The Black Campbell

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.

This is an idea that caught my eye while on Zite. Dice Monkey had a posting on it that linked to Character Generation. Turns out Runeslinger saw the same thing and decided to write on it as well, so why not — I’ll hop on the bandwagon; I even brought my triangle.

Ding!

1. Dungeons & Dragons — whatever box edition. This was the old green (I think it was green) box set that Hess’ Department Store had in 1978 or ’79. I bought it, liked the concept, and when I was finally able to find others who were playing it, loved gaming. I haven’t stopped in 33 years, minus a few periods where I had trouble finding gamers. It’s the ultimate influence, as it got me into the hobby.

I haven’t played D&D since about 1983, after a monumental campaign that ended with the characters becoming — for intents and purposes — the new gods of that game world. Where do you go after apotheosis? Answer…

2. James Bond: 007. We were all of us spy-fi geeks in my original group, so it was only reasonable to expect that with the other games we were trying at the time, Top Secret, Gamma World, Traveler, etc. that we would run across JB:007. The system led you build your character to concept, rather than relie on random rolls. It was skills based. The system accounted for quality of action. The guns and cars were statted out as more than just generic stuff. It replaced Top Secret after one session and I’ve been using it ever since for modern settings. It’s a bit tired now, more because it doesn’t emulate the new action movie look/feel, and after having had combat training, the system is a bit slow (in this I mean the characters “speed” or number of actions) to reflect reality. (This is why I’m working on an update.)

Running JB:007 was a completely different experience from the D&D games. No dungeon crawls, no minis — I were forced to block out the action scenes in my mind, and to emulate the Bond movies, I quickly learned the 3 or 4 act story framework, how to set a scene, how to create tension and drama, and how to focus on character, rather than roll-playing. It’s where my cinematic style got its start and it honed my desire to tell a good, fast story. It also created in me a love of research: to get the facts as right as I could (I’m a big one for verisimilitude) I learned as much as I could about the intelligence communities, read the news.

Ultimately, outside of gaming, it made me a good and fast researcher. After all, when you’ve only got a few hours ’til the next session, you’d better have something quick.

Side During the late ’80s, my group at the time did a lot of comic book RPG playing. We tried the math-heavy Champions and Mutants & Masterminds, but I found character creation took far too much time and I didn’t have access to a Cray supercomputer for the point buys. We tried TSR’s Marvel Superheroes, which I remember kind of liking, but found the lack of consistency to the scale didn’t fint my mind. (Today, it would be a completely different story.) We settled on Mayfair’s excellent, exponential DC Heroes and played the hell out of it. The campaign reinforced ideas from JB:007 that you didn’t need to min-max your characters for efficiency, as in D&D…you needed to build and play them to their weaknesses. That’s what make characters interesting. I also learned to co-opt GM duties with my roommate/friend of the time. As much as we played DC Heroes (a lot!), it never quite stuck with me. Once I was out of the game, I also dropped (for the most part) out of comics.

Number three is what pulled me out of the comic book games: Space: 1889. Released in 1989, GDW gave us an absolutely terrible system…but a setting so good I overlooked it ’til something better came along. The idea of going retro and using old speculative fiction to create your universe wasn’t new to me, but it coincided with the release of Sterling and Gibson’s The Difference Engine. I was off and running. Since Space: 1889 I’ve usually run a Victorian or historically-based campaign (now it’s usually ’30s pulp, but I’m starting to turn back to my Victorian/Old West preference…maybe a side campaign to my friend’s upcoming Marvel Heroic campaign; supers in the Old West!)

The level of research and knowledge needed to realistically portray the period also spurred me to return to college and get my history degree, so, like JB:007 — which created skill sets I still use today (and led me into the intelligence community for a while), S:1889 actually affected my life outside of game, as well. Eventually, I would dump the S:1889 mechanics, but use the setting for several Castle Falkenstein games (but even that system needed serious tweaking to make combat work.)

4. The Babylon Project. A lot of people would be surprised that the Chameleon Eclectic system worked for me. The dice mechanic can be confusing (one a plus, one a minus — add/subtract the total to your skill…) and the stun/wound system was clumsy as hell ’til you learned it, but it did surprisingly well mirror how people get hurt in actual fights — sometimes you’re hurting (stun) and it slows you as badly as an actual injury (wound) — sometime you can be torn all to hell, but adrenaline and the situation mean you barely feel it. The space combat was based on another space wargame and worked beautifully, the system’s great saving grace.

The system, as with S:1889, was secondary. We were really into B5 and I wanted to run it. Through this game I learned how to well craft story arcs, really dial in on character and the idea of consequence — the main theme in Greek tragedies and B5. Even since, when I’m playing in licensed properties — Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Serenity — I use the TV serial format for crafting adventures, but also setting up story arcs (seasonal or series wide), and I use all the skills honed during the first B5 campaign to do so.

Which brings me to 5: Cortex. This is my current favorite system. It can do whatever you want with a bit of tweaking, but it is directed at storytelling — role playing over roll-playing — and character. Character creation is swift, easy, and you can pretty much get whatever you can envision. The mechanics are simple roll the die you have in an attribute, onein the relevant skill, maybe an asset die — does the pool beat the target number? Damage is based on the amount of success, plus a die for the weapon.

Simple, elegant. I use a hybrid of the Serenity and BSG rules sets. The one thing I’ve kept from Serenity is the advancement system, cost to improve is based on the die you want to go to, which I find better than a straight point cost. The better you are, the harder it is to get better.

I’m not a fan of most of the Cortex Plus stuff — just call it FATE, already — with the exception of the Marvel Heroic RPG, which has some real potential. (Hoping to play it Thursday.) The initiative and action mechanics are simple and match the idea of the comic panel. It’s a dice pool, which I like to a point, but once you’re rolling a bucket of dice, it’s too much…shades of Shadowrun or WEG’s d6 (still a good system, but 150+ dice to use your rebel cruiser!?!) Character generation, however? Build the concept, period. No points. No min-maxing. Build the character and drive on.

It was interesting to me, looking at the other posts and their comments what isn’t on my list. No GURPS, and it didn’t appear on anyone else’s list. GURPS has its adherents, but the modularity of the rules makes it a nightmare to learn, and again, the amount of mods and math slow play. Another missing entry was the powerhouse of the 1990s and the LARP community: World of Darkness. The White Wolf stuff was everywhere in the ’90s; you couldn’t swing a dead cat in a game store without hitting a wannabe Anne Rice heroine. I presuming they all went LARP and left the tabletop behind.

I saw a lot of Call of Chthulu, a game I despite most likely more because of the first, terrible, horrific (and not in the way intended) experience with it — easily the most boring, pointless excursion in gaming I’ve had. (OK — here’s a mystery, oops! you’ve gone crazy, now watch us play for two more hours.) I saw Savage Worlds, which has a lot of similarities to Hollow Earth Expedition and Cortex, but the quirky card-based initiative and the skill or attribute mechanic felt a bit off. Oh, and I hate the exploding die mechanic.

Pathfinder turns up a lot, but I have not played that, since I’m not a huge fantasy buff, prefering sci-fi or modernish historical settings. Star Wars d6, as well, had a popular following and I played the hell out of it for a couple of years in the early ’90s. I thought it was simple and fast paced; character creation the same — it was a near perfect rules-lite game engine…save for the dice pools. Oh, the d6 dice pools…we have a collection of small d6s from that period of play. I could build a small guest addition with them. I remember an exchange in a big battle that took half the evening because of the counting 200+ dice for a stardestroyer ripping up a rebel cruiser. Were it not for the dice pool, d6 might have been the engine for my first B5 campaign.

So there it is — my top five games, how they influenced my gaming and life, and the stuff that didn’t quite make the cut. I now open the floor to the readers…