game theory
May. 3rd, 2009 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI spend a certain amount of time awake in the middle of the night these days, and one of the things I think about is ideas for RPGs. (I haven't talked about it here but I recently GM'd for the first time and it was awesome and I'm now mad with power and want to do it again. (I haven't talked about it here because later that night I went into labor and I haven't even managed to finish writing that up.)) Lately I have been pondering the issues involved in roleplaying within an established universe - what kind of features does the game need to have in order to capture what excites people about that universe?
For instance, should all of the PCs in a Girl Genius RPG be Sparks? (The answer is clearly "no" because I'm pretty sure Josh for one would want to play a Jager...)
In a Tines game (from Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep), would it be more fun for each player to be a separate composite individual, or would it be more fun to play the components of one individual (finally, a party that can't split up...)? I imagine part of the fun would be a certain amount of reshuffling and recombining of characters via the deliberate or inadvertent swapping of members, so I would lean towards the former... but that would be a *lot* of bodies to track in a combat situation...
In a New Crobuzon game, should the players actually have a shot at achieving their goals? (Are both corruption and futility necessary to capturing the mood of a Mieville novel? Discuss.) I've been thinking about a New Crobuzon game for a long time but (unlike the rest of these universes) I've never been able to come up with a scenario I like, once the fun of deciding whether you're playing a beetle-headed lady or animate cactus or whatever is over.
In an Avatar game, what would the Bending mechanic look like? Are different Bending moves more like spells/weapon proficiencies that need to be acquired individually, with various prereqs, or should one Bending skill let you try various moves with varying DCs? And how do you make sure non-Bending characters are just as fun to play as Benders?
Also, given that the Avatar verse is based on Asian cultures, is any Avatar RPG played by white Americans necessarily engaged in cultural appropriation, and should a prospective GM worry about that? What about a scenario that introduced elements from Pacific cultures not already appropriated for the Avatarverse - is that somehow "worse" than using what's already in there? I once played in a game set on an alternate Earth that had all the races and classes of D&D3E. The original characters were mostly from European countries but when I joined the party was currently on a quest in Japan - my character was an Ainu wizard trying to become powerful enough to protect her people from Japanese oppression. I realize this was probably not cool from a racism perspective, taking a real culture's history and using bits of it to dress up a character, but in fact the reading I did was really interesting and the character was fun to invent, so, I don't actually feel sorry. Insofar as the Fire Nation is reminiscent of Japan, one could imagine them having some Ainu-like minorities on one of their islands, which could be interesting or useful for some bit of plot or other. But it feels "safer" to stick strictly to peoples shown on the show. Safer but maybe less fun.
For instance, should all of the PCs in a Girl Genius RPG be Sparks? (The answer is clearly "no" because I'm pretty sure Josh for one would want to play a Jager...)
In a Tines game (from Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep), would it be more fun for each player to be a separate composite individual, or would it be more fun to play the components of one individual (finally, a party that can't split up...)? I imagine part of the fun would be a certain amount of reshuffling and recombining of characters via the deliberate or inadvertent swapping of members, so I would lean towards the former... but that would be a *lot* of bodies to track in a combat situation...
In a New Crobuzon game, should the players actually have a shot at achieving their goals? (Are both corruption and futility necessary to capturing the mood of a Mieville novel? Discuss.) I've been thinking about a New Crobuzon game for a long time but (unlike the rest of these universes) I've never been able to come up with a scenario I like, once the fun of deciding whether you're playing a beetle-headed lady or animate cactus or whatever is over.
In an Avatar game, what would the Bending mechanic look like? Are different Bending moves more like spells/weapon proficiencies that need to be acquired individually, with various prereqs, or should one Bending skill let you try various moves with varying DCs? And how do you make sure non-Bending characters are just as fun to play as Benders?
Also, given that the Avatar verse is based on Asian cultures, is any Avatar RPG played by white Americans necessarily engaged in cultural appropriation, and should a prospective GM worry about that? What about a scenario that introduced elements from Pacific cultures not already appropriated for the Avatarverse - is that somehow "worse" than using what's already in there? I once played in a game set on an alternate Earth that had all the races and classes of D&D3E. The original characters were mostly from European countries but when I joined the party was currently on a quest in Japan - my character was an Ainu wizard trying to become powerful enough to protect her people from Japanese oppression. I realize this was probably not cool from a racism perspective, taking a real culture's history and using bits of it to dress up a character, but in fact the reading I did was really interesting and the character was fun to invent, so, I don't actually feel sorry. Insofar as the Fire Nation is reminiscent of Japan, one could imagine them having some Ainu-like minorities on one of their islands, which could be interesting or useful for some bit of plot or other. But it feels "safer" to stick strictly to peoples shown on the show. Safer but maybe less fun.
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Date: 2009-05-04 06:05 pm (UTC)Yeah... and I think you have to follow the narrative lead of the book here — a pack of Tines is one character, in novel or RPG. The question is, then, what kid of mechanics are you using? Tines aren't going to be handled well as a straightforward drop-in content module for any system, since you need some pieces of character data to map to packs, and others to members.
but that would be a *lot* of bodies to track in a combat situation...
Well, remember that in close combat, Tines can't act as packs anyway, so if you're actually having to track all those bodies among each other, the character of the game will shift. I think you'd want to handle melee with a simplified board- or miniatures-based system almost like the battle system from Titan, and not devote to much detail to the resolution of individual melee attacks. After all, during melee, you're not playing your character, so who wants to spend a lot of time in melee?
I'm totally interested in working with you to design this system — you know how obsessed I am with FotD. And I really should finish writing "Red-jackets and the Numerous Bad Wolfpack" one of these days...
no subject
Date: 2009-06-03 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 02:17 am (UTC)