The Black Campbell

There’s been a few over the years that have really stuck with me:

The first would have been from 1983: I loved the quality result idea from James Bond: 007  where the lower you rolled gave you a different quality result from fail up through excellent, and that was tied to a damage class that was an expression of your strength, or the muzzle energy of a particular weapon. That the mechanics attempted to actually take ballistics into account, instead of “well, it’s a .45, so that’s a really big bullet” you see in most RPG design. (Case in point, a .455 Webley being more powerful than a .45ACP or a .45 Long Colt….not just no, but hell, no.) The other thing it brought that I loved was the idea of the hero point (or plot point, fate point, get outta death point) where you could soak damage or bend probability to give the game a more cinematic feel.

From 1986, would be the way APs in DC Heroes tied your characters attributes to the weight they could lift, the speed they could move, the time it took, etc. It gave the players a real sense of how much stronger one character was over another, and your roll of a AP8 strength might translate into knocking an AP3 heavy character 5AP in distance. It’s a bit crunchy for most folks taste these days, but then — I thought it was a great way to do supers.

1993: Castle Falkenstein‘s use of ordinary playing cards as a randomizer because, as the rules pointed out, “Gentlemen don’t play dice…” With some tweaking (see yesterday’s post), it made for a really slick and different flavor for the players. You could plan your moves based on your hand… “Well, I’d like to punch him, but I’ve got a king of hearts…let’s go for talking him down.”

Fate’s use of tagging aspects on a scene is pretty nice, but really just places a specific mechanic on someting people kind of did before without needing a specific rule, save now the player could do it, as well as the GM. But I also consider Fate a pick-up/beginners system that just happens to do a lot of things decently.

2005: Hollow Earth Expedition‘s “take the average” (which I think another game had before this, but I forget which one…) where you could take a character’s number of dice, and half it to “get the average” for a test. This sped up play enormously, especially in low-risk situations, or in fights with mooks.

2005: Cortex and the idea of pairing different attributes with different skills as the situation demanded. So you might use agility or strength+unarmed combat, depending on your style; you might use willpower or alertness+interrogation to represent a different style of questionng a subject. Willpower+ discipline or influence could represent a difference in command style between “get it done!” and “I know you’re hurting, right now, and we’ll do what we can, but right now…I need you to move.” Mechanically, no real difference, but I think it aids in crafting your character’s style.

I think the most innovative and fun mechanic has to go to Castle Falkenstein for the use of cards.

I don’t know that there is such a thing. There are good games, good sessions…but I don’t think any game is “perfect”…

I’d have to go with a nice man cave — a den or room that was off the beaten path with a large enough table for the players to spread out a bit, and easy access to drinks and a bathroom. Maybe something with a minibar.

Now if I really had some dosh, that table would be wired with tablets so you could pass messages, send out maps, etc.

I’ve never done horror well, and I haven’t seen anyone else do it terribly well, either. I played Call of Chthulu a few times in 1991, and the experience was so bad that I haven’t played the game, and recoil at its very mention. So I guess in that sense the shitty GM was successful…

I know it’s unfair. I know it was a bad experience and I should chance it with a GM I trust, but as if considering a deviant sex act, I’m trepidatious.

I had, before that, looked at a few different systems — Chill stands out but I remember nothing of the system. Ghostbusters was a silly and fun pick-up game, but we had played it up more for the comedy than the horror. Even my own dip of the toe into horror a few years ago with Supernatural, had a few eery moments, but the natural humor of the group overcame that. There is the infamous fight between the drunk FBI character and a — I think it was a fox spirit — in a men’s room that involved the character peeing on himself, throwing up, and also getting the s#!t kicked out of him. It was a good fight, and nowhere as gratuitous as it sounds, but it wasn’t scary…it was hilarious!

So, I’ve steered away from horror. I just can’t maintain the atmosphere long enough for a full adventure, much less a campaign.

Easy — Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by Margaret Weis. It’s the first iteration of Cortex Plus I liked (the other being Firefly) and I thought it captured the feel of the comic books very well. The rules were approachable, but could get a bit complex, with a lot of moving parts for what plot points could do, but all of that was easily stripped out, if needed.

Before that, I would have said DC Heroes by Mayfair. I liked the logarithmic progression of the stats, that they tied to time, weight, distance, etc… so that you had a good idea of exactly what your character could do. At the time, in the late ’80s, FASERIP Marvel Superheroes was too abstract (something that appeals, now), and Champions was out because I didn’t have access to a Cray computer or a few days to do character creation.

Easy — Battlestar Galactica. I love the “new show” setting, the old Cortex mechanics, and the post-apocalyptic politics while fighting killer robots works right into my sensibilities.

I’ve run Star Trek with shocking success in the early 2000s; prior to that all Trek efforts had proven to be lackluster and died quickly. I’ve run a successful 2 year campaign in the Babylon 5 universe that was fun, but died once my army service was over and I moved back to Albuquerque. I’ve always wanted to run Jovian Chronicles — I love the look and the politics, am not so hot on the giant robots (but one of my players is), but the denseness of the setting has actually been a bar to entry…I just don’t know where to fit my stuff in. I ran a short Serenity/Firefly campaign that was fun, but ultimately lost steam as we went along. I really want to do a transhuman game, but I’m finding my buy-in hard…

Thinking on it, I realized that the Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica games both found themselves overrun by transhuman ideas and elements, and it made sense to introduce them…but that seems to be the key: that this transformation to post-human and machine intelligence be happening around them. Most transhuman settings are post-Singularity, where the technology is, well, mundane. Look at the Culture novels of Iain Banks — while those stories are big, bold, and he paints an interesting universe, the events are separated by hundreds of years. There’s no scarcity, no real threats (or they would be distressingly similar — some big bad with even bigger tech), and no real drama. Kinda like The Next Generation movies of the 1990s.

You have to set them in the Singularity, discover a society in the midst of it, or pull a Rip van Winkle, where the characters come in and the tech is new. I don’t think it supports a long-term campaign, but that could also be my lack of imagination on the subject speaking.

An honorable mention has to go to Space: 1889 — a Victorian sci-fi game (I’m not calling it steampunk — gad, what a terrible tag!) where steam powered marvels of Verne and Wells combine with imperial efforts of the Great Powers, and courtly behavior is still cool. It’s just as sci-fi as anything else out there, and is one of the reasons I like Firefly, but I drifted away from it because we were playing Serenity and the two games had a lot of the same themes and motifs.

I can’t remember exactly, as this would have been in 1988 or ’89, when I was living in Philadelphia, but there were several all day/evening games that would run for 8-10 hours. These were usually either superhero games using the DC Heroes RPG by Mayfair, or spy games using James Bond: 007 RPG. I do remember one ended with everyone sacked out on my massive studio apartment floor well after midnight, while I was getting busy with one of the female gamers in the closet.

Ah, good times…