This month, Mike and Roger talk about games we don’t think we can run.
We mentioned: GURPS 4e Essentials and GURPS 4e Infinite Worlds at the Bundle of Holding, ending on 18 August. (And other offers coming, for which we don’t have links as I compile this.)
I played in an Ars Magica PBEM in the late 90s. After six months of emails, the group had moved from the Covenant hall to the top of a nearby hill - a total of maybe an hour of In Character play. That IC play was great, and I kept in touch with several of the other players for a long while, but in terms of actually progressing the game … The GM must have been pulling their hair out.
Avatar games - I played on (can’t remember which) back in the early 90s where the GM had started us all out according to their perceptions of us. Absolutely no chance of upsetting anyone there. Given we were told we were playing ourselves, I basically noped out of the adventure - it looked really dangerous. So I spent the play session locked up in an alien zoo as an exhibit. We didn’t play it again.
Mike mentioned that there’s an issue of ‘embarrassment’ around playing out love and sticky stuff in many gaming groups. I agree with him, but I do wonder if that’s a generational thing - especially pre and post Vampire the Masquerade.
Speaking as someone who, like many here, started playing D&D in school with my boy friends and it was largely a 1 character per person war-game, that shaped how I approached the game even now.
10+ years later, it was clear that Vampire and other WOD games (especially the LARP version, was far more attractive to women than stereotypical TTRPGs, and that games about intrapersonal drama were becoming as popular as the more stabbyfighting ahem tactical and strategic games were.
I listened to a recent episode of Orlanth Rex’s Gaming Vexes (this one I think Episode 51: Talking Tools (4) - Fiction Friction — Orlanth Rex’s Gaming Vexes — Overcast - but certainly one of the Talking Tools series) where they were discussing this exact thing and one of the contributors said that he had one gaming group that was predominantly female players in their 20’s and early 30’s and they had no problem at all with roleplaying sex, romance, and emotions.
We played a D&D avatar games in college using basically the same premise as the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. I ended up being a Thief. Suddenly, my friends and roommates stopped trusting me. I called them out on it.
Years ago, someone suggested playing an avatar game in which we were transported to another world. I said that they wouldn’t like me playing myself having a nervous breakdown and missing my wife. I know how I would react in the type of stressful situations that rpgs typically thrust upon the PCs, and it is not pretty.
Michael makes a good point about chairs in conventions. I would invite him to come to Grand Tribunal in Cheltenham in August 14th-16th so he could come and be cranky at Ars Magica players but I fear our community centre’s chairs are no better than the Freemasons.
I would love to try GURPS Transhuman Space again, but I tried running it once and it turned into accountancy in space. I have loved Traveller since childhood, but currently my play consists of one online game where we argue about lore a lot, and a very small in-person game where the GM has two players who love the game as much as he does.
Ars Magica - a lot of people try to run play by forum, play by email, etc. and given how many games collapse I suspect it’s a terrible format for most games. The only play by post games I’ve enjoyed have been relatively straightforward exploration games. If anyone has actually done any hard analysis of how forum games and the like succeed or fail, I’d like to read it.
Avatar games - any that aren’t JH Brennan’s Monster Horror Show are probably terrible He wrote that one as a light-hearted one for teenagers, and any other approach probably sucks for the reasons given by yourselves.
The failure mode I have met most often in play by forum games (mostly run by me) is bogging down in increasing levels of detail. Some day I shall try again.
Some of the things I sa back when I did a lot of play-by-post on rpol.net:
No one every said what they expected from the players. Do you approach it like a traditional live RPG, risking that things drag when ability rolls are needed? Do you approach it like group writing exercise where players have more agency but risk players getting in each others way? How does one play-by-forum?
Games that never made it far past the first scene because the GM assumed the players would do all the heavy lifting (I guess?).
Players who posted a lot (several paragraphs in a single post or just a lot of posts) versus players who posted less (perhaps a single post once a day). Getting a consistent, coherent cadence rarely happened.
I came very close to running The Yellow King, despite the difficulty of including any encounter that hadn’t been planned out long in advance, but one of the players fretted about another of the players having a nickname in questionable taste and played their X-card before we even began.
I’d love to play Ars Magica but that defeated me as it seems to have defeated many others.
I think the way to do ARS MAGICA is to do the core sessions either face to face or via chat and to expect a certain amount of off-line world building for the campaign: the working out of the months in the laboratory or the library without bringing it to the table. ‘Bluebooking’ as it is sometimes called.
It would require a GM who can take queries and work outside the needs of a regular session and yet stop the time tick getting away from the slowest players. It may be more work than I am capable of nowadays: even the best of us tend to keep session prep for most games down to a few hours just before the meeting. Our extensive experiences allows us to do things that way. Our great age forces to do it that way.
I like Ars Magica conceptually, but I’m at a loss of what the magus PCs do that isn’t just administrative or paperwork for the player. I need a bright glowing sign that says “Plot This Way” for me to get into it.
I think one of my mistakes in running AM was trying to establish new covenants. Some were built on the sites of covenants lost to Winter, but the player’s magi were always the ones in charge.
It would help plotting to have senior mages who could say unto them “Go here! Do this!”
As mostly a stranger to the setting, it certainly seems to me that one could wring some dramatic tension out of the contrast between “I am learning the fundamental nature of the universe” and “you, lad, go and fetch me ten weasel pelts. Spotted ones.”
It says something for my degree of sadness that I went and looked up what the rules I have said about weasal pelts.
There’s not even an entry for ‘fur’ in the table on how material and shapes affect enchantments and no entry for weasal in the Beastiary. (Lions, sure. Unicorns of course!)
There is however an entry for Hats in the table and hats are often made of fur. A Hat is useful for affecting the image of the self. So perhaps the Magister wants to make something that to make going down the pub easier for him. Or skulking in the great hall overhearing what the rest of the covenant is saying about him.
I agree with Roger about the “James Bond” genre and setting, and about the espionage and covert ops genres in general. The first thing to do when fixing JB007 — even before removing the gambling and seduction systems — would be to generalise it a bit to cover a wider range of adventure-story content.
I can do it, I went to that sort of school. But for a lot of players it’s enough work that it’s a barrier to enjoyment of the game.
(Similarly my approach to working out critical/special/etc. chances in BRP-related systems is generally “I rolled a 7, times 5 is 35, my skill is 43 so that’s a special” rather than “43, divide by 5 is 8.6” because the former is ingrained for life at a subconscious level.)
Part of the problem is that the rules support a lot of styles of play, but there is no explicit instruction of “these are obvious ways to start your players going”. Having senior magi means you can explain why a place is set up that particular way, why the servants behave the way they do, and has someone to give orders. On the other hand, it may mean the players feel a lack of agency until they’re older or until some of the older magi have died or vanished into the magic realm.
There always is a question of “Why should I be the one to deal with this?”, but this is true of many games. Call of Cthulhu and its imitators would be more realistic if people went “Nope, time to turn this over to the police” and left the spooky place and went to the pub whenever they found dark occult shenanigans.
Reasons to adventure - It might threaten you (occult horrors stalking the neighbourhood, or missing children causing people to look at your castle funny). There might be something in it for you (unusual creatures spotted, rumours of buried treasure). It’s a mystery, learning the secret is educational and who can bear to leave a mystery unsolved (strange ghosts, disappearing villages).
One I adapted from Ken Hite: if you go to a place, the spooky thing happens, and you react to it, that’s horror. If you go back to the place, or seek out more places like that, that’s monster hunting, and they are not the same genre. (This is why I feel that Lovecraftian one-shots and campaigns are quite different things.)
The other is to give the PCs some particular ability that makes them better suited to dealing with the spooky thing than the police are. If the cops go in, they won’t have your protections and so they will come out as a thick red spray, and that doesn’t help anybody. So you need at the very least to go in and disarm the magical landmine before calling them.
The only AM campaign I’ve played in started a new covenant, at Glastonbury in about 805 AD. The PCs had met at a major Tribunal, which had set up the boundaries for the jurisdictions in the British Isles. We were an enchanter from Rome, a redcap, a traditional witch and a half-fairy. Getting our buildings and subsistence set up occupied several sessions, as did acquiring a source of mundane income, and surviving our first winter. We had one “adventure,” a visit to Lyonesse, and then the GM moved back to California.
We found it required out-of-session thought, research and planning by the players as well as the GM, but we were all happy with that.
Considering also @Sexagesimalian 's comments above, I wonder whether one of the stumbling blocks in asynchronous Ars Magica specifically might be the lack of a clear distinction between “this is a thing we’re going to resolve now, in the ‘session’” and “this is stuff you are expected to go away and think about for a bit”.
My most successful Ars Magica campaign was almost exactly that model. We met about every three months for a full Saturday of IC roleplaying and the plot, and in between we emailed back and forth for lab work etc. And we’d generally have agreed at the end of the face to face session the next year’s plans so everyone had a good idea of what the Covenant expected of them. (Not that they always fulfilled it.)
