Current Mood:  pleased
Current Music: Dimmu Borgir - Unorthodox Manifesto
Its hard to truly explicate the frustration I'm feeling at something, as  Heather wisely reminded me, over 6mo away. Still, this being me, and frustrated inconclusion being something I truly hate to deal with, I remain frustrated and irritated over not having a full-bore already understood plan of where I'm going. This, likewise, being me, I thought I might lay down the outline of the things I'm thinking here. Just so the rest of you can, you know, point and laugh at my overthinking. Scope There's really only two real scopes of story I like working in, truth be told: - Street
In short, "Normal people in abnormal circumstances." This is the realm of zombie survival horror, most modern urban settings, and the like. Its fun, but only so long as you have mechanics with sufficient detail to make it somehow "interesting" to differ only slightly from the other characters. (Incidently, this was the place I find ST falls down in modern games; with only 3 "main" choices out of 5 for most characters, diversity is hard to come by.) - Epic
Yeah, this is that kind of story. Huge, scary, crazy, "your character is a god/ruler/major mover and shaker." Again, not a lot of systems really do this scope well. Probably because trying to keep characters mechanically interesting at such widely variant scales is quite the trick.
My original tendency was toward the Street for the Summer game, but examining more of my options in detail reminded me that I definitely have some Epic options at my fingertips. Setting This one is somewhat easier to talk about, as it has fewer options. I don't want a setting which takes 6 hours to communicate to my players, requires learning a new language, or is so totally alien that I can't sketch in the outlines with a very broad brush. This is a serious limitation, for a whole lot of settings, and was one of the major reasons that All Flesh was running as such a big contender for so long (and, really, still is). The ability to say, "Its just like the modern world, except," is really a powerful lever. You really don't understand how important it is, until you sit back and try to sell a really beautifully complicated setting that can't just be groked in a single sitting to your friends. Try Tekumel. No, go ahead, I'll wait. When you tell them they really need to learn Tsolyani to really get the setting, I'll be over here with my three language primers. Yeah, that went as I expected. So, as I was saying, the setting has to be quickly communicated. The easiest way to do that is simply to pick a modern setting. The second-easiest is to pick something so hyper-traditional that everyone has internalized the tropes (like D&D Fantasy, which is so common even the non-gamer knows the tropes). The third way is to pick something with such a loose idea of "setting" that even the most improbable conflations are non-problematic (which is how Donjon and Sorcerer & Sword entered the contention). That's that. Mood I like the dark. I mean, I like it dark, baby. I like games which look at Call of Cthulhu, snort, and lift their noses in the air at such a bastion of hope. (Here, feel free to read Kult or Sorcerer.) If all my players feel like vomiting, crying, or hiding in a corner and just shuddering with their hands over their eyes while singing tunelessly at the top of their lungs, I feel I've done a good job. I love to run it. I do, however, recognize that very few people are up to that kind of regular self-mutilation of the psyche. I can, perversely enough, go the other way and run something light, amusing, and genuinely funny. (Again, Donjon or maybe Toon.) I don't enjoy it nearly as much, though, and such games have a regular habit of breaking loose of any kind of even remote control and going rampage across your living room. I'm not a total control freak, but I find they oft get too disordered for my taste. Mood presents a real quandary for me, as I try to find a place I'll both enjoy running and my players will enjoy playing in. Mechanics Ah, yes, glorious mechanics. I've written enough about my taste in mechanics for pretty much every one of my readers to know exactly what I'm thinking here. Minimalism. But you can't run things too close to the bone. Diversification has to be very possible. This isn't as big a deal when the number of descriptors for any given character is large, but when they aren't, you have to just sort of work yourself along that way. Wushu is a brilliant, wonderful game, for example, but its just not suited to long-term games or those in which characters are intended to be near each other in effectiveness, or where crazy stunts are out of order. You can shoehorn it so, but its not rewarding you to do so. That level of consideration goes across the board. In that sense, Silver Age Sentinels might be kind of interesting. Its not, by any stretch, minimalist -- but it certainly knows what it is, and what it models. OK, even for Street-level supers, its likely too hefty for my tastes. The other requirement is that chargen shouldn't take more than one moderate session. Consideration So, what's the current list of prospects, you ask? - All Flesh Must Be Eaten
Not really a surprise if you've been following me. Street characters, enough mechanics to differentiate one average Joe from another, a real grasp of the setting, and the right mood, somewhere between deadly serious black and a twilight grey. All zombie stories start the same, "Everything was fine, until ..." which is a great aid to short storytelling. Chargen is, pointedly, not hard. All Flesh is still the top contender for this particular run. - Nobilis
Right out of left field, and at the opposite side of nearly everything is Nobilis. I happen to love the setting, but its a bit more convoluted than just the modern day, though running the PCs as a newly created Familia Caelestis could certainly work out to minimize my pain. Mechanically, well, its diceless with a bidding mechanism, which'll burn the brains of half the folks in my group, because I don't think they've played anything even remotely like it. That said, it is truly epic and grand, and at least one potential player even knows exactly what she'll play. - BESM
Perhaps this needs a bit more clarity. BESM's sort of like an engine without a car wrapped around it, and I mean 1st Edition BESM, back when it was a stripped-down super-lean mean machine. The problem is that I'd end up stealing core setting from elsewhere, possibly Hearts, Swords and Flowers ... which would just be incestuous. - Over the Edge
I know, a lot of you are saying, "What the fuck is that?" OtE was the original surrealist RPG. Set on the mythical island of Al Amarja, where the airport looks like an upside-down ziggurat and you can spend the first few sessions just trying to get out of Customs and Immigration, where aliens order rust soup and instead of ties people wear nooses around their necks. Its that kind of place. Of course, the mechanics are minimalist, and were before the new wave games were new wave. Drawbacks: Well, the surrealism might be a bit much to deal with in a short game, and it tends to get odd and out of control quickly.
There's a number of games I really wish could be in this listing. Nephilim, Chill, Ars Magica, Exalted, but they all fall down on some significant point. Possible considerations include Ironclaw / Jadeclaw, for purely personal reasons -- but frankly, I'd really rather play than run them. Its getting early. Time for some rest.
News Update: I found my All Flesh Must Be Eaten! It was hidden, tucked back between two other books and I must've overlooked it about fifteen times. Still no Fistfull of Zombies, though. Hades below alone knows where it could have got off to. |
grumpy