The "general" system I've never seen

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ron,

In Chapter 5 of your "GNS and Other Matters..." essay, you describe a "general" system as holding "constant one or two of the listed elements of role-playing (Character, Setting, Situation, System, Color)" and providing "guidelines for customizing the other elements."

And I understand your examples. AD&D is fixed Setting, Situation, System, and Color, with guidelines for customizing Character. Story Engine is fixed System, with GM- and player-driven customization of Character, Setting, Situation, System, and Color.

My question is, can you envision a game that keeps Character and System fixed, and provides guidelines for customizing Setting, Situation, and Color, and does it really qualify as "general"?

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Paul,

"Fixing Character" is pretty hard to define. I imagine that the archetype method of PC creation qualifies ... e.g. in Hol they simply provide several player characters with no system for creating new ones. Or in lots of solitaire modules (I was just re-reading Sea of Mystery last night), one is provided with a character to use.

Most game design lately has focused very heavily on non-fixed characters, up to and including not even fixing what you make characters FROM very much (in the tradition of Over the Edge).

Can you give me a better idea of what you conceive, as far as fixing-Character is concerned?

Best,
Ron Edwards

[jburneko]

My question is, can you envision a game that keeps Character and System fixed, and provides guidelines for customizing Setting, Situation, and Color, and does it really qualify as "general"?

Hey Paul,

It's really kind of funny but the first thing that leapt to mind is: Sorcerer.  I don't know if you'd call the Character "fixed" but the general character idea is fixed.  ALL Players are Sorcerers and ALL Players are expected to address, "How far am I willing to go to get what I want?" somewhere in their concept.

Everything else Setting, Situation, and Color are completely left to the players and GMs to customize.

Jesse

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ron,

Can you give me a better idea of what you conceive, as far as fixing-Character is concerned?

Well, when I think of "fixed Character" I envision a game presenting very specific characters, say, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, that the players would choose from. If System were fixed, but guidelines given for Setting, Situation, and Color, perhaps the game would present guidelines for developing traditional, as well as futuristic, or maybe alternate-history scenarios.

I guess my question is, if Character is fixed, does it still qualify as a "general" system?

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Jesse, I had the same thought that Sorcerer probably qualified, but then I had this intuition that Paul was talking about MORE "fixing" in the characters - and he's now confirmed that, so Sorcerer doesn't qualify after all.

Paul, it seems to me that character-fixing of the sort you mean pretty much has to mean setting-fixing as well. Certainly many sample scenarios and convention scenarios correspond to this - here's the setting, here are your characters, and here's the situation you're going into. But how one might fix characters without fixing setting is hard to imagine, unless you make up "archetypes" which are later customized ... although that doesn't really qualify either so much as simply delay that step.

Best,
Ron

[jburneko]

On 2001-11-29 17:25, Ron Edwards wrote:
Paul, it seems to me that character-fixing of the sort you mean pretty much has to mean setting-fixing as well.

I don't know if I buy this.  Compare the films Dangerous Liasons and Cruel Intentions (God, I wanted to stand up and cheer when they didn't wreck the ending).  The two have different settings but in my book I'd call the characters pretty fixed.

Valmont in an eighteenth(?) century setting and a modern day setting is still pretty much the same.  And I wouldn't exactly call him an Archetype either.  His personality and motivations are pretty well set in stone as well as his physical and mental abilities.  

Such a game would probably have to use an Attribute Only system as skills would have to very from setting to setting.  This way game data could stay fixed but yet be customizable across setting.  To borrow from Sorcerer we could say Valmont has a Cover of 3.  In the eighteenth century setting he's an Aristocrat.  In the modern setting he's a Student.  Whatever he is its score is 3.  Fixed.

Story Engine would work as well as long as the descriptors were kept to setting neutral values.

This might be an interesting role-playing exercise.  (Damn I wish my players were more experimental).  Draw up a set of setting neutral characters.  Then run them through two different scenarios taking place in two different settings.  That would be COOL!

Jesse

[Mike Holmes]

Wasn't there a Sci-fi King Arthur film recently? The archetypes presented can probably be taken out of their usual setting and presented in another easily. Use a Pendragon-ish system that focuses not on skills but pasions, and the characters are timeless. Surely you could play Sir Lancelot and the Black knight in a western setting?

Or is it your contention, Ron, that this is just scenery, and not a "real" change of setting?

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Mike and Jesse,

I knew someone was going to bring that up.

Yes, one could publish what would basically be a relationship map and set of personality profiles, thus "fixing" character in that sense. The resolution system could be set as well. OK, then setting could be customized.

I presume specific elements of character would still have to be customized, such as physical skills and similar things, if they are at all to be resolved through non-Drama mechanics.

Since this concept for "character" has only rarely been explored in RPGing (Morpheus, Hong Kong Action Theater, and Extreme Vengeance), I decided not to go into it in detail in answering Paul's query. Then you went and brought it up, so there's your answer.

Given a distinction between (a) personality, relationships, and general story-role; and (b) skills, setting-specific stuff, and so on; then yes, your points stand.

I should like to be the one to point out, for once, that setting is often very important for Premise and that skipping around settings COMPLETELY indiscriminately is not recommended. Keeping that small warning in mind, then all of Jesse's points apply in full.

Best,
Ron

[ This Message was edited by: Ron Edwards on 2001-11-30 15:18 ]

[Mike Holmes]

Might be an interesting product. Generic relationship maps. Just plug one into your favorite setting, introduce your characters to it (good links might be included in the product) and off you go.

Essentially that's how you came up with the Art Deco thing, though you did tailor it more to the PCs. Hmmm...

Mike

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

I had a similar realisation after reading That Essay during the week. Very few games have a fixed Character, or set of characters.

So I've started work - well, it's more play than work so far - on a game that would have completely fixed PCs. I'm working on a wishy-washy urban mystic setting, where the characters play recurring spiritual guardians. A bit like Whispering Vault, except that the PC group is composed of strictly three characters, each representing a specific part of the cosmos and gameworld.

Joe.

[Mike Holmes]

The problem with the absolutely set group of characters is that you might need to have one player to play each one. Forex, if you were to do Scooby-do, you'd pretty much have to have all five characters in play, no? Otherwise you'd never get the crucial moment where the party decides whether Thelma goes with Shaggy and Scoob, or with Fred and Daphne, when the party splits up to look for clues.

OTOH, I could imagine a set of characters that were designed just for the game in question that would be designed such that you could play with only a subset. Beginning play would be kinda like a video fighting game where each player selects a character to fight with. Y'know: I'll be the elf, you be the Valkyrie. But with further development of characters, and notes for group dynamics and inter-character relations, and details about how the relationships change when certain characters are absent.

The last part is what I see as one of the big potential advantages of such a design. As in the Scooby-do example, we know how the group inter-relates. Fred is the unquestioned leader. Thelma's the thinker, etc. Shaggy and Scooby have a semi-bohemian co-dependent eating-disorder sort of relationship. :smile: This is the one thing that is likely missing from characters in most games. Lots of times we know the histories of the characters, but rarely do we know how they feel about each other. A preplanned set of characters can fix that.

Mike

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

On 2001-12-03 09:15, Mike Holmes wrote:
The problem with the absolutely set group of characters is that you might need to have one player to play each one. Forex, if you were to do Scooby-do, you'd pretty much have to have all five characters in play, no? Otherwise you'd never get the crucial moment where the party decides whether Thelma goes with Shaggy and Scoob, or with Fred and Daphne, when the party splits up to look for clues.
[snip]

Mike

Ever seen the 70s UK tv show, 'Sapphire and Steel'? :smile:

Each week, two characters would investigate a mystery. Usually, the mystery would involve reality being torn or twisted in some way.

The characters were elementals. Or spiritual guardians. Or reality police. Something like that, it was never explained. Certainly, Sapphire was graceful, elegant and charming. Steel was tough, brooding and serious.

I like the idea that the players could play such set characters (a group of 3-5), but that perhaps every few weeks, they'd rotate play.

You're absolutely right, though, the web of relationships, and their complimentary set of abilities would tend to mean you'd need to have 3 players for 3 characters. Although one could run sessions where the imbalance or disharmony in he group was part of the story.

"We haven't got Scooby? But... but... who'll eat the sandwiches??"

Joe.

[Demonspahn]

Hi all.

This is a shameless plug for our game, which is finished but is currently at the editor/printer and taking slightly longer than expected to lay out.  If I am following this thread correctly, Dreamwalker, Roleplaying in the Land of Dreams was designed with the many of these concepts in mind.  
Players play the same characters each night.  They are Dreamwalkers, that enter the dreams of others in order to help stave off depression and madness (caused by a type of spiritual parasite).  Anyway, the general idea is that since dreams are so unpredictable, they can take place in any time period or place and each dream has a sort of dream goal that must be completed.  

So, if you wanted to play a Dangerous Liasons type adventure one night, the dream would be set in the 1(?)th century while the dream's goal would be to seduce the Countess (?...sorry, it's been a while since I've seen it).  If, the next night, you wanted to play a Star Wars Ep IV type adventure, the dream would be set in a galaxy far, far away and the dream's goal would be to destroy the death star.  

We tried to make the core mechanic flexible enough to be applied to all genres.  Dreamwalkers are able to adapt to the different settings by using a limited amount of their spiritual energy (mana) to automatically learn Skills necessary to survive in these new worlds.

Anyway, there's a little more posted on our website, which is still under construction.  If you have any questions, feel free to email me and I apologize if this is the wrong place to plug your own game but I only did so because thought it was relevant to the discussion.

Pete

[Mike Holmes]

Mr. Spahn,

So, what you have here is a shifting setting? The characters are not fixed by this definition, it seems. Or did I misread you? By fixed, I think we mean that the characters would be the same in every game played by everyone everywhere. In the theoretical Scooby-doo RPG, you'd play Shag, Scoob, Fred, Thelma and Daphne. No making up your own characters, ever. Do you have those characters determined for your game, or can players make their own.

If I might say so, shifting settings are pretty common. Even if you don't count multi-genre stuff like Torg, and Rifts (which are really shifting setting games), you still have stuff like GURPS Alternate Earths and their supplement on timetravel. MJ Young's Multiverser sounds nearly identical to what you describe, in fact.

What Paul was looking for is a system that has fixed characters and system but no specific setting. Not that the setting necessarily has to shift. Just that the game can be placed in any setting you wish. So, GURPS would argue (and possibly be argued against) that it is only a set system, with no set characters or setting. In that way it is much like your system in this context.

Mike

[Mike Holmes]

It occurs to me to design a Fixed Character game that would be Fantasy specific (and thus not fit Paul's description, but check it out). The fixed charcters are:

Rognir the Barbarian(ess)
Felamar the Wizard
Ogdal, Priest of War
Dondal the Dwarf Warrior
Eldilden the Elven Woodsman(girl)
Gilmin the Stuntie Scout

Rognir or Eldilden an be played as females with little adjustment.

Chargen? Each player rolls a die and starting with the highest roller and going around the table make your selections as to which character to play. Over in less than a minute with a group that doesn't waffle a lot. Really more selection than generation.

Given that the characters can be well written, I think that this would be at least as effective as other systems I've seen, and probably nearly as satisfactory. :smile:

Mike