Your discussion of the solo rules made me bite the bullet and purchase the bundle. While solo roleplaying is only peripherally similar to face-to-face roleplaying in a group, it is useful for getting a handle on things and a handy lifeline for people vastly separated in space or timezone from others interested in the same game. (You see this a lot in Ars Magica fandom - people who live far away from other games keen to join in discord or play-by-post just for the thrill of playing with others. I intend to create a zine on solo roleplaying at some point, but there’s such a variety of solo roleplaying experiences I don’t know whether to offer a broad overview or focus in on a narrow area).
I didn’t actually pay much attention to the section on game adaptations as you mostly dealt with adaptations I don’t have much of an urge to play. The section on the big list of games you can’t get people to buy into or haven’t worked how to run - I understand deeply. When Transhuman Space came out, a friend said he loved the book but had no idea how you’d run a game. I tried running a campaign in the asteroid belt and it went badly wrong, so badly wrong I stopped running SF games for a couple of years afterwards. One day I will try that game again.
Peripherally related to the quip about multiple xp, I want to try Artesia at some point, but the “one type of xp for each major arcana” could get tricky, the Chivalry&Sorcery-style massive disparity in social levels from character generation, the potential for rules hacking combat and magic…could all get very messy.
I admit to some bias, but although @Phil_Masters is a friend I feel strongly that Changing Times—nominally the rules update book for converting Transhuman Space to GURPS 4th edition—does an excellent and necessary job of bridging the gap between great big ideas and the game one might actually play. The various Personnel Files books are essentially worked examples of campaign setups within the world.
The things I haven’t worked out how to run mainly lack a clear statement of “The characters are X who do Y”.
Like Coyote & Crow has a lovely setting and a decent system (I playtested character gen and combat). But I have no clue what the PCs would do. The game kind of says “here are a ton of suggestions, but you don’t have to pick any of those”… which means it is up to me to do all the heavy lifting.
If it had said the PCs are detectives who solve supernatural murders (or resistance members who fight terminators… or International Rescue pilots who save folk from disasters) then I would have a handle on that. And the book would have lots of stuff to support it.
Or maybe it wouldn’t. Coriolis mentions a travelling circus in spaaaace as one potential option. Oooh that sounds awesome, yelled my Tuesday group. Does the book support that? Does it buggery. Every adventure/story seed is of the “mercenaries and private eyes sent to investigate something” type.
PC#1: I am perfecting my juggling act.
PC#2: I am chatting up the ringmaster and trying to persuade him to make my performing elephants top of the bill.
PC#3: I am making sure no-one steals from the circus’ box office takings.
GM: can you stop all that, leave the circus for a fortnight and go shoot at those folk over there in the mountains? Please? Pretty please.
Barmi is a delightful book. It depicts the evolution of an imaginary southern European town through a span of centuries. Any one of the illustrations would be a dandy game handout.
I wonder about combining it with something like Beak Feather and Bone, where the players take turns creating factions and characters that inhabit a map, and imagining their interactions. Having multiple maps over time would be an interesting way to expand play.
I wonder when that pitch of “the characters are X who do Y” came in? I don’t remember it in the old days (the very very old days, that is) when we were just playing characters in a fantasy society and the evening’s game might be adventure, politics, investigation, spying, trade, shopping, socializing or whatever came along. Increasing genreization (if that’s a word, which I doubt) also occurred in prose fiction through the mid- to late-20th century so maybe it’s an inevitable trend. But I do find that it’s making it less compelling to show up for games these days.
I think this is correlated with decreasing campaign length. When I were a lad the general approach was that each GM had their own game and it was assumed they would run it basically forever; and “game” encompassed the world and the party, even if characters would come and go as players did. But when I were a lad it was easy to get people together for a weekly game and nobody minded if nothing much happened for a session or two while the party tried to work out what to do next.
Te other extreme is exemplified to me by that early indie game The Mountain Witch: never mind one genre, there is one scenario, and when you’ve played it for a few hours you throw away the game and do something else.
For my gaming style neither of these extremes is ideal. Many of my games have been mission-focused (i.e. “the boss tells you that this week’s adventure is…”) but as they progress and the players get more involved with the world there’s room for them to chase things down on their own rather than be handed a set of clues.
From another perspective, when character generation is “roll some stats, pick a class” you can’t really have a character who’s unsuited to the game,but if the game system allows a wider range of people than standard adventurers some guidance is helpful. Can I be a nobleman? Well, is this game going to support being a nobleman and making a good marriage and and court backstabbing, or is that just going to be background colour and a waste of character points? The more involved the character generation (hello GURPS) the more downside risk there is to having a character who just doesn’t fit with what’s going on.
I think you’re right. Certainly the move towards short, high concept campaigns with defined missions has come as my fellow players have got older and acquired 9-to-5 jobs and families. (I did warn them.) I just wonder if it’s a trend throughout the hobby as a whole or whether younger players, being footloose and fancy-free, still have big sprawling “second life” campaigns in which the PCs decide their own goals.
The best example of Roger’s GMing lasted from 2007 to 2021 in monthly sessions, with players all born in the 1950s or 1960s, They had jobs like writers, accountants, and computer people. We only lost one player during that period, to ill-health that eventually killed her. At least for me, it verged on a second life.
Though even there I started with a fair concept of who the PCs would be: British subjects (or allied trades) in 1939 who would sign up to work potentially behind enemy lines, perhaps in enemy uniform. Those PCs were a pretty diverse bunch, yes, but we did not for example have a cryptographer, a royal princess, or an atomic physicist—all of whom later came into the campaign as significant NPCs, and who could certainly have been statted up under GURPS.
My memory of early games (in the 80s) was that the characters are “adventurers” who kill people and take their stuff. It was all dungeon crawls and wilderness monster hunts.
Any politics or spying or trade was invented by the GM and not supported by any actual game mechanics.
That certainly seemed to be the case for the D&D games I joined in, though admittedly those were few and far between. It was quite different in our Tekumel campaign because that came with political factions, clans, laws, codes of behaviour, specified status levels and costs for harming or insulting another person. A couple of sessions were given over to a court case between two PCs, for example. Without all those social structures, though, a game is often just going to be murder hoboing and dungeons – I suspect the same might be true IRL!
That verges into one of my hobby-horses: the extent to which early RPGs were based on pulp literature, and particularly the idea that if you are a protagonist (i.e. a player character) all the problems in your world are things you have to solve yourself. Foreigners raiding outlying villages? Don’t tell the king or get the army mobilised, kill them yourself. Corrupt king? Kill him and take his place. Harvest failed? Find the wizard who did it, and kill him. The idea of organising things better or making any sort of societal progress really isn’t part of these stories or this worldview.
The games I prefer are the ones set in functioning societies. Yes, the PCs may still be exceptional people wielding unusual powers. But sometimes the correct answer is “beat down the supernatural defences,.then call in the cops to arrest the bad guy”. Or, as in the occult WWII game, not only make sure the war is won but use our reputations and connections to lay the legal groundwork for magical beings to exist in society afterwards.
I think Hollywood is to blame too. All those 70s cop movies where the Chief gives the maverick cop 48 hours to solve (meaning murderise all to death) the [insert criminal faction here] problem. Or the ones where the maverick cop’s badge is taken away and he goes on a one man murder spree to get his rewenge on the [insert criminal faction here].
Weirdly the sequel to these movies is never the maverick cop being investigated by Internal Affairs or arrested for homicide.
That’s one thing that Dirty Harry gets, perversely, right. At the end of that first film, he knows that even he has gone beyond what a cop can do and keep being a cop, and throws away his badge. Of course by the second film they’ve forgotten all about that.
(Also those superhero comics in the 60s and 70s that tried to get socially responsible. Urban Poverty is bad, right? So we will give urban poverty a face which can be punched, because that’s basically the problem-solving tool our characters have.)
This seems adjacent to some of the last Ribbon of Memes with the various solutions to crises attempted by the 1970s leading man being “perhaps light cathartic violence, obtain personal observation in lieu of evidence, shout at people in a manly fashion”
