The Black Campbell

Surprisingly, I had trouble with this prompt. My initial desire was to talk about gaming space — the physical (or virtual) location one plays in, and sort of the dream library (not a man cave — a proper library) I envisioned, but it turns out I’m not hugely interested in pursuing that. So what to talk about..?

Recently, I grew tired of the ’30s pulp game (Hollow Earth Expedition) I’ve been running. It’s a great game with good characters, and the players enjoy it, but it’s been one of two campaigns we’ve been cycling through every few months since this group came together almost three years ago. Prior to that, the pulp game had been the main game for the group for about a year or so prior to that.

All of this had been the rebound game after an epic, five-year long Battlestar Galactica game I’d been running. That campaign was easily the best bit of gaming I’ve been part of,  and I’ve been gaming for four decades, so that’s saying something. It remains the only campaign I miss, and I’ve had plenty of games I’ve been in I’ve really enjoyed, because I hit my stride as a GM. So recently, I’ve really wanted to return to a space opera setting…and hence the tie to the prompt.

I had considered a space-based game for the next rotation, while I get my taste back for the ’30s. The two choices were Battlestar Galactica — but I wasn’t sure we could catch lightning in the bottle again; and Star Trek. Recently, I’ve watched Star Trek: Discovery, and truly enjoyed the second season, despite the interminable “talking about our feelings” scenes and the execrable spore drive McGuffin. I floated the idea of doing a “pilot episode” for both and we started with Star Trek. To my surprise, the group — most of whom only had a passing knowledge of the various series — loved it.

Space is an environment that works well for RPGs because of several elements: First, it’s insanely dangerous. Even soft sci-fi can’t escape things like vacuum, even if you use a lot of hand-waving to ignore weightlessness and the attendant health dangers, radiation, aliens, and the forces that speeds high enough to get around the galaxy entail (inertial dampners, anyone?) are still waiting to kill the shit out of you.

Second, it’s isolating. You’re far from things in space, even in a solar system. One of the issues I had with Discovery‘s spore drive (other than the mushroom idiocy) was that it made space small. It was a similar issue I had with the J.J. Abrams movies. Need to get somewhere? Done! Trek has always traveled at the speed of plot, but this removed the sense of exploration and wonder. Everything was a quick nip down to the corner. I decided to use old show scales of speed — they are often weeks from anywhere, and communications repeaters might allow you to talk to the bosses back home, but once you are outside of the Federation, you are alone. Galactica worked so well because Man was truly alone. There were no “head of the week” aliens just around the corner, or life-sustaining planets. “The universe is a pretty barren place when you get down to it,” as Colonel Tigh tells the president in an early episode. It’s why arctic and antarctic settings work so well for horror — no one is coming to save you.

Third, there’s the unknown. You meet things that are hard to understand or communicate with. There’s physical events and things that can’t be overcome (unless you rewire the deflector dish into a spiraling quantum whatsinator…) One of the issues with the “head of the week” approach of Star Trek is that aliens become just people with strange customs…they’re rarely strange. Even with the watering down of the recent movies, the creature from Alien was strange!

There’s a number of great settings that have RPGs attached to them. There’s the hardish science fiction of The Expanse (although after a quick look at the rules set a few days ago, the game looks to be a hot mess…), there’s the upcoming horror of Alien, done by the guys who gave us Tales from the Loop; there’s various version of Star Trek (I prefer the Decipher CODA system to the new Modipius’ 2d20 system), and there’s the more customizable games like Traveler. You can get your Firefly fix with classic or the Fate-ified Cortex, and there’s even the steampunk of Space: 1889.

Get out there.

“Engage” — Jean-Luc Picard

One of the primary elements of role playing is interaction. Whether with your character or the other players, the plot, the setting, or the rules, you are engaging with multiple things intellectual, social, emotional, and maybe physical. (LARP? Figures and dice? Dress up?)

A role playing game allows you to delve into a personality you have taken on. Maybe it’s a new character that you came up with yourself that has to be shoehorned into the setting. Maybe it’s a rip off of a character in cinema, TV, or a book, but you want to do it your way. Maybe you were given a pre-generated character at a convention and have exactly NOW to create some personality for this person. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why are they like they are? What are their likes and dislikes, their interests? Are they just you as you wish you could be? All of that is you interacting with this “fake” person.

The character, as well as the player has to engage with the setting. Maybe it is a new one to the player. Maybe it’s an established property that everyone kinda knows the basics. I have a Star Trek game I’m running set in the Discovery period and universe — ’cause I like a lot of the aesthetics of the show (and I get to use the cool as hell Eaglemoss ship models I’ve been collecting) and it allows us to do a lot without “canon” being an issue. They have an idea of the setting, but most aren’t Trekkies (or even Trekkers!) They have to engage with the setting, but it is new to them. Certain things can be assumed; other’s cannot. In a fresh setting no one but the GM knows the world, at first. How does that affect the characters’ through the players’ understanding of the plot and its stakes, or how the characters “fit” in the world? There’s really only one way to find out (short of a massive game bible…and don’t do that to your players.)

How does the story affect them, if it even does? How so? How do the characters react to each other?

When this is done well, and when everything is clicking — when there is engagement — role playing is a magical experience.

This was a tough prompt…unique means the only one of its kind, but it can be used to mean distinctive. Do I go with “distinctive”, a bad synonym of unique?

Is role playing itself “unique”? It’s play, and not unlike that any child does when they are young and pretending to be a Power Ranger, or hunting aliens/zombies/bad guys, or exploring space, or or or… There are no rules, usually, in that unstructured play, but sometimes there are. Role playing has been called interactive story-telling, but people do that while talking over each other about an incident in the pub. “Theater of the mind” — like improvised theater, just at a table. But it’s also LARP. you dress up and pretend to be, well, usually vampires and werewolves, for that. It grew out of board games, wargames, and if you still use minis and grid maps, is it still kind of a board game? Is it unique? If fits in a bunch of Venn diagrams, when you think about it.

Are the game mechanics unique? Roll a die and hit a target number and/or above/below. Add a modifier, or add an attribute and skill together plus the die and hit a target number. Use cards to randomize. Use two d20s and try to figure out what the hell you did. How about some different die that do a different thing if you get a [symbol]. Roll to sixes and get above/below at target. Roll different die according to your ability or skill score to change the probability curve and hit a target. You roll and the other guy rolls: who gets higher? Are these systems, no matter how cool they might be explained, or how the math might work out truly unique?

That bad ass tiefling sorcerer with the androgynous look whose evil but really would like to be good but just can’t because zir a creature of the darkness that likes to wear leather and… Not unique. Look at the most popular race/class combos online. Tiefling sorcerer. Human fighter. Elf ranger. How about that spy you built. Nothing like another character that might have inspired it, but looks a lot like this character. That superhero that’s one part Tony Stark, one part Wolverine, with acrophobia and a bit of geeky wordplay thrown in? Unique? Maybe the way you play it!

Settings…your homebrew is certainly, in how it’s constructed unique, but it might be derivative as hell. But out there, somewhere, is there no one else who threw Pokemon for their little one into their D&D game with a side helping of steampunk because the teenager likes the look of the cosplay? Some of the best “new” settings started as a homebrew of something else — Shadowrun, for instance. Does it have to be unique?

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9, King James Bible. (But I think God was paraphrasing here. ) Is there nothing truly unique? Is everything a bit derivative? And is that such a bad thing? Familiarity with a story doesn’t make it any less impactful or fun; sometimes it’s quite the opposite. That’s why we tell certain stories over and over again, but the permutations are where we make it new, fresh, and…unique.

As you play, the characters, players, setting, and rules combine to make something fun, personalized, and wonderful.

Unique.

This piece ties in nicely with this article…

Today’s prompt, appropriately enough, was “First”, which lead to the inevitable phrase in the title. This year’s prompts are very free-form, a single word for the blogger, artist, etc. to work from in talking about role playing games. So this first piece will be equally open:

My first introduction to role playing was in 1978(ish). I don’t remember for certain the exact year, but that’s about right. We were in Hess’, a department store chain in Eastern Pennsylvania that may or may not still exist (I could look it up on the interwebz and find out but I’m not gunna.) and in the toy section there was a game called Dungeons & Dragons and had this cover:

So, it was at least 1977. I was into the fantasy scene thanks to the animated The Hobbit on television. The one that was about as long as The Hobbit needed to be, not three movies long.And get off my lawn. I bought the game ith my own pocket money, and read through the thing in an afternoon. What a great idea! thought I.

It took months to find anyone else who played. A “cousin” — I don’t know if they were an actual cousin or distant one, or whatever. We played a bit. There was an older guy running a game at the library that I vaguely remember as a fussy rules lawyer-y type. But it wasn’t until the last year or so of middle school that I found a few people who were also interested in the game. We would play all throughout high school, college — traveling to play together when we could — all the way up to the early nineties. I had other groups in that time, but these were the old crew, and when we got together for a weekend of gaming, it was like slipping on old shoes.

The first game we veered away from D&D was Traveller or Star Frontiers. I like to think it was Traveller, but most likely not. At that time, everything was TSR. To find a new game I had to bicycle a few miles into Bethlehem Township to the good hobby store where I got my models,  art supplies, and model rocketry stuff, as well as role playing games, from. Boot Hill, Gangbusters, Gamma World — we played it all, at least once. But the one that really grabbed me was Top Secret. By this time I was really into spy novels, movies, but the d20 system just didn’t quite jibe with modern life to me. And in 1983 we got the first game I would truly love: James Bond: 007 by Victory Games.

It was the first game to use quality-based damage and results. The first to let you build your character as you wanted (for points) that we played. It was crafted for telling stories, not just fighting monsters and nicking their treasure. I ran that game for the next quarter century and it’s still on my shelf. It led me into working in intelligence. It taught me how to research because I wanted to create a sense of reality in the game. It taught me to pay attention to international politics and history. Hell, I still put out equipment profiles on this blog for it. There are other systems that i like better now, but this was my “one true love” of the gaming world.

Gaming was the first hobby where I felt I was…myself. Which is weird to say about a game where you pretend to be other people. (Maybe i should have been an actor.) At first, it was a bit like being gay at the time — you never let anyone know you were a gamer until you’d either gotten to know them, or you’d dropped a few hints that only another gamer would get, then you got together to play. Otherwise, you might get ridiculed or beaten up. (It could be a rough neighborhood.) You played with anyone, at first, because there weren’t a lot of others doing it. I could only really start getting a bit choosy about the sorts of folks (like the 300 lb. “ninja” who was “make eye contact and you’ve got a friend for life” sort of co-dependent) hang with us. But it got me my first real girlfriend in college. My first wife — found through gaming (and tangentially, my second, as well.)

And yes, I had to look it up — Hess’ was based out of Allentown and was pretty much just a Lehigh Valley, PA thing. It folded in the mid-90s.

…and this time it’s more obscure. Or open. Different. Anyway!