Month: August 2018

Today is the first of the weekend, sub-thematically-organzied questions: Most Memorable NPC.

I would go with Sebastian, an NPC from my first-ever VAMPIRE:THE MASQUERADE game, back when it was first released.

Sebastian was the player-characters’ Prince. And the opening line of the campaign was: “Sebastian is dead.”

I set up a campaign set in my college town (of course), with the PCs being the only vampires there, squeezed in between two cities (Topeka to the West, Kansas City to the East), with a powerful Prince who protected them from being absorbed by one or the other.

In the opening session, I announced that the Prince, Sebastian had been murdered. Each of the players had secrets they were keeping from the others, some of which involving their relationship to Sebastian, or their knowledge of how he died. I prepared nothing else.

I sat back, and mostly just watched for the entirety of that first session, as the players dealt with the news, and interacted with each other. I’d never had a game session like that before. I don’t think any of us had.

Sebastian would appear as an NPC, more than just a shadow cast on the events of the game — but he would appear in flashbacks, which is another thing I’d never attempted in a game before, but which just seemed to fit this new style of story-telling play.

For me, Sebastian is memorable mostly for what he made me realize was possible in an RPG, a lesson that I carried over into other games.

 

Today’s #RPGaDay question: What Do You Look For In An RPG?

First and foremost, I’m interested in a setting that fires my imagination. That’s one of the reasons why so many of my favorite games are licensed settings: Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, James Bond, etc. — I come to those with a pre-existing love of the setting, so my “buy in” is pretty easy.

I love original settings as well, but they take a bit more work to “sell me” on the concept. The best original settings are the ones that can grab me just from the “Elevator Pitch.” Give me a brief rundown of the concept, and if I find myself going “Oh, COOL!” — well, I’m in. Sometimes, it takes a combination of the pitch and some artwork.

A good setting will make me a fan of the world, not just the game. I’ll be willing to buy fiction, comics, merchandise, the whole transmedia package. It surprises me still that more games publishers don’t do this, preferring instead to just do the game alone.

Beyond the setting, I’m also looking for rules that are elegant.

“Elegant” is an entirely subjective description, of course — and for me, in this context, it means rules that are streamlined, emulative, and clever.

Streamlined, in the sense that the rules don’t hinder story-telling by “getting in the way” — I don’t want everything to grind to a halt while checking some chart, and doing cube-roots. I don’t want to have to look up special-case systems which are unrelated to the core mechanic. As a GM, I want to be able to reasonably wing it with a basic familiarity with the system.

Emulative rules are those which feel like the action they’re trying to convey. Examples include the chase and seduction mechanics from the old JAMES BOND 007 game, or Trusting In The Force from West End Games’ STAR WARS. I want the rules to match the setting. Don’t tell me your game is “swashbuckling adventure” and give me a combat system that differentiates between various weapons modifications and involves 40 minutes of tallying up bonuses and penalties for every round.

Lastly, I look for rules that are clever — ways of handling things that I’ve never seen before, that make me wish I’d come up with them. But that’s just the designer in me, admiring the art form.

This combination, elegant rules and a compelling setting, means that I’m kind of hard to please. But, honestly, when your day job is writing and designing RPGs, it takes something special to make you want to spend your leisure time on RPGs as well. Thankfully, something special always seems to come along.

 
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