the big three you never see

[Uncle Dark]

Something that has been hinted at but never said here:

Physical action is the lowest common denominator.

Even people who have never been in a fight know what physical exertion feels like.  Most people know running and climbing, and most people have been in enough schoolyard scrapes to be able to imagine that they know what combat would be like.  The fact that they are wrong is beside the point, they can confidantly imagine that they know what they're about.

Magic or high tech in games often boils down to modifiers of or substitutes for physical action.  This is, I think, why so many fantasy games have dozens of different spells for frying critturs, but few (if any) for blessing marriages or healing goats with the mange.

An aside: anybody who wants to hear my rant on the "magic isn't real, so we can ignore realism with it" argument can ask me about it, as I know it's not really on topic here.

This leads into the techincal information argument: for the purposes of most RPGs, watching ER or Law & Order are adequate training for medical or law RPGs, since this represents the lowest common denominator of such knowledge.

Lon

[Jack Spencer Jr]

On 2001-11-27 12:56, Uncle Dark wrote:
Something that has been hinted at but never said here:

Physical action is the lowest common denominator.

(snip)

This leads into the techincal information argument: for the purposes of most RPGs, watching ER or Law & Order are adequate training for medical or law RPGs, since this represents the lowest common denominator of such knowledge.

I argee with the lowest common denominator factor.  While many gamers may enjoy learning something from gaming material, I suspect few enjoy it being required to learn from the material.  I suppose that's a bizzare facett of human behavior that is beyond the scope of this thread.

However the knowledge given in ER, Law & Order and other tv, movies and books is generally so much gobbledygook.  You can usually replace all of the technical lines with "bullshit" and achieve the same effect.

Well, that's not entirely accurate.  These shows have advisors to try to make the scripts accurate.  They don't to get accuracy on screen, but it's better than I've just said.

That said it's still not always accurate and most of the time, it tends to go right over the average viewer's head.

It's also different for the different genres as well.  A half of law is arguing you case and the other half is finding legal precident, previous arguements and rulings that will help your case (There's a good one in The Rainmaker involving stolen evidence).  The arguement can be fairly easy to accomplish but how the heck do you translate legal precident into a game?  Medicine and other such games have similar problems.  Hence my own solution to the problem which allows it to remain "bullshit" while still workable.

[James V. West]

I belive that fantasy (in all its forms) touches on human emotion in a way that reality-based art forms often cannot.

Say you've never roleplayed. I say "OK, would you rather be a wizard, a cop, or a lawyer?". I'm just guessing here based on personal experience and preference, but most people are going to go for either the wizard or the cop. Why? Maybe because these types of characters are closer to psychological archetypes.

The wizard has overtones of wisdom, power, knowledge. He's the archetypical magician as seen in the Tarot. The cop is a warrior. He fights evil. He's got some baggage with him due to reality, so he's not the perfect choice, but he's better than the lawyer. What does a lawyer do?

You could say that the lawyer is basically a warrior--if he fights against the bad guys. But there is a level of removal involved that makes it harder to see the warrior archetype coming through.

A doctor is clear example of a "magician" archetype. The wizard. But because we have all been in doctor's offices, there's a lot of baggage that comes with playing that role. Being a wizard cuts straight to the meat of the matter.

So what I think I'm getting at is that reason violent and/or fantastic rpgs are so dominant is that they provide quick, easy access to these basic human archetypes. In some modern psychology, they are Warrior, Magician, Lover, and King. These are based on a book by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillete, if I'm not mistaken. But these archetypes are much older and much deeper than any one person's vision.

In many art forms, rpgs in particular, the negative side of these archetypes often gets reinforced. Violence, savagery, power, deception. But at their root, these are things we all respond to.

Anyhow, that's my take on it. I think by questioning why we don't see games like that we are expanding, exploring, and understanding--all good things. So this is not meant to indicate that I don't think such games are worth doing. I think any kind of game is worth doing. I'm just pondering out loud why we like to kick in the door and take the ork's stuff.

I hope I've made a little bit of sense :smile:. I fear I've been long winded and unclear.

Later

James V. West

[Jack Spencer Jr]

hi, James

I would argue that fantasy, super science, paranormal, etc. tend to readily capture the imagination.  This is probably because they are products of the imagination, but that's getting away from the point.

As for your examples:

"OK, would you rather be a wizard, a cop, or a lawyer?"

There's a problem here in that lawyers don't have very good image.  "What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?  How can you tell if a lawyer is lying?"

There's a stigma of lawyers being money-hungry, shiftless, blood-sucking leeches.  Who'd want to play a blood-sucking leech? (vampires?!?)  

A better comparison would be doctor in place of lawyer.  Doctors probably fall into one of those archtypes you're talking about.

This is the problem with mass-marketing such a thing, unless it's sold like Pantheon, with multiple games in one book or like GURPS: main rules, splatbooks.

[joshua neff]

I would argue the "fantasy captures the imagination" point. Sure, it conjures the imagination for people who like fantasy. But for those people who don't go for fantasy or SF, it doesn't do anything of the sort. In fact, for a lot of people, one of the main reasons to avoid RPGs is because of the prevalence of SF/fantasy/horror. But a hell of a lot of people watch soap operas, & I bet at least some of them would enjoy RPGs if they gave them a try.


[ This Message was edited by: joshua neff on 2001-11-28 21:04 ]

[Paul Czege]

Hey James,

I started off the thread with all the titles of movies and TV shows because I think we are fascinated by doctors and lawyers and politicians. Are you suggesting that isn't true? My question was, since we are fascinated by them, why do we never run scenarios where the players are doctors, lawyers, or politicians? What's the hidden factor that deters us? It's hard for me to think it's the lack of killing. Are Call of Cthulhu scenarios about killing? My instincts coincide with Fang's suggestion that the hurdle is providing the players and GM with the right tools:

...to create a palatable abstraction....without having the same abstraction divorce the game from its genre....so that it does...not lose its main selling point...

Which is why I was stunned by how easily Blake abstracted a criminal trial.

It could be a cool series of indie RPG books, with titles like, "Put a Criminal Trial in your RPG" and "Put an Emergency Room Trauma in your RPG." Not modeled on GURPS supplements, with their emphasis on coverage, the books would be abstractions that structure their topic the way Blake structured a criminal trial, with guidance on what to ignore and what to emphasize, the focus of intent being on making the event work for the narrative, and sidebars of details that could be used to "color" the sequence.

Hmh...

Paul

[Gordon C. Landis]

I remember a very effective sequence in a short-lived SF (using Mekton rules) game I was in a while back.  I was playing essentially the ships' doctor.  "Warp" travel here involved a kind of psionic link between the pilot and the engines, and our pilot was an especially powerful esper.  So she tried to bend the normal rules that govern this "warp" travel, failed her roll, and ended up in some sort of coma.  My doctor had to diagnose the problem, determine how much of her condition was physical vs. psi-shock, consider several treatment options, dope himself up on stims to monitor her through the really rough spots . . . and it wasn't enough.  He finally had to slap her into stasis (a somewhat risky procedure) and tell the captain to limp to the nearest location with a substantial medical center.

So . . . this was much easier to do in a SF environement than it would have been in an "ER"-style RPG, as no one was too worried about getting the details of warp-pilot psi-shock wrong.  On the other hand, playing out the diagnosis and treatment was pretty much improvised between myself and the GM, me calling out skills and rolls for what I was attempting, he giving me some relevant information, lather, rinse, repeat.  it would have been nice to have a little more "rule structure" to how this all played out.  In similar situations in that same game such improvistations didn't go that well.

Gordon

[contracycle]

I'm kinda surprised that we are still, even on the Forge, producing "RPG's" that are really just resolution mechanics.  Although I'm a mechanics wonk, essentiually they are just tools not the meat of the game; the meat is the who and the where.  I'd much rather see well realised discussion of the ER environment *for RPG purposes* than a set of mechanical rules for controlling bleeding, frex.  I really like the idea of such How To... books - detailing things like procedures and techniques, specialist skills and technology etc.  Hmm, that sounds too much like a bog-standard supplement; I mean something more like those books of Worst Case Scenarios.

This would outline the kind of situation you might find yourself in, what skills people employ, what concersn these people need to worry about, extended discussions of skills and the like.  The idea here is not to construct a set of game mechanics so much as to give players and GM's enough detail to fill in the blanks of their own mechanical system.  Instead of just "roll first aid" a properly designed aid could give the players the ability to discuss more details, based on sound knowledge, thus add depth to their narrative descriptions of actions and decisions.

Som FRPG ideas:
How To... Run An Imperial Bureacracy
How To... Fight An Open Field Battle
How To... Build & Run A Castle
How To... Run A Monotheism
How To... Run An Agricultural Village

[James Holloway]

On 2001-11-29 04:46, contracycle wrote:
How To... Run An Imperial Bureacracy
How To... Build & Run A Castle
How To... Run An Agricultural Village

I'd say that "Sailing to Byzantium," (in Pyramid a few weeks back) covers the first, "Lordly Domains" (for Pendragon) addresses a lot of the second, and "Fief" (from Cumberland, S. John Ross's venture) covers the third.

So I think there's a good amount of this kind of stuff ... but again, all from a medieval/ancient/fantasy perspective. On the other hand, don't I hear that GURPS Cops is coming out?

[Paul Czege]

Hey James,

..."Sailing to Byzantium,"..."Lordly Domains"..."Fief"....GURPS Cops...

Although I haven't actually seen any of these, I'm familiar with Ken Hite's presentation style, and with GURPS supplements. And my lack of enthusiasm for them is that they don't actually make their content work for me. I've read "How to Try a Murder" by Michael Kurland. It gives a great overview of the stages of a criminal trial, the structure of it, the best I've ever seen for a general audience, but it doesn't do what Blake did in his post earlier on this thread. It doesn't tell me what to focus on. It doesn't tell me what to ignore. GURPS supplements emphasize coverage. I don't need that. I need something that shows me how to do it in a way that makes for dramatic game narrative.

Paul

[contracycle]

I have Lordly domains and a couple of other products, being heavily into political economics.  Lordly domains was pretty goods but still suffers from encyclopedia-itis; it tends to describe things, not events, processes, econonomic and political relationships.  It's pretty dry managerialism.  Anyway, its not quite the kind of thing I am interested in, but I am having trouble articulating precisely what it should be.

Things like trade and manufacturing, say.  Having a set of mechanical rules for the wealth of the fief is all very well; but that does not help the GM much filling in the detail.  A discussion of horse diseases, frex, might be really useful by contrast, becuase having the royal herd wiped out wmay have major strategic implications.  Stuff like that (he says vaguely).

[Le Joueur]

contracycle wrote:

Some [Fantasy Role-Playing Game-based] ideas:
How to... Run an Imperial Bureaucracy
How to... Fight an Open Field Battle
How to... Build & Run a Castle [and Keep]
How to... Run a [Monotheistic Religion]
How to... Run an [Early] Agricultural Village

Say aren't there "...for Dummies" books on these?

Shouldn't there be?  (For role-playing game milieus at least?)

Fang Langford

[Mike Holmes]

I'm starting to see what I personally think would be a really good idea here. Instead of RPG adventures, or scanarios, supplements that allow you to interject interesting scenes related to a particular field into your current game.

The players suddenly inherit a feifdom? Get out Adventures on the Feif, and select from any of several sorts of situations that could develop on the estate. A player gets incarcerated? Pull out Adventures in the Courtroom, to see how to play it out in the funest way possible.

Don't include an encyclopedic listing of all things related to the field. Just include stuff related to what would frame interesting RPG scenes. If a part of a trial is long and boring, the rules would explain how to get past it with just a die roll, and move on to the dramatic portions. All about how to pace technical things to keep them interesting for a game and not get bogged down in minutia.

Cool idea, guys.

Mike

[James V. West]

Paul said:

"I started off the thread with all the titles of movies and TV shows because I think we are fascinated by doctors and lawyers and politicians. Are you suggesting that isn't true?"

No, not at all. I'm not personally fascinated with them, but I know many who are.

Pblock said:

"There's a problem here in that lawyers don't have very good image. There's a stigma of lawyers being money-hungry, shiftless, blood-sucking leeches. A better comparison would be doctor in place of lawyer. Doctors probably fall into one of those archtypes you're talking about."

Yeah, the Doctor is a magician archetype. A wizard. But even so, would you rather play a wizard, a cop, or a doctor? My argument (or rather, my point) is that most people would go for the wizard first because the wizard is the most direct link to the power of that archetype.

My main point was that the reason fantasy is dominant in rpgs is that fantasy is a live wire to the soul. Role-playing is a way of reaching energies within ourselves and playing with them in ways we can't do in mundane life. For many people, fantasy gets them "hotwired" faster and easier. And by fantasy I mean *all* forms of it from cyberpunk to horror.

But I don't want to derail the discussion. What would I think of an ER rpg, or an LA Law rpg? I'd be curious and interested in reading it, but I probably wouldn't play it unless I just happened into it. I need a lot of distancing in my games. If I'm going to play a cop or a doctor, I want to be in the future, the past, or an alternate reality of some sort. I don't want to be a cop in New York investigating a jewelry heist. It doesn't appeal to me on the surface.

Later
James V. West

[Le Joueur]

Mike Holmes wrote:

I'm starting to see what I personally think would be a really good idea here. Instead of RPG adventures, or scenarios, supplements that allow you to interject interesting scenes related to a particular field into your current game.

The players suddenly inherit a fiefdom? Get out Adventures on the Fief, and select from any of several sorts of situations that could develop on the estate. A player gets incarcerated? Pull out Adventures in the Courtroom, to see how to play it out in the funest [sp] way possible.

Way ahead of you Mike.  Except from my experience in retail, these have little chance of selling¹ (for you internet marketeers that means word won't get far and downloads will be few - better make it a labor of love).

Seems there was this little company not so long ago, who thought to do something along this line (maybe a little more on the 'module' side).  They felt that no one would want a product that wasn't geared specifically for gamers and without some kind of mechanical tie-in; so what would make it a gamer product?  Unfortunately, they used a little too much copyrighted terminology from a few too many companies and BANG got sued for copyright infringement.  The rest is history (did I mention they had to release a card game that they hadn't really finished to try and make money for the legal fees?  Or so the mythology goes).

We felt similarly about mechanics-free gaming product.  Who would be the audience?  How would they find it?  What would be the selling point if you only needed it for only one trial?  Better, we thought, to present things along the lines of ER or Law and Order or Gundam Wing as supplements with a few mechanics.  (At least enough to catch a gamer's fancy.)

When we were working out the 'supplements' side of Scattershot, we paid attention to a fact that retailing experience brought back again and again; if you don't bring out new role-playing gaming products regularly, you lose your 'front row' seat to sales (and interest).  But how to do that without succumbing to 'editionitis' (printing second and higher editions of the rules)?  Modules?  (Those are only sold to a smaller and smaller share of the market who are already buyers of the line.)  Updates?  (I don't know about anyone else, but I hate having to scan three or four books to find one rule; that's too much 'handling time.')  What then?

I got an idea from both Palladium's pre-Rifts lines and GURPS' world books.  It should be something light, and very narrow-genre (each one of its own creation, thank you), yet it should contain at least some of the main rules (always a flaw I found in GURPS).  Yet Palladium books cost too much to be light.  What then?

Well, a long time ago, I segregated Scattershot's mechanical complexity into three tiers (to avoid GURPS' innumerable 'optional rules' search-time problem).  We decided that we'd put only the first tier of the mechanics in each of these 'genre books,' as we'd come to calling them (with ample references to a 'core set' of books).  We'd also spend most of our design time on the mechanics in the core books (twelve of them now, with no more in sight) so they'd never need major revision/updating.  This also meant the first tier of mechanics, as it appears in the 'genre books,' would be fairly static (not the presentation, just the mechanics themselves, did I mention that core book twelve is meant to be in comic book format even though it carries roughly the same mechanics as all the others?).

What this means is that anyone right off the street could pick up a 'genre book' and be able to approximate play (with the static, first tier mechanics, this makes for a shorter production schedule, crucial for making a profit at media tie-ins and licensed products - fad chasing).  These books would lead consumers back to the core set of books which cross-reference each other (in as user friendly - not 'where did those rules go' – a way possible, each book offers modular rules + narrow-genre information that can be used to augment any other), inviting the consumer to buying the whole line.  (This is much like the effect the 'Open Gaming License' was supposed to have on Player's Handbook sales.)

Since we'd be treating every little narrow-genre as it came up and these products hung from the 'structure' of the generalized genres presented in the core books, we'd never run out of source material (or fads to chase after).  Production time and costs would be low, so we could catch as many trends as possible (without losing our publisher's shirt), and the price at the counter would likewise be lower for the entry-level consumer (I am still amazed at price tags over thirty dollars).

Add to that that we have a similar type of tie-in planned as a collectible card game and also an electronic console game tie-in in development, means we can be as diversified as needs be.

Don't include an encyclopedic listing of all things related to the field. Just include stuff related to what would frame interesting RPG scenes. If a part of a trial is long and boring, the rules would explain how to get past it with just a die roll, and move on to the dramatic portions. All about how to pace technical things to keep them interesting for a game and not get bogged down in minutia.

Better yet, how about writing out how the exemplars of the narrow-genres do all that and how (at least for Scattershot) the mechanics are geared to help this advice carry the 'feel' of its narrow-genre?

Cool idea, guys.

Oh you're making me blush.

Fang Langford

p. s. Now if we could only find someone to take our art and our writing and get it onto the shelves.  We're a design think-tank for gosh sakes, we have no interest in publishing, production, owning and running a company, and well...profit really (we're totally against loss, we want to exactly break even).

p. p. s. To James V. West: we felt similarly about the lack of interest in a doctor- or lawyer-only game, that's why everything in Scattershot (from the core books out to the farthest flung 'genre book') is designed to also be used to augment every other product.  Imagine a Sorcerer-style game set in the Law and Order narrow-genre (yes, I know its been mentioned before, I still thought it was a cool idea).

¹ I still have my copy of Cities (Create and Explore Your Own Fantasy Communities) by Abrams & Everson for Chaosium, a great resource for creating medieval cities and trust me, it is totally non-system (even though it uses dice to walk you through the process).  The problem with it was, even though I read at least two glowing reviews for it (and this is before the internet took off), it took me six years to lay my hands on a copy.

[ This Message was edited by: Le Joueur on 2001-11-30 10:08 ]