DisasterQuakeFireFlood

[Simon W]

Disaster movies are a poular draw at the cinema. Role-playing games often try to emulate the movies. However, I am not sure that I have seen any disaster based role-playing games. Maybe there is a good reason?

We have films with sinking ships, earthquakes, forest fires, tidal waves, exploding volcanoes, crashing-to-earth meteorites and lots of others. So how can we put this into a game? Is it worth considering?

I cannot see any long-term campaign out of such an idea, but something along these lines might be good for a night or two's play?

There are no obvious protagonists, other than nature itself. Would it suit a narrative style of play better than rather than sim?

Any thoughts anyone? I'll put my thoughts to paper in a day or two if there's any interest.

Gideon
http://www.geocities.com/simonwashbourne/Beyond_Belief.html

[Shreyas Sampat]

Well, I can see three kinds of games coming from this thinking:

"Cheerios, we're going to have a disaster!  What do I do in the time I have left?"  Insects of God.  My own idea Tentacular is along these lines - you're a deepsea diver who just felt a tentacle curl around your leg.  A very big, very hungry-looking tentacle.  What now?  I haven't seen very much at all in this highly structured mode.

"Lucky Charms!  We detected impending doom in time to avert it!  But, can we?"  This is a pretty classic D&D style trope, but often in the slower-paced version of megalomaniacal villain.

"Disaster strikes!  How do we deal with all the Special K hitting the fan?"  This doesn't seem to be so much a thing that games are designed around, but at the Forge I see a lot of advocacy for this kind of play.

I think the reason that we don't see a lot of games written specifically for this genre is that it's a pretty wide variety of things, and it can't be easily reduced.

[talysman]

I think also that, because it's a wide genre, the main group interested in developing source materials have been the multigenre crowd. I'm thinking specifically of GURPS Y2K, which actually covers a wide variety of disasters-threaten-society situations.

plus, most disasters in roleplaying are either about to happen and need to be avoided (common in D&D and other games, as already noted,) or already happened and part of the backstory (post-apocalyptic stuff.) there's not that much "the disaster is happening now" roleplaying, at least not in terms of stand-alone games.

[Walt Freitag]

There are no obvious protagonists, other than nature itself. Would it suit a narrative style of play better than rather than sim?

Are we talking about the same disaster movies here? To me they appear entirely driven by character protagonism, albeit in a relatively shallow way. More along the lines of focused sim exploration of character, rather than full-blown Edwardian Premise. It's practically paint by numbers:

The girl who's afraid of heights will end up at some point hanging by her pinkies above some awful abyss.

The recently divorced couple will be driven into each other's arms.

The tough racist ex-cop will sacrifice his life to save a member of his least favorite minority group.

I'd recommend rules-lite Sim with borrowed Narrativist teleological eye-on-the-outcome plot development mechanics like InSpectres'. There should be a significant pre-disaster play phase, starting with minimally defined characters, during which the players invent and develop "issues/conflicts that must be resolved in the disaster aftermath" for their characters. Perhaps rotating vignettes each centered on one character, with moderate GM-ful participation by all the other players. This would best represent the old-school disaster movies (Earthquake, Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure, Airplane!)

The fully Narrativist alternative would work a little differently, starting with more fully elaborated characters and using the disaster (or the preliminary mini-disasters presaging the coming big disaster) as the kicker(s). This is a bit more like the recent crop of disaster movies (Dante's Peak, Armageddon, Volcano, Outbreak, Twister). (Titanic really has more in common with the old school examples.)

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Walt,

I'd call all of those examples Narrativist. Some happen to be simpler and (perfectly acceptably) shallower, that's all.

Best,
Ron

[Walt Freitag]

Hi Ron,

Yeah, I realized that after posting. Which is fine, as regards the general reply I wanted to offer to Gideon's question; that protagonism and Narrativism are far from ruled out in the genre.

- Walt

[Mike Holmes]

Do a search here for the Isolation system. This deals with a different genre, but the unique ideas of how to deal with such a situation might give ideas for how to make a system that deals with your selected genre.

Mike

[Maurice Forrester]

I've seen this idea articulated before as "movie of the week" gaming.  You can extend it beyond disasters to any movie where a bunch of ordinary people get caught up in an extraordinary situation.  I haven't played it, but it seems like the idea of building characters around cliches as in Risus would work well for this.