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stevekensonAfter some consideration, I’ve got to peg Marvel Super-Heroes as the pivot point from old-school superhero RPGs. Although Marvel’s game system is, in many regards, the pinnacle of achievement in superhero RPG design, other aspects of the game shifted it away from what had come before and towards what would be in the future: the licensed setting, with a greater focus on a pre-existing setting (rather than an implicit or assumed setting), greater genre enforcement (via Karma, whereas before there was no such mechanic) but, most of all, the presumption that the game, rather than the players, would provide the “heroes” of its adventures, namely the Marvel Comics characters.
Sure, there was a nod to character creation, but it’s telling that it was in the Appendix of the game, rather than right up front: the default assumption was that you would play Spider-Man and his amazing friends (so to speak), and the adventures were all written that way: for a group of pre-generated, pre-existing characters that were provided for you.
Since then, there’s been a tendency, if not an expectation, in superhero game/setting design (as the two have become strongly linked) to provide pre-existing or “signature” heroes. The Champions—in all their various Hero System and Fuzion incarnations—are a good example, as is the Guard in Silver Age Sentinels, the Justice Foundation in San Angelo, and my own Freedom League in Freedom City. Even in Champions: New Millennium, where part of the high concept is a comic-crossover style “crisis” has killed off most of the world’s superheroes, there is still an existing sample hero team!
In some regards, if I had it to do over again, I’d have ended the Freedom City timeline shortly after the Terminus Invasion and killed off all of the setting’s major heroes, leaving only the mysterious Dr. Metropolis, Foreshadow, and a handful of Claremont Academy kids, with the rest as big, gaping holes for the player characters to fill. I still would have provided background and game stats for a lot of the characters, but I’d have left it up to the GM whether or not to have any of them survive or just use them as inspiration or legacies for a new generation of heroes. I’d have turned all their secret lairs and orbiting satellites and skyscraper headquarters and whatnot into mausoleums and museums, gathering dust and waiting for new heroes to arise and take up the mantle, and I’d have villains having a field day, with a city and world crying out for heroes. (That and I might have had a “new” Freedom League actually made up of bad guys prentending to be new heroes, ala Kurt Busiek’s brilliant Thunderbolts run.)
That’s a key complaint about many pre-fab settings: they’re too tightly woven together, so complete in and of themselves there’s not a lot of room to insert new characters who are truly important and capable of great deeds. In the worst-case examples, the settings and their meta-plots become entirely about the creator(s) pet character(s), with the players (and their characters) as little more than bystanders, watching “history” unfold around them. Part of the problem is for an RPG setting to continue as a published setting (with follow-up books, etc.) this is necessary, to a degree, otherwise the setting has no continuity, no story to it. The problem is, the story in an RPG isn’t about the setting, it’s about the heroes.
Sure, there was a nod to character creation, but it’s telling that it was in the Appendix of the game, rather than right up front: the default assumption was that you would play Spider-Man and his amazing friends (so to speak), and the adventures were all written that way: for a group of pre-generated, pre-existing characters that were provided for you.
Since then, there’s been a tendency, if not an expectation, in superhero game/setting design (as the two have become strongly linked) to provide pre-existing or “signature” heroes. The Champions—in all their various Hero System and Fuzion incarnations—are a good example, as is the Guard in Silver Age Sentinels, the Justice Foundation in San Angelo, and my own Freedom League in Freedom City. Even in Champions: New Millennium, where part of the high concept is a comic-crossover style “crisis” has killed off most of the world’s superheroes, there is still an existing sample hero team!
In some regards, if I had it to do over again, I’d have ended the Freedom City timeline shortly after the Terminus Invasion and killed off all of the setting’s major heroes, leaving only the mysterious Dr. Metropolis, Foreshadow, and a handful of Claremont Academy kids, with the rest as big, gaping holes for the player characters to fill. I still would have provided background and game stats for a lot of the characters, but I’d have left it up to the GM whether or not to have any of them survive or just use them as inspiration or legacies for a new generation of heroes. I’d have turned all their secret lairs and orbiting satellites and skyscraper headquarters and whatnot into mausoleums and museums, gathering dust and waiting for new heroes to arise and take up the mantle, and I’d have villains having a field day, with a city and world crying out for heroes. (That and I might have had a “new” Freedom League actually made up of bad guys prentending to be new heroes, ala Kurt Busiek’s brilliant Thunderbolts run.)
That’s a key complaint about many pre-fab settings: they’re too tightly woven together, so complete in and of themselves there’s not a lot of room to insert new characters who are truly important and capable of great deeds. In the worst-case examples, the settings and their meta-plots become entirely about the creator(s) pet character(s), with the players (and their characters) as little more than bystanders, watching “history” unfold around them. Part of the problem is for an RPG setting to continue as a published setting (with follow-up books, etc.) this is necessary, to a degree, otherwise the setting has no continuity, no story to it. The problem is, the story in an RPG isn’t about the setting, it’s about the heroes.
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Date: 2008-02-23 05:15 pm (UTC)On the other hand, both the DC and Marvel universes have been adapted and changed to the point that it became necessary to coin the word "retcon". Even with that, there are still massive inconsistencies.
Perhaps the solution is to make the game settings more genre-like, and embrace the nonsense.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 05:20 pm (UTC)More seriously, I think you're quite right about this and, given the positive response Thousand Suns has gotten primarily because of its meta-setting approach, I'm starting to think we might be on the cusp of a sea-change in RPG design with regards to setting.
At least that's what I'm hoping, because the current approach just isn't doing it for me.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 06:07 pm (UTC)Can anyone say "Elminster"?
>>Part of the problem is for an RPG setting to continue as a published setting (with follow-up books, etc.) this is necessary, to a degree, otherwise the setting has no continuity, no story to it.<<
Why is a "story" necessary for follow-up books? It's a setting, not a story. The story should belong to the players - that's the whole point of roleplaying. (Well, that and the joy of killing stuff.) If somebody wants to write and publish stories, that's great, but it isn't roleplaying, it's just ordinary fiction.
Worse, these stories often have an end result of completely trashing the setting. TSR's Wrath of the Immortals was a death blow to the Known World. (Which by that time was marketed under the juvenile, idiotic name of "Mystara", so maybe its demise was inevitable.) White Wolf did the same, seemingly with intention, to their own World of Darkness.
The argument that game companies need these stories to have something to publish doesn't hold up. Any of these settings could continue to generate books almost without end if those books further developed the setting. I have NO idea why the Eberron Five Nations supplement was published. What a waste of potential! That material should have been released a bit at a time, in five different books that each developed one of those nations in depth. Instead we got a rather generic overview that didn't leave me feeling that any one of those five nations was particularly special or intriguing. Contrast this with the Sharn supplement, an entire book focused on one city.
Which of the above books do you think I got the most use out of? Would I have purchased a book about the town of Vathirond? You betcha. I would have loved a book specifically detailing the kingdom of Breland.
I'm just using Eberron as an example because it's something we've both had recent experience with. Any setting could be fleshed out the same way. Obviously you need to begin with the core "overview" book, because (to flip to another setting) it's important for a GM to know that there's a nation ruled by wizards known as Glantri even if he doesn't know much about what goes on there. After that, any setting worth its salt should have years and years of potential material without resorting to stories that shift the focus from the PCs to the NPCs.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 07:06 pm (UTC)That's why I hedged this with "to a degree." Eberron is a great example of a "moment in time" approach to setting-building: that is, you pick a moment at "freeze" the setting there. All the subsequent supplement expand the world without advancing it. So the nation sourcebook that comes out 18 months after the core setting book is still set in the same time, not 18 months later. This way, all the later pieces "fit" into a bigger picture of the setting.
The problem is, once you introduce action into the setting in the form of adventures, especially adventures intended to be sequential, you've added action. So the campaign that started 18 months ago when the core setting came out has progressed past your "moment" and the supplemental material is now in the past to them. This may not be a problem, if its someplace the characters haven't been yet, but what if they've been mucking around there for the last year, and now the detailed sourcebook is all "wrong"? Sure, GMs adapt, and all that, but it just shows that it's tricky to have it both ways.
It's gonna be the same situation when Wizards moves the Eberron setting forward by three years or so for D&D 4e. Suddenly campaigns wanting to switch over will need to "catch up" or "fall behind" depending where they're at, and figure out what of the new "history" to incorporate or not, etc.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 09:22 pm (UTC)But to get back on topic, the first thing I did when I ran a San Angelo campaign was to have the Justice Foundation vanish mysteriously. If I were to run a Freedom City game, I'd put the Freedom League on a similar bus outa town.
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Date: 2008-02-24 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 09:29 pm (UTC)That is indeed a potential and unavoidable problem, but again you're looking at the issue of empowering (or not) the GM's and players who choose to utilize the materials. If a GM takes his players into uncharted territory, he risks a highly likely chance that his world will eventually differ a LOT from the official setting.
During my 16 year "Known World" campaign I made a point of keeping characters in known parts of that world. Even then there were a few unavoidable reality shifts, but in a world filled with fantastical magic those were possible to explain away. (I tend to be a stickler for verisimilitude in my games.) As you well know, the ultimate power is in the hands of the GM, and some are going to dick around considerably with the canon material.
But that's the GM's option. It's not the same as running a game and then having Stonehenge unexpectedly explode in your face (White Wolf actually did this), or Elminster go on a little adventure of his own that changes everything in the official setting. You can argue that the GM can choose to ignore these things, but then everything published after that point generally becomes useless.
This is a large reason why I think official stories are stupid. They don't make a setting more salable, instead they usually screw it up. Suddenly the game company is selling fiction (like the endless Forgotten Realms novels) instead of a roleplaying game.
So what do you think, if anything, about the fifth iteration of Dungeons & Dragons? (I'm treating 3.0 and 3.5 as a single version here, since the latter was basically just a correction of all the goofups in the former.) I doubt very much if I'm even going to touch it, but "never say never".
no subject
Date: 2008-02-24 03:47 am (UTC)> idiotic name of "Mystara", so maybe its demise was inevitable.
Wow. In the middle of well-reasoned commentary, this. It's not as if they called it "Mangled-baby-ducks" or "Painful-rectal-itch."
Or "Urinetown."
I don't see how the name Mystara is any more juvenile or idiotic than Eberron, Toril, Krynn, Athas, Oerth, or Earth for that matter. And certainly better than "Demiplane of Dread."
Which is not to say it isn't juvenile and idiotic, but moreso? Nah. Why pick on Mystara? Quite out of place with your rational observations is all I'm saying. I was a fan of the setting, and frankly I cared for the appellation "Known World" much less and was glad they finally tagged it "Mystara."
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 07:42 pm (UTC)On the plus side, you've just given my exactly what I need for my next crack at a Freedom City game.
I think you're right about MSH being a pivot point, but the secondary event which really set it things in stone was the publication of The Champions in the fourth edition version of Champions. Before that, what few heroes we saw in unlicensed sourcebooks and rulebooks tended to be from the home campaigns of the individual designers (George MacDonald's Guardians, Aaron Allston's Strike Force/Shadow Warriors, and Scott Heine's Protectors). As a fan, I found these characters far more interesting because they'd grown organically from actual play. In contrast, the Champions were sterile examples, created to fill specific niches, and it showed. Unfortunately, that started the trend for all future products, regardless of publisher. Sometimes the signature characters stood out a bit more, but most of the time, they're just obstacles the GM has to move out of the way so the PCs can shine.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 10:58 pm (UTC)MnM in the Bay Area
Date: 2008-02-28 07:46 am (UTC)I love the idea of the entrenched criminal element and the reasons behind it. Is that from recent Wild Cards novels? I only recently found out that there were new ones coming out (and plan to acquire them soon). I don't quite remember that storyline from the old ones unless you're referring to the Puppetmaster storyline, which doesn't seem to be quite what you're describing.
...and, BTW, you probably have no shortage of players, but if'n you're in the Bay Area and looking for one or two more, just let us know. ;)
Re: MnM in the Bay Area
Date: 2008-02-28 01:31 pm (UTC)I'm about halfway through the newest book and I'm loving it. I can't wait for the M&M Wild Cards sourcebook. The comic that's coming out looks good, too,
Re: MnM in the Bay Area
Date: 2008-02-28 05:53 pm (UTC)I seem to recall there was a Wildcards comic before, back in the early 90's, but it didn't survive. (...or maybe it was a limited run to begin with.)
Re: MnM in the Bay Area
Date: 2008-02-28 06:00 pm (UTC)There is a new Wild Cards comic book series in the works from Dabble Brothers coming fairly soon.
Re: MnM in the Bay Area
Date: 2008-02-28 06:51 pm (UTC)Re: MnM in the Bay Area
Date: 2008-02-28 08:49 pm (UTC)http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=147058&highlight=wild+cards
The Wild Cards M&M book is in the works now; it was their big Christmas announcement. It's targeted for a GenCon release. The announcement and others are on their main website at www.mutantsandmasterminds.com