Where Worlds Collide

Game WISH 99 asks:

Pick three to five genres and name the best RPG for that genre. Why do you think it’s the best? What makes it better than others? What are its downsides?

I find that things like power level, realism vs. Hollywood, and where you stand of the Gamist/Simulationist/Dramatist spectrum matters more in choice of system than whether your game is fantasy, SF or horror. Not only that, my favourite game systems are probably GURPS and Fudge, both of which are advertised as universal systems. The former is my preference for detailed, moderately realistic games, the latter for more freewheeling cinematic stuff. However…

Low Fantasy
I define low fantasy as something semi-realistic, where combat is dangerous, magic is subtle and low-key, there’s a lot of attention to detail, and campaigns revolve around the fate of the characters rather than the fate of the whole world. This is one that a detailed system like GURPS handles very well. The other good system for low fantasy is of course that old warhorse RuneQuest, now long out of print, but a game that still stands the test of time.

Hard SF
GURPS, with it’s emphasis on realism, was made for this genre. It’s not surprising that one of the most successful incarnations of Traveller is the GURPS version. Saying that, classic Traveller, although dated, is still a good game. I haven’t looked at the d20 version (“Where’s the Zhodani Lair? I need the eps to get my Marine up to 6th level!”)

High Fantasy
My definition of high fantasy is where the heroes and villains are much more powerful that ordinary folks, magic or it’s equivalent is overt and flashy, and plots are epic in scope. One system I’d recommend if you have a Dramatist bias is Hero Quest, a very free-flowing system explicitly designed for epic narratives. I wonder if anyone’s tried using HQ for space opera games (which I consider to be closer to high fantasy with different props than it is to hard SF).

Horror
I know it’s an old game, and some aspects of it are looking dated, but Call of Cthulhu is still the definitive horror game. Meet Things Man Was Not Meant To Know! Go horribly insane! Wibble! I’ve played some other genuinely scary horror games, most notably Unknown Armies, which has a very neat and simple system. I found the concept of Whispering Vault was a little too weird to get my head round, and I didn’t like their dice pool mechanic.

Time Travel and Dimension Hopping
Two closely-related genres, both of which are ideal for multi-genre systems such as GURPS or Fudge. The choice between the two should depend on the level of detail or realism you want. Fudge works well for a freewheeling cinematic game where the player characters include an intelligent 2″ long insect and a telepathic horse, and technological items are plot devices. GURPS works better for a semi-realistic game where the player characters are all close to human, and adventures focus on preventing bad guys from meddling with history, or on exploring strange and dangerous alternate timelines. I’ve heard people rave about the highly cinematic TORG for these sorts of games, but I’ve only played that system for high fantasy, and wasn’t terribly impressed.

Two online gaming zines hit the net in the last couple of days.

First, the June issue of Dreamscribe, the house zine of the Dreamlyrics community. While this one contains a lot of news about forum members, this month does have a good retrospective on Lace & Steel by Paul Kidd.

Second is issue 16 of Fudge Factor, about all things Fudge. This has been going from strength to strength recently, and all the articles are well worth reading.

Carl Cravens wonders how to approach Faster-than-light travel in games.

I’ve been thinking about this from a gaming view point. One of the first questions most space setting planners try to answer is “what kind of FTL technology is there” because it drives a lot of other factors. But what if we just didn’t ask or answer that question? Throw out the laws of physics, declare arbitrary distances between systems we want to be reachable (and untraversable distances for those we don’t), and just pretend that everyone gets around in normal space under non-relativistic speeds. Could a game work that way, or would the ability of the audience to ask stupid questions about the world cause problems.

I see it as a genre issue; it’s one of the big differences between (semi) Hard SF and Space Opera.

I don’t recall Jack Vance ever telling us how FTL worked. In his Gaean Reach universe, ships just travel from A to B, and that’s it. But space travel was never really the theme for any book; all the action takes place on planets, and spacecraft are nothing more than plot devices. Even on Planet of Adventure, where the hero struggles to build his own ship from pilfered spare parts, Vance doesn’t tell us what all those components do or how they work. And he spins a good enough ripping yarn that we readers don’t really care.

It’s the approach I’ve taken for AEF, the Vancian space pirate game I run on Dreamlyrics. I inherited the game from another GM who never specified the mechanics of FTL travel either. I do something find myself having to define bits of the physics of the game universe as I go along, and then keep things consistent. Rigid Simulationist players will hate my game….

Game WISH 98 asks:

What are three games or settings that you’ve bought or seen recently (in stores or previews) that you’d really like to try? What interests you about them and why?

First: GURPS 4th Edition. I’ve been a GURPS player for fifteen years, but was considering dropping GURPS as my system of choice in favour of something simpler, possibly FUDGE. The announcement of a long talked-about 4th edition has very much rekindled my interest in the game.

While at it’s core GURPS 3rd edition is a still a very good game engine, it’s not quite perfect. More significantly it’s suffering from a lot of accumulated cruft; the accretion of rules from a plethora of supplements, many of which were created on an ad-hoc basis with little consideration on how they’d impact the system as a whole. SJG promise to clean up and streamline the system, to produce something for the ’00s rather than the 1980s. I like what I’m seeing in the sample characters and ‘rules leaks’ appearing in Pyramid Online. They make me very optimistic that game will be what it promises to be.

Second: Infinite Worlds, which will be the official ‘house setting’ for GURPS 4th. I loved the two Alternate Earths books (I even reviewed the second of these on RPG.net), although I struggled with trying to come up with a good campaign framework to use them all. Infinite Worlds builds on the concept and promises to add some more exotic new ones, some including the sorts of magic and weirdness omitted from the hard science based originals. While lesser game writers might turn such a multiverse into a horrendous munchkinised mishmash, I’m confident Infinite Worlds will turn out much better than that. That’s largely because it’s being written by Ken Hite.

Finally, for something completely different, FATE, something I’ve downloaded, but I’m intrigued to see how it actually plays. It’s a implementation of FUDGE, but with some intriguing ideas borrowed from a couple other games. It has what looks on paper to be a very elegant way of handling attributes in relation to skills, and a very clever lifepath-based character generation system.