Blade Runner RPG! The system is set up to have standard mechanics for “when you get the forensics results back” and such things, by dividing each day into 4 chunks.
Yes, niche protection can be a problem in an all-cop party. You are a rubbish cop if you can’t spot hidden, drive, shoot, brawl, have streetwise, chase people across rooftops, etc. On the other hand it means that splitting the party is NOT a problem. Janet & John go to interview the old lady while Dick & Jane head off to shake down the local informants. Mobile phones/police radio means they can swap info. But less helpful if you are running a Ripper Street game!
I think Roger underestimates how many tea mugs people own these days! Or maybe I buy or people give me geeky themed mugs a lot?
I think my concern with splitting the party is that one or two players are getting to do stuff and the rest are sitting around waiting for their turn, or playing NPCs, or perhaps throwing in comments via the radio.
You have to trust the GM to balance it right. When I played Blade Runner the GMs constantly bounced between the various groups, which was good. So not 30 mins while Janet & John interview 3 separate little old ladies, then 30 minutes while Dick & Jane talk to 3 separate informants. More like Lady 1, then Informant 1, then Lady 2, then Informant 2, etc.
I suppose the problem is the forensics guy, who instead of 10 minutes gets “the blood matches the missing businessman”.
I think the thing I’m unsure of is does Blade Runner need its own system? I mean I love Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the first Blade Runner movie but its own RPG?
The growth of the let us make this into an RPG seems to hark back to the days when we had a Lawnmower Man, Species and Tank Girl RPGs.
Mind you my current “really an RPG?” is Terraforming Mars.
I generally feel the same way, but from what I’ve heard of the Blade Runner RPG it could work quite well as a generic dystopian future RPG with an investigative slant. Would be up for trying it if someone were to run a session at Stabcon…
Do system-independent rpg supplements sell well? Could they sell as many “investigation-focused, dystopian, near-future” rpg books if it didn’t include a system? Would it have done as well without a recognizable intellectual property attacked?
I’m only on thr fringes of the business, but I’ve heard that system-independent generally doesn’t do well; the mass market is looking for something to drop into their existing game, or to start a new game, with minimal rules effort.
It could but it could just as well be a “splat book” for any system or you could watch the film and read the book and get all the feel you need. There isn’t really a great deal of background in either that goes into great detail. While Dick uses the “off-world colonies” in other fiction there is no real detailed world for Blade Runner beyond flying cars, Voight-Kampff, a Chandleresque feel and a lot of rain…a great deal of rain.
Are splatbooks still viable? Unless it’s compatible with D&D 5e, I think people are reluctant to buy a a splatbook for a system they don’t have but would be open to purchasing an all-in-one book that contained everything to play.
Yes, one could watch Blade Runner and then adapt a system to it, there is something to be said for paying $60 for someone else to do it for you.
I will probably be using the Blade Runner RPG system to run a not-Blade Runner game at Stabcon. I’ve just finished reading the 2000ADGrey Area graphic novels and now have a hankering to run something in that setting…
Assuming the “please book for Summer Stabcon” email ever arrives…
Griffon Publishing’s excellent system agnostic Pulp Egypt is an electrum seller on DriveThruRPG and I often wonder if it would be higher had it been a Chaosium product with about twenty mythos specific paragraphs and forty proper mythos names.
And presumably that’s all sales from a 2011 publish date to now.
A fair point although I still see system neutral and indeed non-system neutral splat books coming out, but you are absolutely correct that there are an awful lot for 5E.
I’d say that I’m down $60 I could have spent on something else, but that’s just me.
The idea I’ve seen offered once or twice for games where all the PCs have essentially the same skillset (I’m recalling GURPS Fantasy II for one) is that they should be distinguished by personality and characterising quirks instead. (The smartarse, the joker, the serious one, the green kid…) Yes, we can all stab monsters about equally well, and in the same ways, but it’s the chatter beforehand and how we feel about it afterwards that makes the game.
This would involve leaning heavily into roleplaying; it might be facilitated by a Hero/GURPS disadvantages system, but it would primarily require full player buy-in. Still, I think most players could get their heads around it. How well it would work would likely be up to the group, and I think it might work best for limited-duration games. It’s the format of many a classic “squad” war movie, after all. It’s arguably also the approach taken by many classic cop shows, though I think many of them start differentiating by skillset sooner or later - you’ve got the forensics expert, the intuitive genius, the people person, the tough veteran, and so on, with personalities tied to their specialities.
I think it depends on the genre/real life you are trying to emulate.
If everyone is a cop, then everyone will have the whole, varied skillset, because on Monday you are interviewing witnesses to the vandalism of the Mayor’s statue, on Tuesday you are in a car chase after a ram-raid on a bank, and on Wed you are looking for clues at a murder scene.
But if you are the criminals doing a heist, you only need one safecracker and one getaway driver.
Not all police scenarios are investigations, of course, but I’m interested in the evolution of the latter. Originally we expected player-characters to find the clues and deduce what happened. But what if they missed vital clues and ground to a halt? So then we had the three-clue rule and/or not insisting on players rolling dice to spot a clue. But even then they could (and usually would) find all the clues and fit a completely different explanation to them. (This was called getting it wrong, though I dispute the idea that what the PCs do can ever be wrong; what they do is the story.)
So the next development was one of those fashionable meta ideas – now the players could fit any theory they liked to the clues (which the players might even devise themselves in storytelling mode) and then roll or vote or whatever to see if they’re right. Great for the lazy referee who doesn’t want to devise an explanation in advance, but I think those games are missing a trick. Improvising solutions is how police investigators have usually worked. As we see in countless true-crime dramas like The Long Shadow, they don’t apply the scientific method. Often they quickly decide who’s guilty, then look for the evidence that supports their case and disregard what doesn’t. And (see above) that’s not doing it wrong; it is the adventure. And if it leads to a miscarriage of justice – well, that’s the adventure too.
I could only think of one example from fiction of a multi-police team, and that’s the four-man (very briefly five-man in the pilot) Strike Team in The Shield. They also don’t care about niche protection; each member of the team has pretty much the same skills, the difference is in personality. Still, investigation is very far from what they do, and justice is a peripheral concept in their policing strategy.
I’ve also seen in a few places a different meta idea—the PCs do investigative things and thereby build up mystery-solving points, and when they have enough they can find out what’s going on and arrest the bad guy, track down the monster of the week to its lair, etc.
Arguably, this is truer to the spirit of role-playing than the original approach of “the players learn the clues and try to work out what they mean”; just as I, who don’t know how to swing a sword, can play a mighty fighter, Mick, who isn’t too bright or well-read, can play an erudite and brilliant detective. But while it may work for Mick, this feels unsatisfying to me; just as when I read a mystery story, I want to use my mind to put together the clues and come up with the answer, not just plug away at raising a number until it’s high enough that the GM has to tell me what happened. (And I feel the same way about “any solution the players come up with is what actually happened”, though as a GM I often borrow elements from player speculation where they’re compatible with the existing information.)
Indeed, a lot of the gaming I do is investigative on a wider scale: not so much “who killed the prince” but more “what is the connection between these various weirdnesses that are going on”. For the WWII game I built an elaborate structure of the interaction of nuclear physics and magic, and one of the things the PCs and players did was design experiments to explore just how that worked.
As for picking the most likely suspect and interpreting everything in the way that makes them look guilty, I think for me this trips up against the idea that players want their PCs to be good guys. Yes, police may well do this in the real world (in part because, in the real world, most criminals are very obvious and the most likely suspect is very often the guilty party), but in the fiction I enjoy the rules tend to be different; the criminality interesting enough to get into a scenario is subtle and sophisticated, and there’s an actual problem to be solved.
Or maybe I buy or people give me geeky themed mugs a lot?