Establishing Premise in Serenity RPG
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi Pete,
Exactly. The idea that one one can band-aid up a couple of new rules is probably going to fall flat on its face. There will be *many* new assumptions, tools and procedures for different kinds of games. Notions about thematic mechanics or whether or not there will be a "party" are just pieces of a re-wired whole. Some people, like me, wanted something different enough that learning to chuck whole sets of assumptions was worth it. For others, not so much.
Such play is a very different game. This is why, as an example, Sorcerer works even though it jettisons many, many assumptions about how a GM preps a game and how the Players approach the game. But it replaces them with a new set of gears and levers and interlocking regulators that are well thought and can produce great, fun play. (Other games do this effectively as well. I'm discussing Sorcerer because it's fresh in my mind right now, but game like In a Wicked Age, Primetime Adventures, and HeroQuest all games I've loved playing but are startlingly different in play and mechanics than many folks are used to. There are lots of other cool games I haven't even had a chance to play yet that I know I would love that also unique to themselves as to how to play them.)
Last year I ran a game of Sorcerer my player and I called THE BROTHERHOOD. It was set in a prison. There was a prison, Landsfied, where the prisoners were doing sorcerous lore. The demons were tattoos and shivs and cell blocks. One PC was a father who was seeking vengeance on the cult leader who was housed in the prison. Another was an cop-killing ex-cop who had just been betrayed by a member of his crew and needed to find out who did it. The third was a lifer who discovered that his nephew had arrived in the prison and was part of a plan to seize control of the cell block the PC ruled.
There was no team: but there were many elements that bound the PLAYERS together. (Not the characters, the Players -- and this is a vital point that was a lightning bolt to me when I realized it years ago.) In THE BROTHERHOOD, the Players were bound by the definition of Humanity (treating others well, playing outside the rules of "the system"), the definition of Lore (rituals of domination and abuse), the backstory I had prepared about the history of the prison, the turf war taking place in the prison. Every PLAYER paid attention to what was happening with every other Player because they were curious about a) what choices the Players would be making morally, and b) information gleaned from by one Player's character often piqued the interest of another player even if his character hadn't been in the scene.
The game worked great. Alliances were made between the PCs -- even though they had never known each other before -- bonds of trust were built in game. It was really intense and sometimes moving and really quite compelling. The Players had a great time. (Please note, despite all fears that Players without "party" enforcement will always fly off to different corners of the world, I have never found this to be the case. PLAYERS want to go where the interesting stuff is. If the GM preps correctly, the Players will moved toward each other because they are all near interesting stuff.)
Setting up a Firefly game, the kind of Firefly game I would want to play, means working with lots of rules and tools that might seem not to work -- and if used individually probably would not. But by using rules and tools designed to interact with each other effectively, produce terrific sessions of game play. Many of the fears of such rules and tools vanish in actual play because the nightmare behaviors of the Players fail to arrive, or the behavior is transmuted into something effective and quite enjoyable. (For example, lack of party play does not produce boredom or indifference form other players, but it also allows an amazing, hot interest in what the other Players will have their characters do, because we don't know what the character will do. Any choice in the moral arena is available.
Now, some people want this kind of choice in their game play, some don't. But when I watch shows (for example) like Lost, Firefly, The Wire, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica I know I want that kind of electric decision making at my table. And with the proper rules and tools such play does not produce fights, boredom, obstructive behavior, confusion or frustration. Instead, the specific rules and tools used in a cohesive combination produces great, compelling play.
I understand people have horror stories about games that were "like" what I'm talking about. I can only say I haven't had a horror story from a game session in the years I first started picking up the games I read about on The Forge.
Dr_Pete:
Hi Christopher,
While I haven't played Sorcerer at this point, I'm definitely interested in giving it a try at some point. I've read some of the stuff you've put up here and elsewhere, as well as many of Ron's comments. Very interesting stuff!
I've had various bad experiences over the years with games where everyone makes a character and then we assume they're a "party" (especially bad for modern games-- a cat burglar, a 10 year old and a socialite team up to fight ghosts, etc) so I am all too familiar with how that can go wrong.
Sorcerer discussion seems to take two different tacks... talking about mechanics and talking about how games are structured. In talking about drifting Serenity, one would presumably keep most of those mechanics, and would probably want to keep "true" at some level to the Firefly story structure, I would think... otherwise, why put it there rather than some other sci fi universe?
Firefly is a Space Western, of course. Westerns are mostly about civilization vs lawlessness, and being on the edge of civilization. They're about things like the lone gunslinger riding into town, fighting the bandits or indians. About maintaining your moral code when nobody else cares. My suspicion is that you are interested in the "loyalty" element, Christopher, but that's just one element of the cowboy code at play in western movies. To use a Sorcerer-ish metaphor, Mal would risk losing a "humanity" if he didn't give the money back on that job he refused for going against his sense of right and wrong, I think. The point being that if you want to craft stories, you need to decide what they should be about rather than "just" having adventures...
As far as mechanics tweaks, I don't know the Serenity mechanics, so I dunno. One idea that springs to mind might be using Riddle of Steel spiritual attributes to replace plot points. Basically, you have attributes like a moral code, faith and passions. Your rating in these go up if you act on them at some risk, and they give bonuses based on their ratings... themed plot points, if I understand Serenity's mechanics based on a quick google search. I'd also add that acting against them penalizes them, either by zeroing them out or by reducing them gradually. It provides an in-game carrot for certain types of behavior, but also provides hooks for presenting hard choices for the character sheet... Loyalty or Revenge... do I pursue my revenge, worth 10 points on my sheet, or protect the innocent, worth 4 points on my sheet? If I go with revenge, at the cost of innocent lives, I lose the 4 points, but if I go with save the innocent, I'm letting the object of my vengeance go, and I lose the 10 (or maybe it drops to 9...)! That's just an idea, to bring it back to a mechanical "drift" question.
Pete
Caldis:
Quote from: mcv on February 19, 2009, 03:44:22 PM
to stay together.
Have you read what I wrote in another thread about a particularly dramatic session with mismatched characters? It was memorable, but maybe a bit too intense, and not a lot of fun for the player who got completely overshadowed by the escalating conflict between the other characters.
I ran into a situation like this long ago, almost 20 years now, when we fell into narrativism by accident. Our group was using a freeform system and had set up a situation where we were agents for a vast galactic empire on a mission to earth to track down a scientist. There were three characters with different goals for this mission two of which were directly at odds with each other which ended up pushing the whole session into a cycle of conflict and violence, it was amazingly fun. It did however leave one player sitting on the side mostly watching.
I think the reason this happened in my game and likely yours was because we fell into. It wasn't planned and we didnt know what we were doing. The two characters were primed for interesting conflict the third was a side character who wasnt really connected plus our lack of system gave him no tools to get involved in the conflict. I think it's one of the things you will have to consider if you try and run a nar game with a system that isnt really designed for it. You may get what you are looking for but you may also end up with someone spinning their wheels because they arent connected.
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi guys,
Caldis, that's a good point. One thing I want to add, though, as I stated two posts ago, is that simply having characters in conflict is not Story Now, even if it's justified with "My Guy Would Do This..."
I have no idea what, exactly was going on at your table, Caldis, nor Martijn's in his example. I just want to be really clear that inter-character conflict is NOT the definition of Story Now. I've played several games where that never even happened.
My only point earlier was to make clear that there was no "party" to speak of since the Players had to have the freedom to have their PCs do anything. The assumption of the "party" short circuits that.
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi all,
I just (finally) finished posting the Actual Play summary of a HeroQuest game I GM'd at local convention a year ago.
The setting was Glorantha. But used many of the procedures and gameplay I've been talking about in this thread onto the game. (Basically I took procedures from Sorcerer and mapped them onto HeroQuest play.)
I'm linking here because I think the thread successfully illustrates many of the points I've been talking about in this thread.
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=25796.0
Fair Warning: It's a pretty complete write up, with lots of notes about GM prepping, Kickers, Bangs and other items I really wanted to talk about. So. Um. It's about twenty or so pages of single spaced material if you were to print it all out.
Just so you know.
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