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Category: Gaming

Monday Mashup #11: Star Trek

Let’s get ready to Mashup! (And remember, there’s an new game meme announcement list — get your gaming memes piping hot.)

Today we’re going to take another SF classic and subject it to our evil whims. Your target du jour is Star Trek, and we’re not talking any of that revisionist stuff. No Enterprise, no Next Generation, no Deep Space Nine. We’re doing Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and the five year journey. Or the movies, cause hey, everyone loves Ricardo.

The core characters of Star Trek were officers in charge of an exploration mission. They were often caught between duty and humanity; I wouldn’t give Star Trek the same props I give Horatio Hornblower, but Roddenberry knew what drove his conflicts. I think there are some interesting possibilities for mashing.

Superurge

It’s Chris’s fault, really. After a pulse-pounding conclusion to his Morrisonian supers campaign, I have a yen to run Champions. Maybe it’ll pass. I’m probably safe, since I don’t think anyone in my current gaming group is a Hero fan. (“The chargen! It burns my eyes!”)

(The UNTIL Superpowers Database makes it easy! Really!)

Champions Universe? Maybe. Millenium City is a nice piece of work, and there’s a ton of background available. Or I could do my own universe and just reuse all the interesting super writeups from the CU; with novice Hero players, it wouldn’t matter.

I do have a little stock of campaign ideas, to wit:

Infectious

In 1957, the first superhuman came into his powers. He, unlike those who would follow him, had only one ability: by drinking the blood of a human and giving that human his own blood in return, he could grant that human unpredictable powers of his or her own. The only common thread? All superhumans can grant powers to others, just like the long-dead originator of the line. Superhuman powers are infectious.

Bloodlines

The seven Great Familes of metahumans have never been inclined to let the normals know that superpowers are hereditary, and the big lie has held up for centuries. Behind the scenes, the non-powered members of the families plot for position and arrange marriages between just the right superhero teams. Dynastic royalty, hidden from the world.

Man, that’d take a ton of setting work. But it’d be fun.

College Days

By the twenty-first century, college athletics are passe. There’s only one college activity that matters: the superhuman studies program. Where else would young superheros learn their trade? There’s not a superhero team on earth that would accept a non-graduate, so best to take your studies seriously. But hey — when the recruiter gave your family all BMWs as an under the table signing bonus, how serious are you going to be about exams?

And then I have the one where the PCs play non-supers, who’re the minders for the only four superheros in the world. But that one’s just dark and I kinda wanna do four-color.

Shiny happy sparkly

Phil Brucato turned up at Gen Con this year with a game called Deleria, which was pretty clearly his vision of what Changeling should have been. And I’m a mark for shiny things, so you can tell where this is going. I pre-ordered.

The book came in the other day. It’s a big hardcover with really shoddy binding. The inside is glossy and full cover and more or less a design mishmash that actually works fairly well. It’s got a hodge-podge feel to it that makes sense given the subject matter, and the art (lots of Photoshop manipulations) is OK.

There’s a ton of setting fluff. The tone of the writing — well, it didn’t work for me, but it wasn’t awful. It’s written from the point of view of an elder in a youth culture, if you see what I mean. Gentle yet hip, and pointedly so in both ways. I didn’t dislike it, I just didn’t like it.

The fluff does get the setting across, and the setting has the right feel. It’s an attempt at Faerie done De Lint style, with the changes that have come with the modern world reflecting into myth. It’s not as smooth as De Lint, though. For example, Brucato has the Internet manifesting in Faerie as a kind of kudzu, and faeries can’t deal with technology. Except when they can. Brucato’s trying to move beyond the nostalgia factor, but he can’t quite bring himself to make that final break.

I’d talk more about the rules, but the book is sufficiently baroque that I’m having trouble extracting actual game mechanics. You have stats, and you have a difficulty number, and you draw a card and add or subtract it from your stat depending on the suit. There’s also a big magic system thingie which looks to be mostly freeform.

Summary: forgettable.

Yes! But!

How to send literally dozens of fans into a tizzy in one easy step:

"Sword & Sorcery Studios Announces d20 Versions of Adventure!, Aberrant and Trinity."

I think D20 will probably work out just fine — it certainly isn’t any more of a handicap than the Storyteller system. I think Aberrant will have trouble getting past Mutants and Masterminds, but that’s White Wolf’s problem to worry about. It’ll be good to see Trinity back in print.

I hope we’ll see some sourcebooks.

WISH #66: Pesky players

WISH 66 is about plotting (and, tangentially, the necessity of same):

GMs can spend hours designing an adventure and have their players take off in an entirely unexpected direction. How does a GM handle this—try and steer the players back to the designed plot, or hang back and see where the adventure goes? How does a player handle this? Stay on target or go with the flow?

I’m inclined to disagree with the context of the question. “How does a GM handle this?” Well, which GM?

The No Myth meme currently prevalent over at the Forge rejects preplotting altogether; a No Myth GM doesn’t know anything about the world other than what the players have seen. A failed task resolution check doesn’t mean the players have failed, it means there’s an additional obstacle in the way of reaching whatever objective the players have chosen. And that’s a reasonable approach.

But it’s not reasonable to say (as some Forge denizens do) that it’s the only proper approach. Some GMs spend days designing, not the adventure, but the world. In Brad’s Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, he had the entire world mapped out and spent a lot of time figuring out the actions of the NPCs between sessions. There wasn’t a designed plot, per se; there were NPCs with desires who acted on those desires. The PCs could act and react as they wished.

I don’t believe in a single approach; I believe in behaving as appropriate for the playgroup.

My preferences? I don’t preplot very heavily, so I tend to ad lib when players go off on a tangent. There are more of them than there are of me, after all. As a player, I like free-form stuff because I like the feeling that there’s a whole world out there. Strongly directed plots only bug me insofar as it makes me feel like the world only exists as far as the PCs can see.

Strong genre games can overcome that feeling, perhaps because a strong genre also engenders a feeling of a world outside the limits of a PCs perception. Pulp comes to mind, of course.

Sticky situations

Arref and Ginger are talking about “sticky PCs” today — characters who really touch and affect other PCs by their very nature. It’s an excellent concept, and one I’ve used without having a good name for it for a while. In gaming, the easiest way for a PC to get screen time is to draw out the other PCs.

“Tell me your story — it sounds interesting.” The key is to enable screen time for other people, and get your screen time from the reflection, rather than trying to draw others into your story. Popular characters are those who facilitate someone else’s roleplay. The dynamic is most visible in large-cast games, like LARPs and MUDs, but I think it applies even in smaller face to face groups.

Monday Mashup #10: Dukes of Hazzard

Somewhat later than I would like, it’s time for another Monday Mashup. I was forcibly restrained from doing Finnegan’s Wake. People have no sense of fun.

So instead I’ll do something classic. Dukes of Hazzard.

It’s a fun-loving family who’s continually plagued by incompetent venal lawmen for no good reason — kind of an updated Robin Hood, in a way, but without the political aspect. There are lots of car chases, which are close to any gamer’s heart. Have at it, and damned be him who first cries “Hold, enough!” (Couldn’t figure out how to mash Macbeth, but maybe next week.)

WISH 65: Workin' for a Living

WISH 65 asks about jobs and gaming:

Does what you do for a living have any impact on your gaming? Have you had occupational details intrude on your descriptions of how something works? Have you ever dared a player to go “Hotwire a car, then, if that’s how you think it’s done?”

I’m a computer guy, but the answer’s really “Nah.” I’ve played Shadowrun, and I don’t really mind that decking is nothing like real computer work — it’s just an analogy for magic anyway, so I can take it at that level happily enough. I don’t mind if someone gets their hacking descriptions wrong, and I generally assume any modern-day game takes place in a slightly alternate universe.

Now, if you turned the question around, I’d have to say yes. I currently work for a computer game studio, and one of the reasons I got the job is because I’m an avid player of their games. So there’s that.

I also — don’t laugh — attribute some degree of my management skills to spending a lot of time playing Amber online. I know that may sound like rank gamer arrogance. Allow me to elaborate. I think that a lot of management is simply being able to pay attention to what people are thinking and feeling. Gaming doesn’t give you that skill, but it is a good arena in which to practice that skill.

If you’re an insensitive idiot, playing a leader isn’t going to make you any better at it. If you have a certain degree of social eptness to start with, though, it’s just like any other skill. Practice makes perfect. And how many opportunities do you have to practice leadership in a simulated environment?

It’s also a chance to practice sounding confident, and again, practice makes perfect. I don’t manage people by threatening to send their families into exile from Chaos, mind you, but I know how to be direct and reassuring. That skill carries over.

Monday Mashup #9: West Wing

In honor of the impending election season, and because — oh, wait, nobody demanded it. Well, our mashup of the day is The West Wing anyway. Depending on how you look at it, West Wing is either a brilliant show about a team of exceptional individuals working to maintain their ideals under the spotlight of Presidential politics, or it’s a self-indulgent epic about a bunch of unlikely White House staffers that takes place in an alternate reality in which liberal politics work. Either way, it’s got that snappy Aaron Sorkin dialogue and it’s kind of nice to pretend that our government is that idealistic.

Have at it.

WISH #64: Godtalk

Simple Game WISH question this week:

Name three gods or religions that have appeared in games you’ve played in. Were they good, bad, or indifferent? What made them so?

Off the top of my head, I can only remember one campaign in which deities played a significant on-screen role… no, wait, maybe two. OK, two.

First off, the easy one. Carl’s Babes in the Woods campaign is based on Bronze Age Celtic culture, but the gods are Roman, because the Roman culture in that world was the elves and they conquered everything. I played a cleric of the Traveller (Mercury), Cian, and his restless roguish nature was very defining for the character. Another PC was a paladin of Kore; at one point in the campaign, the gods argued about who would get this new champion, and she got to choose the god she wanted to follow. This sounds like a twinkfest unless you know Carl, in which case you’d be remembering that Greek gods get really petty when mortals deny them something they want.

Which is the key to why the gods worked so well in that game; they were a tangible presence in our lives without being overbearing to the point where player fun was diminished. They had personality. Probably the same reason we like Greek myth so much — they’re fun gods, even if you’d be wary about having a drink with ‘em.

The more complex one: Catholicism was important in UN PEACE, but probably only to me, since my character Paul was Catholic. It’s hard to say the gods were good or bad in that game, since they never showed up (although there was one person claiming to be an angel…). However, Carl did a good job recognizing that religion was an important factor in Paul’s personality and providing roleplay opportunities around that element.