Games Blog

Turn of a Friendly Die: WISH 27: Science Fiction RPGs

The RPG market is dominated by fantasy (with horror coming in second). Why have most attempts at creating a science fiction RPG failed (commercially or artistically), and what would a hypothetical SFRPG need to catch on the way fantasy has?

It depends a bit on your definition of “failed”. While Traveller has never had the runaway success of Dungeons and Dragons, it’s still around (in two different versions).

I think the main reason is that ‘Generic Fantasy’ has a widely-known set of tropes that DnD has managed to capitalise on, while science-fiction is a much more varied genre, and lacks such a standard set of conventions. Every literary or cinematic SF universe works a different way; Trek is different from Star Wars which is different from the SF universes of Robert Heinlein which is different from those of Iain Banks, and so on. A setting-free system that encompasses all of those would end up looking much like a totally generic one – perhaps a lot of SF gamers with original settings use GURPS?

Of course, many published SF games have been licenced games, and they’ve suffered from the whims of the media companies with licences – both of the ‘household name’ SF settings have bounced from company to company, in the case of Star Trek more than once.

To sum up, I think it’s all down to the fact that there’s no such thing as ‘generic SF’ in the same way that there’s a ‘generic fantasy’. Perhaps there could have been. If someone had come up with a game resembling Star Trek but with the serial numbers filed off in the primeval days of gaming, might it have done better than Traveller? On the other hand, was Traveller really that much of a failure? And on the third tentacle, what about RIFTS? This was apparently the third-biggest game on the market (after DnD and Storyteller) for many years.

Turn of a Friendly Die: WISH 25: New PCs, Existing Party

I haven’t posted anything to the last couple of WISHes, because I couldn’t think of anything much to say. However:

How do you introduce a new PC to an existing group? Is it best if the GM takes special measures of some kind to integrate the new and existing characters, or should the GM just allow them to meet and let the players put it all together? Does it matter whether the game is oriented towards character cooperation or character competition?

I’ve tried both approaches. In one of my current on-line Kalyr games I’ve dropped two new PCs into the game just after the climactic battle of previous “chapter” of the game. The existing party had accidentally switched on an interplanar portal device which warped two people from 21st century Earth (the two new PCs) into Kalyr.

Previously I’ve started new PCs in their own threads, and had them meet up with other PCs when the plotlines called for it to happen. In another Kalyr game I don’t really have party as such at all; each PC has their own agenda and plotline, and PCs tend to meet up and split up, sometimes just passing ‘as ships in the night’.

In some ways, the ‘party’ is an artificial construct necessary for face-to-face gaming, that doesn’t always apply to gaming on-line. On the other hand, an on-line game without much PC-to-PC interaction can rapidly turn into half-a-dozen semi-independent one-to-one games.

Now I’ve done most of my Christmas shopping, I see I’ve managed to ensure all the presents I’ve bought are sensibly rectangular in shape, and therefore easy to wrap. Remember folks, if you choose to give someone a present that’s non-Euclidian in shape, you’re the only one to blame for any sanity losses incurred while wrapping the thing!

Lawrence Simon of Amish Tech Support is claiming he’s now reached 9th level, and wonders if anyone’s created a Blogger DnD class. As far as I know, nobody has, but that doesn’t stop fools like me trying. After all, I once wrote a Spammer template for GURPS

So here it is – The Blogger Prestige class.

Unlike most adventuring classes, Bloggers spend their time in the plane of existance known as the Blogosphere, a sub-plane of Cyberspace.

Alignment

Blogger alignment does not follow the usual Law/Chaos or Good/Evil axes. Instead, blogger alignment is on a Left/Right axis.

Favoured Enemy

Every blogger must choose one favourite enemy at 1st level, and gain an existing enemy for every four subsequent levels. Bloggers gain +1 to all blog attacks against their favoured enemy. A favoured enemy might be an individual, a group, an ideology or even an inanimate object. Examples of favoured enemies of bloggers are George W Bush, the Palestinian Authority, Robert Fisk, The RIAA, Music Journalists,and Virgin Voyagers.

Hit Points

Bloggers are assumed not to be much good at hand-to-hand combat, so Bloggers only get 1d4 hit points per level.

Blogosphere Reputation

As wells as hit points, Bloggers (and other public figures) have Blogosphere Reputation Points. Bloggers get 1d8 of these per level, other public figures (politicians, sportsmen, writers, rock stars etc.) get 1d6 per level.

Experience

Bloggers don’t spend much time wandering around in dungeons, killing things, and taking their stuff. Therefore bloggers gain experience by blogging. Of course, it’s not enough to blog, somebody out there has got to read the stuff. Therefore you get one XP for each person that reads each post. So if you post ten posts a day, and get one hundred hits, that’s 10×100 = 1000 XP.

Feats

Since most Bloggers are human (do you know any half-elves?), Bloggers get the standard two feats at 1st level, and one for each additional three levels. The following feats are specific to Bloggers:

Fisk: You are a master of the rhetorical attack form known as the Fisk. This does 1d6 damage to the Blogosphere Reputation of your chosen target. You may only blog one Fisk per day.

Improved Fisk: As Fisk, except this one is named after you, and does 2d6 damage.

Google Fu: Your blog is ranked so high in Google that for any site you reference, your own site comes up higher in a Google search than the site you referenced.

Domain: Your blog has it’s own domain, to distinguish it from the riff-raff on Blogspot

Moveable Type: Your blog uses Moveable Type rather than mere Blogger. This means your archives can be guaranteed to work properly.

Instapundit: Your blog has made it onto Glenn Reynolds’ blogroll.

I once spent a lot of time making up languages for the World of Kalyr. Unlike the master of invented languages, JRR Tolkein, I didn’t pay much attention to phonoaesthetics. Caveat Lector examines the concept, and proposes Dorothea’s Law of Velar Villainy

The more villainous you are, the more velars and postvelars in your name or your language. Corollary: the more villainous you are, the more likely your name or language is to contain velars or postvelars in syllable-final and word-final positions.

Velar consonants are pronounced by pulling the back of the tongue up against the velum, the soft area at the back of the mouth. The ‘k’ in ‘kite’ is velar. So are the ‘g’ in ‘go’ and the ‘ng’ in ‘sing’

Doesn’t seem to apply to many of my Kalyr NPC villains, but it does apply to some of my player characters – Should I consider Dharak, Jorlak and Jaldaric to be bad guys?

plasticbag.org talks of Wikis.

I’ve wondered about the pros and cons of Wikis or Moveable Type for maintaining gameworld information. A few weeks ago I spent quite a bit of time cutting and pasting a lot of the static World of Kalyr pages into the Kalyr Wiki hosted by The Phoenyx. Wikis let you have very rich hypertext cross-referencing, using the WikiWords.

On the other hand, Moveable Type is very powerful for maintaining indexes and categories, something Wiki’s won’t do for you automatically. It’s very good for something like game logs that are essentially date-based. But you don’t get rich hyperlinking unless you code all the links in manually.

From John Tynes’ blog comes some horrifying news – there’s to be a d20-based roleplaying game based on John Norman’s Gor books. Just what the roleplaying hobby needs! What next? Steam Tunnel Live Roleplaying?

Ginger sums it up quite well:

In fact, I’m all for seeing who has and uses d20 Gor, because it’s a clear marker of who not to game with for me.

The sad thing is, there are people out there who’d buy this drek.

My Game System Overview on GURPS is now up on Dreamscribe. There’s also a review of HatCon with a player’s comments on the game I ran.