An Experiment In The Ordinary

[jburneko]

There's an idea I've been mulling over for a while now.  It's something that's been brought up before on various game sites but never really addressed in an interesting way.  It's the idea that almost ALL RPGs are based on some kind of 'genre', usually an 'escapist genre' at that.  Horror, Western, Swasbuckling, Scientific Romance, and so on.  Even ones that do not contain a supernatural or paranormal element are still based on action/adventure concepts such as secret agents.

Where are The Fried Green Tomatoes RPGs and the Fight Club RPGs and the Big Lebowski RPGs?  The closest thing we have is the Wuthering Heights RPG and that produces more of a characature of victorian romance than actual victorian romance stories.

I think there are many valid answers including the appeal of escapism and the fact that many of the stories I mention above are just that, very specific stories.  You'd be hard-pressed to create an RPG that mimics one sufficiently without just forcing a recreation of that tale.  The closest you could come is MAYBE making a Cohen Brothers RPG that somehow supported larger than life characters with absurdist elements but it would be hard to mirror that in the rules.

But aside from designing a specific RPG I'm interested in attempting to run such a scenario.  I'm thinking of using Story Engine as the rule set.  I'm looking at Fight Club, The Cohen Brothers Films, and some of Kurt Vonnegut's less sci-fi-ish work as inspiration.  I want it to take place in modern day, probably in a city or a near by suburb.  I don't want one hint of magic, psychics, government conspiracies, aliens or anything like that.  Although a player or a character might be a mystic or a tabloid reporter, the point is that their "powers" wouldn't work anymore than they do in reality.

I'm thinking of having the characters write up perfectly ordinary human beings but include a Sorcerer style kicker that moves them from their ordinary state into an unusual active state.

What do you think?  Would this work?  Do I need to provide something more for the players to hold onto?

Jesse

[Mike Holmes]

Well, you can cetainly do this, but I'm not coming over to play. I like my escapism. I have a real life. OTOH, what you imply seems to be more of a Movie Reality, I think. Is what you picture more Hitchcockesque? Take a normal person and then throw them into something really exciting? Like North by Northwest or The Man Who Knew Too Much? Or anything by Hitchcock, really. Is that what you're after?

That might be cool.

Kinda pertains to the "Hidden Premise" concept that we all discussed a while back. I've started games off lkike this. I use GURPS because it usually works fine and players have no idea from the system what the Premise will be. Then something odd happens. In my case, however, I must admit that the something was always far out. Aliens, Paranormal, Magic, Time travel, whatever. But a sufficiently well designed Premise might not require any of that. I'd think that it would still devolve into Spy or Gangland or Murder mystery; something contemporary but fun.

What is your weirdness limit?

Mike

[jburneko]

Mike,

Yes, I'm still interested in producing a compelling STORY.  I'm not trying to create a sim of everyday life.  That would be boring.  And I don't think I'm going for straight up drama either.  I think Fried Green Tomatoes the RPG would be going a bit TOO far and a bit too hard to pull off, at least the first time around.

So yeah, I'm talking about ordinary people thrown into extraordinary circumstances.  But I want those extraordinary circumstances to stay within the realm of possibility but I don't want it to devolve into a straight up murder mystery or action-adventure.  But that is a fine line indeed.  Again, all of The Cohen Brother's films are near perfect models.  So is Fight Club.  But something like North-By-Northwest would be going too far.  Strangers on a Train would be borderline.  But I'd like to try and get away from a storeline that revolves around murder or any other kind of straight up mystery.

Jesse

[ This Message was edited by: jburneko on 2001-11-13 17:50 ]

[Ron Edwards]

Jesse,

Sign me up. That would be an amazing way to play, for me, and a real challenge.

Forget all the glitz and dress-up, which frankly can be distractions - or at worst, justifiers for simply producing sociopathic fictional behavior (see John Tynes' essay/pseudogame Power Kill, in Puppetland). Can we actually make a story about human people?

Cool. I think Story Engine would definitely be a good choice, although with my usual concerns about replenishing burned descriptors. I also think a "normalized" Over the Edge would work well.

Best,
Ron

[Epoch]

I tried to do something like this with a game idea I had called Urban Renewal.

The concept was nominally fantasy:  Essentially, people who had serious "issues" to deal with look for an apartment, find a too-good-to-pass-up deal in a place of the city called "Old & New."  That area of the city is compulsively quirky and weird, and filled with quirky and weird, but well-adjusted, people.  The game is essentially about people shedding their negative issues and relearning the cool things about modern life.

I initially wanted to make it so barely fantasy that you could plausibly claim that it wasn't even in-genre.  The two people who I recruited to play in it (it was to be a PBEM) wanted none of that.  I re-did it as much more fantastic.  The game never got off the ground.  I'm reprising all the important parts of the game as a bit of serial fiction I'm trying now.

The long and the short of it is that Urban Renewal scares the bejesus out of me.  I'm highly unsure I could make anything like that work, even in a PBEM format, and even with very willing players.  If you can do something similar, more power to you.

(Hell, it scares the bejesus out of me as fiction!)

((But neither Urban Renewal (the game) or In the Midst (the fiction) scare me as much as Twentieth Century, the coolest game I'll never run.))

[Laurel]

Family Ties, the game I'm working on, is very much set up to support an Experiment in the Ordinary.  While I'm including rules for involving ghosts, angels, and demons, the main focus is on people.  People as the good guys, people as the bad guys.

I've uploaded the rough draft of the first two chapters to a webpage so that people here could see them.  They're in plain text, so they are not aesthetically pleasing.  I plan on doing a lot of work on it between now and New Years, my goal for having a complete rough draft.  The first section is the introduction.  The second section is the character creation rules.  If people like it, I'll post more.

http://www.geocities.com/laurel_artemis_stuart/FT1.txt
http://www.geocities.com/laurel_artemis_stuart/FT2.txt

I personally think role-playing games about "Common Man" is one of the best untapped markets right now.  Or at least, that's something I'm counting on.  LOL.  

[Jared A. Sorensen]

From an old GO thread
http://www.gamingoutpost.com/forums/index.cfm?fuseaction=showthread&messageID=38070

I'm pondering a "real-life" game based around High School life.

No magic, no weirdness...just kids and teachers (inspired by the current "Boston Public" and of course, the movies of John Hughes).

PC's will be one of the following cliques and yes, this game will have levels (most characters will be between level 1 and 4 -- aka Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior -- kids who skip a grade might only advance to level 3...those who stay back might be level 5 or 6).

Each clique has Wants and Needs -- Wants are what they want at this point in their life...it represents their "temporal wealth" -- Needs are what they really want but don't have. The goal is to fufill your Needs before Gradutation Day. You acquire your Wants and use them to "buy" modifers/re-rolls (or something). It's all very squidgy at this point.

The cliques, of course, are taken from the 5 characters of John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club."

Brain
Wants: Grades
Needs: Friends, Confidence

Freak
Wants: Solitude
Needs: Friends, Acceptance

Princess
Wants: Status
Needs: Friends, True Love

Jock
Wants: Victory
Needs: Friends, Self-Expression

Punk
Wants: Freedom
Needs: Friends, Help

I still think this is a cool idea. I love the idea of "normal folks" games (The Code was one attempt).

[ This Message was edited by: Jared A. Sorensen on 2001-11-14 02:06 ]

[Mike Holmes]

On 2001-11-13 21:12, Laurel wrote:
I personally think role-playing games about "Common Man" is one of the best untapped markets right now.  Or at least, that's something I'm counting on.  LOL.  

Well, I wonder. I personally play RPGs as a form of escapism. So I don't really see drama as a genre that I'd go for. Just as I don't watch it on TV. I think that the current RPG player market is probably slanted in my direction on this one. I think that few current players are actually interested in this sort of thing. Just a guess, really.

Might bring in new players if you could expose them to it, however. Which I'd like to see.

Mike

[joshua neff]

I'm all for RPGs with a low special effects budget. I don't read only fantasy/SF/horror, nor do I only watch TV shows & movies of the fantastical variety. I'd love to see, for example, a Sports Night or West Wing RPG, or (as, I believe Jared has suggested before) an ER RPG. Or an Amelie (my new favorite movie) RPG.

Reg'lar folks involved in the irregular stuff of life--drama, romance, comedy, mystery, adventure...

[Jared A. Sorensen]

I have a theory that gamers (ie: big, smelly morons who play RPG's) fear accountibility for their actions in games. That's why the most popular games seem to be fantastical in nature. You can kill, destroy, rape, maim and pillage without anyone bothering you (or if they do, it's part of the game that you beat them too).

Let's have a look-see, shall we?

D&D. The PC's are "heroes" with abilities far beyond that on ye olde average villager. Enemies are "monsters," and their only purpose is to be killed.

Vampire. A secret conspiracy of amoral bloodsuckers. Virtually the only form of law (more powerful vampires) comes into play only when they reveal their existence to mortals.

Cyberpunk. Heavily-armed criminals with de facto permission from ruling incorporates to play live-action D&D with real weapons. The monsters are other criminals, cops, etc.

Deadlands. The "frontier" where there is no law, or a source of monsters to kill (again, ala D&D).

Gemeric Superhero Game #1. PC's are "superheroes" whose raison d'etre is to punch/blast bad guys and knock over buildings. Opposition comes in the form of tougher super-guys.

See a pattern?

The problem with a real-life game is that the players are accountible for their actions. There's no safety net. What we as designers/players/GM's need to do is remove "gamers" from the hobby and secretly replace them with Normal Folks, the Folgers Crystals of geekdom. This is when you get that guy who has "never gamed before" at your table and he turns out to be an amazing player. Imagine that.

Destroy All Gamers!!!

[hardcoremoose]

Josh,

I've wanted to do Sportsnight for a while.  I even have a teaser up on my website for just that thing.

God, I love that show.

- Moose

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

A few more examples:
Dead Again
The Fisher King
Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story
Wolf
Angel Heart

All of these movies have a "touch of the strange" to greater or lesser degree, but they are first and foremost about persons who live in a regular world, and whose concerns are about their interactions with other people.

Best,
Ron

[Marco]

I've played lots and lots of games where the characters at least started as ordinary people (might be my favorite). In some, something *weird* happened. In others, things just "got interesting" (but not really weird).

Any generic system is great for that--one of the reasons we wrote JAGS was because the players acquiring paranormal abilities didn't work so well in GURPS--and Hero wasn't realistic enough for us (combat wise and damage wise: ordinary people trying to kick through walls or reliably survive 30-story falls because the system allowed it was a little tiersome).

A great game was where we were all online-game junkies and in the fantasy game that we were all playing (which we gamed out with mega-characters) someone came and started asking us for real-life help (it was a conspiracy campaign).

-Marco

[Ben Morgan]

I once tried to get my group into playing in a way-off-center Teenagers From Outer Space variant that was supposed to be more like Parker Lewis Can't Lose. No aliens, no zap guns, characters had special powers like "In a Band", "Owns a Van", "Teacher's Pet", and occasionally someone would have something really out there (like Jerry's Coat of Bottomless Pockets, or Lemmer's apparent ability to teleport). No one was interested. People like their escapism. Go figure.

[joshua neff]

Ben--

That sounds really cool! But then, I was a big Parker Lewis fan.