing roll call of RPG Podcasts there; I’d recommend most for
anyone hunting for something new. You can vote if you’re an RPGGeek, BGG, VGG
supporter in good standing.
GIMME SPACE
This episode links to our previous one about licensed settings. I still think the best settings are those with plenty of
imaginative space. Harry Potter does that for me. I can imagine other stories
and plots within that world. Perhaps a campaign covering gumshoe Aurors who
have to hunt down the last remnants of Voldemort’s forces. Despite the victory, their numbers have
been decimated and the pall of the recent battles still hangs over these enforcers.
Paranoia, uncertainty, PTSD, mixed with hope for a better future. Or a
historical game of the early days of Hogwarts. Or what an American school for
magic looks like. On the other hand, Dune doesn’t appeal to me as a game (sorry Brian). I can’t really
imagine playing out stories there. I’ve read the first six books and enjoyed
them, but it felt static to me. The universe doesn’t seem to have real room or
interesting spaces to insert a group of PCs. I know it does and I’m sure a good
GM would make that come alive for me. But it doesn’t spark stories that I want
to tell.
As an interesting case, there’s Dave Duncan’s King’s Blades
series. I dig the setting and the ideas. The Blades themselves are swordsmen
bonded to a particular person. This grants them strength and a danger sense
regarding their charge. I love the concept and the magic system of balances which Duncan presents in the stories. However most of the tension and drama comes from the relation between a Blade and their Charge. Sometimes
they get bonded to someone awful- and they have to obey their orders. That’s a compulsion
I can’t imagine players being particularly down with- except perhaps in a one
shot. You could skip that set up, but then you lose some of the essential
nature of the setting. I don’t see it being particularly workable for a
long-term campaign.
BREWING A NICE CUP OF GAME
I love figuring out homebrews for existing concepts and settings. I done that with Watchmen, GI Joe, L5R, Changeling, and others. That’s a challenge worth doing because it forces you to
drill down and figure out what actually makes a setting tick. What grabs you
about it? Is about the tone? Is it about the places? Is it about the magic or
some other cosmological principle? In the episode mention Adventure Time as an rpg setting I’d like to see presented. Part of that comes from wanting even more
sourcebook-style materials. What would an AT style game look like? It would
have to have a measure of weirdness- with flexible and odd powers available to
the characters. So doing a list of feats or advantages, ala Pathfinder probably
wouldn’t work. It would need to be something open like Fate’s approach. On the
other hand, combat needs to be interesting, stunt-filled, but still have a measure
of crunch. The characters take hits, suffer damage, get worn out, and even
lose. Characters often go on dungeon-delves, hex-crawls, and extended and
taxing quests. So there needs to be some detail and resource management. How do
I build a game that echoes the things that I love about the world of Ood?
One question would be how much I need to rely on the
mechanics to carry the tone- and how much simply comes from the players knowing
the setting. When I went to run my homebrew Star Wars game, I relied heavily on
the players' knowledge of the setting and the conventions. I simply elaborated
on that for the backdrop. I kept the system simple. When they built characters
they each chose an archetype. I had advantages, flaws, and benefits suited to
those kinds of things (Gambler’s Luck, Droid, Weird Alien, Knack with Machines,
Head in the Stars), but only a page's worth. The pilot got an additional set of choices, a list of
possible ship upgrades. Finally for the Jedi I created a relatively light set
of power rules and encouraged them to develop in different directions. I left a
good deal out: weapons, lists of species, elaborate space combat rules, methods
to fully balance the Jedi to the PCs. The campaign worked in great part
because I emphasized and played up the genre elements. I got the mechanics out
of the way.
Consider another perennial licensed product: Lord of the Rings. That’s an odd setting
to work with for a number of reasons. You play LotR game to participate in and
interact with Middle Earth. It doesn’t work as a version with the serial
numbers filed off (see The Sword of Shannara for that). Or actually it works
too well because it has so influenced D&D and most other fantasy games. So
a good Middle Earth game rests on detail: history, peoples, sights, and sounds.
Forget vague atmosphere, it draws on specifics. System matters a little, in
that players know what characters in the setting ought to be capable of. They
know about Dwarven heartiness or the legendary skills of the Rangers of the
North. If you get something basic wrong (like MERP’s problematic handling of
magic), it can undercut everything else. If I went to put together a Middle
Earth homebrew I’d either go completely open (like hacking Fate Accelerated) or
I’d go in the opposite direction and spend some months getting all of the
details right.
If you like RPG Gaming podcasts, I hope you'll check out
Play on Target. We take a focused approach- tackling a single topic each
episode. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or follow the podcast's page
at www.playontarget.com.
Ooh! Yes! Favorite subject of mine! I can't wait to listen to it.
ReplyDeleteI myself have created and run numerous officially unofficial IP RPGs. Look forward to comparing notes.
After having listened to the episode, the subject wasn't exactly what I was expecting would be discussed.
ReplyDeleteSettings with the numbers filed off, as least as largely addressed in this instance, are usually not my thing. I would separate that concept from games that emulate a genre as well. For instance, while Fiasco does have that 'Coen Brothers' vibe, it isn't 'No Country For Old Men' the RPG. It lets people play a certain style of story and for me that's very different from say, Starships and Spacemen or Prime Directive being knock-off Star Trek.
I would love to hear an episode based on my original belief that this episode would more accurately reflect some of what you mention above; What published IP settings that there have never had an official RPG has you created a homebrew one for?
Wow my grammar is poor in the above post! My apologies. ^ ^;
Delete