Thought experiment: Imagine a sandbox type game with some serious narrativist elements thrown in. What would such a game look like? Would it work? Is Castle Greyhawk still Castle Greyhawk when utterly personal and non-tactical decisions repeatedly come into play?
I've been thinking about this lately because my group has been dabbling in two sorts of games - a savage worlds fantasy sandbox campaign in the old school vein (GM'd by co-blogger Pat), and a more narrativist streak of games like Burning Wheel and a more recently started Spirit of the Century game in Fading Suns space that I've been running. It's also worth mentioning that I've shown up at a couple of Chgowiz's old school fantasy games.
Upon the deepest of reflections, it turns out that I like elements from these various games, and I have problems with these types of games as well. I find "old school" games a little restrictive because the pc's are fairly powerless and every little thing takes so much effort. And while I love true sandboxes as the basic framework for games, I find that these games lack real connections between the characters and the world. Which makes all decisions a player based thing rather than a character based thing.
I find many narrativist games too foofy, for lack of a better word. In my current Spirit of the Century game, the world is so wide open that I'm forced to be a little too heavy handed (for my taste) with plot hooks. But I love how games like Spirit of the Century and Burning Wheel have mechanical repercussions for personal characteristics. For example, in SoTC, a character can have the aspect "disdainful to non-nobles." Pulling this aspect into a roll can give a character a mechanical bonus to do things where this applies (which could be a range of situations). The environment or reaction of the NPCs change accordingly, and voila - a plot starts to appear that's grounded in character sheets.
So, the question is now: Could a fantasy megadungeon fruitfully work with a system like Spirit of the Century? Would the balance of the old school and new school be just right? Or are we really talking about oil and water?
Showing posts with label burning wheel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label burning wheel. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Monday, September 8, 2008
The Importance of Robust Settings...Or Not
Over the past couple years, I've played (or at least read) several games with varying levels of setting detail. Games like Planescape, L5R, and Mutants & Masterminds are chock full of detail that the players and GM can devour. Games like Burning Wheel and Wild Talents...not so much. With these latter games, I've generally created the setting during the first session (or over email) with the other players in the group. So the natural question is: Which way is better?
The games with robust settings have a lot going for them. They significantly decrease the work load for the GM, which from experience, can be a huge boon to maintaining an ongoing game. Given that a lot of players have tendencies toward the bad-ass Wolverine type player (brooding loner), settings give every player something shared, especially if they are encouraged to dive into the setting at the onset of the game and connect their characters to it in some way. Some players also love reading through the setting and figuring out where their characters fit in it. One of my fellow players loves the Mutants & Masterminds setting and gets jazzed whenever a familiar but unused face shows up. Also, robust settings can really help explain the tone of a game with an unfamiliar world, like Dark Heresy or L5R, to players.
But these types of huge settings can sometimes lead to problems. Even if warned that the GM has license to pick and choose, players can get upset when the setting isn't precisely translated in game. When I GM, I often feel that a well described setting is more constraining than enabling. I like the ability to flesh out the setting as the story demands - in a Wild Talents game I'm GMing right now, I've changed various setting elements on the fly that seemed hardwired in to me when each session started (like the underlying physics of the universe after our resident scientist, Dr. Epistemic, investigated the origin of a rift in space). And I think that players have more buy in from the outset if they've actually had a hand in creating the setting themselves.
In the end, I favor less setting rather than more. But as with all things rpg-related, it all seems to come back to the makeup of each group. Go with what your group needs to give you the best possible game.
The games with robust settings have a lot going for them. They significantly decrease the work load for the GM, which from experience, can be a huge boon to maintaining an ongoing game. Given that a lot of players have tendencies toward the bad-ass Wolverine type player (brooding loner), settings give every player something shared, especially if they are encouraged to dive into the setting at the onset of the game and connect their characters to it in some way. Some players also love reading through the setting and figuring out where their characters fit in it. One of my fellow players loves the Mutants & Masterminds setting and gets jazzed whenever a familiar but unused face shows up. Also, robust settings can really help explain the tone of a game with an unfamiliar world, like Dark Heresy or L5R, to players.
But these types of huge settings can sometimes lead to problems. Even if warned that the GM has license to pick and choose, players can get upset when the setting isn't precisely translated in game. When I GM, I often feel that a well described setting is more constraining than enabling. I like the ability to flesh out the setting as the story demands - in a Wild Talents game I'm GMing right now, I've changed various setting elements on the fly that seemed hardwired in to me when each session started (like the underlying physics of the universe after our resident scientist, Dr. Epistemic, investigated the origin of a rift in space). And I think that players have more buy in from the outset if they've actually had a hand in creating the setting themselves.
In the end, I favor less setting rather than more. But as with all things rpg-related, it all seems to come back to the makeup of each group. Go with what your group needs to give you the best possible game.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Burning Wheel needs an explicit buy-in
More than perhaps any other game I’ve encountered, Burning Wheel really needs a common buy-in from players in order to make it viable. This realization forms the theme of my reaction to the game, which I’ll describe here in support of Ben’s postgame breakdown from last week.
He pointed out that our party sort of self-destructed because Burning Wheel’s beliefs system tends to force players into antagonistic roles. This is especially true in a “burned world” – that is, a setting created on the spot by the players and the GM. Because Burning Wheel encourages players to create a unique game setting just prior to character creation, there’s relatively little shared knowledge out there for players to draw upon. When one character seizes upon a bit of backstory or history, the other players tend to leap aboard as well, sometimes crafting opposing beliefs.
In our game, this happened once we sketched out the concept of the Tome of Architecture. We agreed it was a big, powerful book of Dwarven lore, and each of the characters then created beliefs involving the Tome. It turned out that they were all some variation of “I want the Tome for myself, and I’ll do anything to get it.” As you can imagine, this led to inter-party conflict and ultimately brought the party to a premature end (with my character fleeing with the book and then falling, pierced with arrows, into a lava river, still clutching the Tome). It's very telling that our GenCon demo also ended this way, with players competing to seize a bit of treasure in a dungeon.
So what’s the solution? I think it involves having some sort of macro-level buy-in that all the players can agree to, something that artificially removes the temptation of crafting adversarial beliefs, at least initially. This can be as simple as the good old “you were sent by the king to investigate X” or as complex as the feuding members of a royal family willing to put aside their bickering in order to achieve some shared goal.
It also helps if the players are all more or less heroes; we played a “morally ambiguous” group in our Burning Wheel experience, and I think it helped escalate our downward spiral.
Anyway. All the other game elements were a lot of fun – the social encounters, the “scripted” combat, as well as the FORK mechanism, which is the designers’ term for loading your die pool with relevant traits and abilities. My biggest regret (in retrospect) is that we completed our campaign meltdown having barely scratched the surface of Ben’s overarching story. Bummer!
He pointed out that our party sort of self-destructed because Burning Wheel’s beliefs system tends to force players into antagonistic roles. This is especially true in a “burned world” – that is, a setting created on the spot by the players and the GM. Because Burning Wheel encourages players to create a unique game setting just prior to character creation, there’s relatively little shared knowledge out there for players to draw upon. When one character seizes upon a bit of backstory or history, the other players tend to leap aboard as well, sometimes crafting opposing beliefs.
In our game, this happened once we sketched out the concept of the Tome of Architecture. We agreed it was a big, powerful book of Dwarven lore, and each of the characters then created beliefs involving the Tome. It turned out that they were all some variation of “I want the Tome for myself, and I’ll do anything to get it.” As you can imagine, this led to inter-party conflict and ultimately brought the party to a premature end (with my character fleeing with the book and then falling, pierced with arrows, into a lava river, still clutching the Tome). It's very telling that our GenCon demo also ended this way, with players competing to seize a bit of treasure in a dungeon.
So what’s the solution? I think it involves having some sort of macro-level buy-in that all the players can agree to, something that artificially removes the temptation of crafting adversarial beliefs, at least initially. This can be as simple as the good old “you were sent by the king to investigate X” or as complex as the feuding members of a royal family willing to put aside their bickering in order to achieve some shared goal.
It also helps if the players are all more or less heroes; we played a “morally ambiguous” group in our Burning Wheel experience, and I think it helped escalate our downward spiral.
Anyway. All the other game elements were a lot of fun – the social encounters, the “scripted” combat, as well as the FORK mechanism, which is the designers’ term for loading your die pool with relevant traits and abilities. My biggest regret (in retrospect) is that we completed our campaign meltdown having barely scratched the surface of Ben’s overarching story. Bummer!
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