The Black Campbell

I was having a conversation with J over at 1nsomnia.wordpress.com regarding how bringing new blood into a game group can liven up play and rekindle the joy of playing. One of my comments was on the size of his gaming group:

8-10 is a massive group! Most group work is best done in groups of 4-6, studies show — from corporate environment, to fire teams in the military, to terrorist cells — above six becomes unmanageable (in the case of gaming groups, you have less “screen time” for the characters and it becomes hard to manage events); below four (including GM) and any absence can put the kybosh on a session and relationships between players become sometimes too comfortable and the play becomes stilted.

I’ve commented on group size before, but I think this is a nicely succinct take on my opinion regarding group size. Were it me (and it’s not, so feel free to ignore me on this), I would try — if scheduling permitted — to break the group into two. But that’s me, and as always, I could be completely full of shit.

In fact, it’s almost a certainty.

I was going to do a post on what comic books influenced my gaming style and choices, but realized that outside of that particular genre, comic or supers games, they don’t really have any. So here’s what has informed our current campaign:

1) The Incredibles: Specifically, the notion that superheroes have the same issues normal people do: peer pressure to be “normal” and the threat of lawsuits. Our supers have to be registered (the Libertarian Party and Institute of Justice are fighting this as discriminatory; the ACLU is silent on the matter), and if they use their powers licensed at various levels (construction work if you’re super-strong, legally sworn as a peace officer to fight crime, etc.) A lot of them can’t afford the licensing fees and more importantly, the insurance to get licensed, and either hide their gifts or go rogue — become supervillains. They are policed by special units around the country/world that employ supers or highly-trained normals. It’s my understanding a lot of these issues cropped up in the latest Marvel Civil War books.

2) The Venture Brothers: This is a show the creators have siad is about “failure.” I’m borrowing the notion that a lot of supers are still lazy, incompetent, or downright stupid. They highlight the failure of the Jet Age promises: private supersonic jets, space stations, underground habitats, etc…things that I have included in smaller part. Similarly, the comic book Empowered touches on the same ideas — and that a lot of supers get their powers from venereal diseases…

3) Astro City: Funnily, I haven’t read this comic, but I’ve borrowed a lot of the tropes for our game — Liberty City as the cynosure for supers in America; it draws supers like Hollywood draws sexual deviants. I’ve even borrowed some of the characters and adjusted them for the game. Also, I’ve nabbed some of the Jet Age imagery that they use.

4) Every power suit manga: The cops have “masks and capes” squads that hire supers, but they also employ power armor, Masamune Shirow-style, to combat these threats. Ghost in the Shell, the manga and TV series, molded these ideas.

5) Bits and Bobs: I’m borrowing characters from the various comic books and old supers campaigns and tweaking them for our game.

This one was surprisingly harder to do than the television and movie articles. There’s plenty of books I’ve been influenced by in that I stole from them for plot or characters, but as an overall influence on my gaming style, books haven’t had the impact of film. When they do influence me, they are usually more genre-specific.

1) The Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser. I didn’t read these until I started to get into history thanks to Space: 1889, but once I started to read them, I was an instant fan. The style of dialogue, the examination of the attitudes of the Victorian period, and particularly the use of real people as primary characters was very influential on how I use history and historical figures in my historical and modern games. The series also fed my desire to be more realistic in my games.

2) The Sprawl Trilogy by William Gibson. Gibson was a master borrower in his early works — fusing the crime noir and spare wording of Elmore Leonard with high tech trappings, something that Ridley Scott would also do with Blade Runner, with a strong critical eye toward technology, capitalism, and power. It’s a powerful enough “look” that it helped spawn a subgenre of science fiction, a slew of “cyberpunk” books, and the influences on settings put out continues to this day. If you’re down and out types fighting the evil corporation, the Alliance, fascist police states, or something the like, there’s likely Gibsonian DNA in your game. There usually is in mine (strangely, there’s a strong Elmore Leonard feel to some of the Liberty City setting for our new supers campaign. Coupled with superheroes and jet age high tech, it feels like Gibson writting episodes of The Venture Brothers.)

3) Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brien (but you can use any of the series): O’Brien is a master of how people work. How the slightest, stupid thing can take a victory and crush your joy in it, or how the smallest kindnesses can buoy you up, no matter how bad things are going. His easy characterization, and his sharp eye for how people respond to the world around him, makes them fantastic primers for crafting NPCs.

4) The Rogue Warrior novels by Richard Marcinko: The former Co of SEAL Team 6, Marcinko’s a colorful character who wrote a series of action/spy novels in the 1990s and early 2000s that were pretty damned good. They benefited from his military experience, his real adventures, and while they were politically incorrect and violent, they are an excellent primer in how to do large-group spy games. I had trouble running espionage games for 3+ characters well, but Marcinko show you how teams work in these situations — from the division of labor in doing surveillance, putting together information, planning and executing assaults. The early ones are the best. (His biography Rogue Warrior is also a blast to read.) Couple it with a few viewings of the first two seasons of The Unit and you’ll have a handle on large-group spy games pretty quickly.

I have a very cinematic style to how I plot and describe events in games, right down to occasionally using script direction “Smash cut to…” or ” we pan over the scene…” I love films, even some bad ones, and Im a very visual thinker, so it’s no surprise that television and movies have had a big influence on my gaming style and preferences.

There are plenty of movies that have had an effect on me personally, but here we’re just sticking to the ones that have obviously influenced my gaming style.

1) Just about any Bond movie. Since the first one I saw, The Spy Who Loved Me, I’ve liked the Bond movies. It’s funny that this first movie, and the rest of the Roger Moore run, are my absolute least favorites of the series. I hate campy Bond — especially the disaster that was Moonraker. By the time that pile of dreck had hit the screen, I had seen the Connery Bonds and Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (a movie that would have been a damn sight better if they had dumped the 4 hour ski chase sequences.) The only Moore flick I do like is For Your Eyes Only — no gadgets, very little cutsy crap, and Bond gets angry enough to kick a guy’s car over a cliff. I liked Dalton. I love Craig in the role. I like serious Bond films.

The series created a love of the spy genre, along with the series The Sandbaggers, so my spy-fi tended to be a bit more LeCarre and a bit let Moore mugging for the camera. I instantly took to the Top Secret and James Bond: 007 RPG. No matter what setting I’m running, there tends to be elements of espionage or crime fiction in the game. (Exhibit A: my current Battlestar Galactica campaign feels more like Cold War espionage, with the characters discovering and trying to root out Cylon moles.) No matter how strapped for cash the characters’ agency might be there’s always travel, cars, clothes, guns, and chicks (or boy toys when there are women playing.) Craig, rather than Moore.

I also developed a peculiar style of plotting stories from Bond movies: basic plot McGuffin, followed by choosing three locations and associated action sequences, then build in the clues and the twists at the end. I still do this for action-oriented games. There’s always a bit of Bond in my games, no matter the setting.

2) Raiders of the Lost Ark: A near perfect action movie (except that whole Nazi soldiers in a British allied country thing, and the sub… but hell with it, I’m having too much fun!) Like the Bond movies it got me thinking in terms of how action sequences work. How does the environment get used in a fight or chase scene (fans of chop-socky films, you should be right here with me): does Indy pull his gun, or does he hit the guy with a handy object? How can you use that deuce and a half against a motorcycle (answer: very effectively.)

The pulp sensibilities also stuck with me for my choices in games and in running games. Victorian steampunk and ’30s pulp, once you strip away the clothing and the steam vs. diesel tech differences are pretty similar in nature: often its a rush to find object X before bad guy Y does. The rest of the time (for me) it’s spies in a different era.

What these both don’t teach you is characterization. Bond is always Bond, no matter what he goes through (until the Craig pics.) He’s a thumbnail sketch of a character: a drinker, smoker, womanizer, who is coolly effective at what he does…but there’s not real weakness in him, other than women. Indiana Jones is a guided missile: put him on track to find something and he doesn’t stop. He’s afraid of snakes and not much else. Women are a weak point, too, but not enough to turn him away from his archeological goal. He is, as Belloq puts it, a shadowy reflection of the villain.

3) Anything sci-fi and Ridley Scott: It’s where I get my phrase “Ridleyville” from — shorthand for a noir-ish setting where the streets are always wet and the neon is reflecting romantically on the streets. I learned atmospherics from Alien and Blade Runner, which fits with my love of science fiction.

4) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: I didn’t really appreciate Star Trek as an RPG setting until about 2000. I tried running it, but for me, it was always the white elephant of RPGs: a good idea, but hard to find someone to do it right. It wasn’t until I realized that throwing out the stuff that didn’t work and keeping the stuff that did was how to do it. Nick Meyer did that in this film. Kirk is still an arrogant punk, but he screws up…a lot. He goes from being the incorruptible guy of the series to the guy who cheated in the academy. Put it together with the original film and you have a self-centered guy with a starship fixation who has a tendency to ride roughshod over the rules and for the most part gets away with it…but other people pay for his hubris. Like Khan and his people.

This film is the one that taught me characters weaknesses can be exploited in a fun way that takes them down a peg, but doesn’t leave them vanquished.

5) Ghost in the Shell: I was into cyberpunk early on, but GITS (and the sequel) brings a nice philosophical edge to a pretty standard cop action story. The same questions cyberpunk was attempting to address with loss of humanity in the mechanics were much better addressed by the mood of the character and the interplay with the surroundings (case in point: Kusanagi’s spotting a woman that looked just like her from the ferry, and the use of mannequins in the same montage.) Loss of humanity is better played out than as a stat. Like Sanity. (Yes, that was a swipe at Call of Chthulu.)

There are plenty of movies that I could point to as having some influence, but the first three groups here are the ones that really did it. Bond (especially The Living Daylights and For Your Eyes Only) and Raiders were the movies that really stuck with me for how I game.

Honorable Mention: The supers campaign that’s been coming together has been heavily influenced by The Incredibles and TV’s The Venture Brothers. The notion that normal folks would resent and oppress these extraordinary people is easily seen in our dumb it down to the least common denominator school systems and cultures. Laws and lawssuits, rather than fists, are a more effective means of pummeling a super into submission than a strong optical blast. (On a side note: I had a great idea for a character — a PI super whose jobs are mundane stuff — serving subpoenas, serving warrants, collecting bail jumpers,and repossessing cars of supers in trouble. The cops/companies/bailbondsmen hire the guy because he has the abilities to withstand attack when the strongman with the fire breath gets pissed your repo’ing his 2011 Mustang for lack of payment. Vinnie, the normal dude’ll be in the truck. Around the corner. Call when it’s clear.)

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A few days back I wrote a post on the five games that influenced my style of play. Now here’s a similar list of television series that influenced my play style and game choices:

1. Star Trek: No so much for the content, as for being the show that really got me into science fiction. I was four or five when the son of one of my mother’s friends showed my a couple of reruns. Around the same time, another favorite was Gerry Anderson’s Captain Scarlett. Even today, I’m less a fantasy guy than I am a science fiction fan; most of the games I run are science fiction settings.

2. Miami Vice: I was a teen/early 20 something when this hit. It might look cheesy now, but it’s hard to explain to a modern audience exactly how groundbreaking the series’ first few seasons were. Instead of the usual look, sound, and feel of cop shows (or any show, really) — which were best described as western/gunslinger themes transposed to modern day — Miami Vice brought a combination of the music video era’s would-be auteurism and use of actual tracks, rather than poor covers (and the covers of ’70s and ’80s music in television were terrible), and combined it with the cinematography style of movies.

The effect on my games, especially in the late 1980s was that I started experimenting with soundtracks for the games being run — tracks that would either set the feel, or were specific to an action or transition sequence. These were the days of having to make a tape mix to make this happen — hours, sometimes, of work. Today, you can queue up a series of tracks on the laptop or iPad and fire them off at the appropriate time without the obviousness of hitting the play button on your boombox. (“Oh, oh! He’s starting music — get your guns out!”)

3. Hill Street Blues: Hill Street Blues was wrapping about the same time as Vice hit was this tremendous series. It was one of the first cop shows that felt “real” — from the exterior filming someplace other than New York or Los Angeles (it’s never said, but it’s pretty obviously supposed to be Chicago.) There was a steady progression of character development, ongoing plot lines, and most of all, a feeling of realism that I wanted to capture in my games. It’s one of the origins of my fascination with verisimilitude in the campaigns I run…no matter how fictional the stuff might be, it should feel real.

4. The Sandbaggers: About the same time as HSB was running, there was a British spy show from the late 1970s running on PBS that was unlike anything before or since. The Sandbaggers has almost no action — everything is subtext and politics, with the show revolving around Burnside, the chief of the Sandbaggers (essentially the 00 section of the Bond movies.) They are perpetually undermanned, underfunded, and subject to the whims of the politicians, leaving Burnside to cut deals with the CIA and play one politician off the other.

Like Hill Street Blues, this show was very bright in my gaming eye when I started running espionage settings in the mid ’80s. HSB might have become a little less influential over the years, but The Sandbaggers is still an influence on my games (and my taste in spy-fi.)

5. Babylon 5: I’d seen shows with story acs before — Star Blazers from my youth (or Space Battleship Yamato, for your purists…), but B5 was the first time I really started to incorporate them into my campaigns. Prior to this show, I’d used story arcs, but they were short and usually the missions were more episodic. Now I added overarching stories and metastory — bigger events and trends that the characters had little to do with, but were still effected by. Characters started to get their own arcs, based on the concept and the consequences of their actions, especially those unforeseen ones — where those actions you thought would do well for you and your people/team/whatever would backfire on you.

Even more importantly, I had always seen the characters failing as a negative, something that would detract from their enjoyment of the game. They would fail, or periodically not do as well as they would like, but I rarely was gunning for them. (I’ve never been a fan of the GM as adversary technique I’ve seen in a lot of D&D campaigns. “Yeah, our DM was really trying to kill us off this week…”) After B5, the idea that failure could serve the story and character development made me focus more on the weaknesses of characters, rather than their strengths. It also liberated me to have failure be not just an option, but central to the story arc.

Another thing B5 dealt with fairly that, until that time, most TV science fiction (primarily the various Star Trek shows) did not was religion. Remember the almost sneering disdain Picard had for the superstition they had outgrown..? Not so in B5. Religion was central to almost every character’s make-up, from the Minbari, to Ivanova’s Judaism, to Molari’s casual observances, etc. people believe in things beyond science and the observable world. Like most people do. And they never talked down to faith, but they also never chose a side on who was right. The unknowable stayed that way, despite a strong streak of predestination.

I’m not a religious person, myself, and when I was young I had that same patronizing attitude toward religious faith you see in a lot of atheists, these days. Somewhere along the way I realized that faith is something to be envious of, when you don’t have it; I’m a skeptic, but I would love to have the certainty of faith others have. Science is not certain by any means — hell, current cosmology of astrophysicists have about 80% of the universe an unobservable matter and energy (“dark” matter and energy.) That’s a hell of a fudge factor…you might as well just call it magic or God.

Babylon 5 also freed up science-fiction to accept religion. Deep Space Nine was a pretty blatant rip-job of B5 (Straczynski shopped it to Paramount first…and lo and behold, a new Star Trek series set on a space station!) right down to the religiosity of the Bajorans. But even then, they had to explain the unknowable. The Prophets were extra-dimensional aliens of great power — sure — but they were, ultimately, a quantifiable/qualifiable part of the universe. Firefly didn’t shy away from people have (different) faiths. Battlestar Galactica‘s entire premise is that of the Mormon exodus in space — God is extant and involved. I felt the series would have been better with an air of mystery — not given us that button on the show that confirmed divine intervention, but left it open to interpretation. (And kicked whoever’s ass in the writer’s room thought All along the Watchtower needed to be used…)

As you can see, if I were ranking these by level of effect, B5 would be the top slot, hands down.

Honorable Mention: It’s a fairly recent show, so it hasn’t had a lot of time to influence my games, but The Shield‘s combination of gritty realism, the action/consequence, and flawed characters has been having a decided effect on my most recent Bond campaign, where the heroes are using laws like asset forfeiture, PATRIOT Act, and other terror war  acts to make their lives easier, bend laws, and do good by occasionally doing bad.