Small Games

I've been giving thoughts to game concepts and ideas lately, mostly mulling things over in my head, problems of genre and possible solutions.

To whit: the fewer players a game has, the 'better' it is. This not only allows the players and GM to develop both characters and supporting cast more fully but makes for a more solid game all around. A smaller game is also more likely to survive one or more players going AWOL for various RL reasons and should be able to factor the player's absence into the game narrative or pause the game without that much difficulty.

Genre Conventions: If the PCs are playing police officers, they play police officers. They don't quit the force when then going gets tough, fight to be reinstated when fired and so forth. The implied player/gm contract needs to explicit regarding PC occupations and how this affects the overall game. Are the PCs jobs going be connected to the game and plots or is it just office work they go to for X hours a day that will be glossed over? If it's intended to be a buddy cop game, are the players willing to work together to ensure this happens? And so on, and so forth.

Teamwork: Assuming the PCs are intended to work together, is there some necessary extrinsic force promoting this? Is it necessary? What happens when one player can't make the session?


Thoughts for future games

I think I'd like to try a setup where the PCs are either paid for Plot/Game stuff or paid enough in Day Job (or, being wealthy, don't need one) to be able to gloss over the problems of what is done for a living. A game where the PCs are wealthy enough not to need to work can be done with only mild moralistic fun and games on the side.

I still think a game involving playing siblings and/or other family members could work in a small game (one could be adopted, perhaps). It creates a dynamic from the start and solves a lot of pesky problems regarding knowing each other and the like.

If the teamwork function of a game is extrinsic, making a game where the PCs have some some edge over normal people but not enough to take on Bad Guys without working together and so forth would be both handy and necessary: the idea of the PC as unique rather than Unique being a kind of selling point for a game.

on the nature of pcs

Sooo .... I've been reading about world war III stuff and such lately (aka the news) and begin thinking about the current game and the nature of PCs. To whit: If we ran Middle East: the RPG, PCs would be nuclear weapons. They don't all go off, but they have the potential to. They change the world just by existing in it. If the world were a river, the PCs get to be stones and dams and anything else that fits that metaphor.

One of the major aspects of the world is that PCs Matter. The things you do create ripples, spreading out. The world isn't as much a powder keg as it is stuck in a stasis that the existence of PC s breaks, both for good and for ill. The things you do and friendships your characters make -- to say nothing of enemies -- echo into the wider world as they do. The point of PCs is that they change the world: having kewl powerz and such is only one aspect of being awesome and the stars of the show.

What is made of it depends on Sparkie, of course :)

How social media ruins rpg games ....

A lot of novels are no longer set in the present. This tends to be true of games as well, and for the same reason: social media. The internet. Facebook. Twitter. All games have problems in that that need solving, all quests have some mystery/discovery lurking in them waiting to be solved. Or you can just google it. Need help? The police are just one cell phone cal away. So are family, friends, co-workers. And why bother meeting in person if you can use google+, set a limited group as 'other pcs' and use that?

Granted, a GM can obfuscate things: the internet is an awesome source of flat-out lies and mistruths. For example, have a pc use wikipedia as gospel and just smile at them in the certain knowledge that the Big Bad had been editing certain pages for years under various sock puppets because it's the best way for a vampire to get prey these days. And cell phone coverage can be spotty, to a degree, but the chief problem is that such plot  devices make PCs lazy.

(This is much the same issue as skills in D&D: why look for anything when you can just roll Detect Traps and so forth. Laziness is roll-playing, role-playing is less so. (But using lots of dice is fun, and fun isn't lazy - Sparkie))

There are ways to use this and make it fun, no doubt, but the overall issue is that a lot of tropes uses in games and novels came into existence long before the internet, which tends to hinder and limit them. Sort of making PCs all Amish [which would rock....] or just not having FB and such come up as options I'm not sure what can be done with this problem, insofar as it is one. It can be useful: I would quite like to see a game where the players make social media avatars for their PCs and do in-game stuff with that between sessions but a lot of genres don't work as well when PCs have access to too much information or can exploit the ruthless common sense that comes with it.

At which point the GM pay well drop an EMP on the world :)

Thoughts on D&D

So, the next edition is coming out in ~2 years (2013 at some point). I was not a fan of 4e -- admittedly, I didn't play it often and only read through the rules twice but it pretty much struck me as D&D trying to be an MMO and failing, to say nothing of being more complicated than it needed to be. I find as I get older I get tired of games involving flipping through acres of pages and legacy systems that make little sense. So .... some thoughts toward 5e of D&D.

1) The stats will remain as they always were. This is, pretty much, a given. Ditto for HP and AC, however unwieldy they've perhaps become. A thought: give fewer options. So, random dice roll, stat at a time, and you're stuck with them. This will prevent a lot of the min/maxing that begins right at the gate. I would allow for an optional rerolling of all if more than 2 stats are 9 or lower, but that would be it.

2) Scrap the obsession with balance. Classes are not balanced: you play X because it is the best at X, and won't be as good at Y and unable to do Z. Trying to make every class even seems to do a disservice to all of them.

3) If every race can be a PC, then have them all as options from the get-go. People aren't spending money on RPGs like they did back in the day: said model isn't working, so don't piss people off by trying to force it on them.

4) Reduce the amount of books.
PHB (The basic classes, with instructions for how to make everything else into a PC class. Ta-da. Combat stuff. Magic. Also psionics. They'll show up, put them in as part of the main thing from the start.)  
DM/M&M: One book. Cull stuff, streamline and focus things.
Optional book:  The M&M species done up as PHB ones. The rules should allow the GM to do that on his/her own but this could be handy and include the 'full' M&M list of monsters to make certain people happy.

Also, if one will be making Settings -- which one will -- have some idea as to what and the relevant feats in the main book rather than setting-specific ones. Just a thought.

5) Character generation can be complicated (See: spells, keeping track of). Make an online PC creator, make it free, give .html and .rtf formats for finished PCs.

6) Toss skills out the window, as they're just excuses/reasons not to role-place. Assume everyone can do X at a certain level, add in feats if they want to be better. So anyone can Climb, if you have a feat you can climb really well (and without the equipment). D&D is focused on dungeon crawls and killing monsters -- this has never changed, from a system POV. If skills vanish, it requires actual player skills to work things out, not just 'I check for traps.' *roll dice*. Rolling dice should be for social and physical combat, not broken things like diplomacy checks devoid of role-playing.

7) Cull things. If need be, add all those in as pdf/pod things later on for those who insist on having weapon X and Y and armour Z.

8) Recognize that the Epic 20+ level D&D stuff has never worked; don't bother trying to get it to.