This will probably be my last look at Dicing With Dragons, the 1982 introduction to RPGs that we’ve discussed in Dicing With Dragons on the Crisis Point and DWD on Published Scenarios — the GMing chapter is only nine pages long, after all.
The good news is that, whether your favorite book or film is Lord of the Rings, Dune, 2001, Star Wars, the Darkover series — whatever — then you can re-create it through roleplaying.
Off the cuff, I couldn’t disagree more with this one.
Sure, you can play in all of those worlds, experiencing many of the things that made the fiction/movie so enjoyable — but actually re-creating them is a whole different ball of wax.
Most RPGs have trouble modeling fictional sources, and the biggest reason for this is that most RPGs put PC death on the table in every conflict — Luke dying in A New Hope is always a possibility.
I’ve looked at this disconnect before, in …And Then James Bond Spends a Month in the Hospital, and it’s a toughie. (Games like Primetime Adventures, which is designed to model TV shows, are the exception, not the rule.)
What do you think — can most RPGs re-create fictional narratives, or are there fundamental differences that make this almost impossible to pull off? And as a GM, what can you do to make your games more fiction-y without losing what makes them RPGs?
I think playing in the setting of the novel-film-TV show is about the best you can hope for — and even then you have to make compromises for whatever rules set is being used.
A lot of people play Tolkienesque fantasy in the form of D&D. But it’s not LoTR. The Star Wars rpgs are much the same. My friends and I play a lot of The Wheel of Time, but I’ve purposely set our adventures before events in the books to avoid inconsistencies in continuity. Fans complain that the rpg doesn’t quite match the flavor of the magic in the books (and they’re correct), but the designers made choices in favor of fun and game-balance over a perfect match in terms of flavor.
And since we’re only playing a game, those were the correct choices, in my opinion.
If magic worked exactly like it does in the Wheel of Time books, it would be a much more boing game — mainly because the books are all about POV and internal dialog and the inner conflicts that are essential to the responsibilities of casting magic. Internal dialog doesn’t play out very well at the gaming table.
I’ve known several people who play StarTrek/DS9 games by email. They do it because they like playing in the Star Trek universe. But it doesn’t play like the shows or movies, they say, because otherwise all the action would focus on the captain and the other players would have little/nothing to do. I agree. It would be a boring email game if the referee and the captain were having a discussion, and every so often all you got to say was “hailing frequencies open, sir.”
I’ve run d20 Modern games using plots from Michael Crichton books. They tend to be fun, but there’s no question that I’ve had to restructure some of the combat scenerios to ensure the PCs advance, as they should. While it’s OK to lose a player here and there to death, you’ve got to adjust the endings sometimes in the event it’s not the PC with the crucial key/skill essential to the climax. How’s that for railroading?
Antecdotes aside, I think it’s generally a good idea to only want to play around in a certain world — but not create it exactly. You want it to be new and fresh. You don’t want to play Holmes and Watson in Victorian London — you want to be detectives associated with Holmes and Watson enjoying your own fresh adventures and perils.
What I’m interested in knowing is whether others think a given game system is a better fit for a genre/fictional setting than others. I play d20 mostly, but I’m not convinced it’s the best mechanic for swashbuckling-type adventures or Old West things — but I think its adaptability makes it a solid choice for fantasy and superheroes.
When I GM, I try to distance myself as far as possible from an existing setting – or from what is known about the setting, if that isn’t possible. What’s fun about replaying a story that everybody already knows?
When running D&D I eschew prebuilt Campaign Settings and do homebrew instead. There’s far too much known about, for instance, Faerun. I don’t feel like I can take the liberties I can with the characters and the world, because they’re not mine in the same way a homebrew world is. Something like Shadowrun is a little more open in my opinion: there’s an overall historical and societal framework, but many of the details are left open.
If I were to run something like Star Wars, Serenity, Army of Darkness, or another game based on an existing property, I’d reach across the table and smack anyone who insisted on playing one of the main characters. We already know how the story from the movie or book goes, so recreating it is mental masturbation. There are large worlds and many possibilities associated with any game, and it’s better to tell those stories than retread the same old material.
“*yawn* Okay, forget that awesome roll you just made, Vader rolled better, cut off your hand and says he is your father.” “Is this where I pretend to be surprised?” “Yes. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
I have to agree. I love the Star Wars movies, but I hate playing Star Wars RPGs with Star Wars fans. When I play, it’s either in a time period uncovered by novels or movies, or it’s in an alternate reality where things deviated fundamentally from the movies, ie Luke missed his crucial shot and was destroyed by Vader. As a result Ewoks are never recruited in the fight with the Empire and remain vicious little cannibals, eating anyone stupid enough to cross their paths. That way there’s not a five minute pause for nerdom when we get a distant glimpse of the Millenium Falcon.
In addition, novels are usually told from one POV, leaving the rest of the characters to play support to a key player. Do this in a RPG and watch your players flee.
Einan
I long ago came to the conclusion that role playing creates fundamentally different fiction than traditional fiction (books, movies, plays, etc.). Some of the big factors are:
– multiple characters that are more or less equally protagonists (though traditional fiction is exploring this more, perhaps partly driven by gaming).
– while an author might even roll dice, there is no game system behind his writing. The author has sole responsibility and power to weave his story (subject to editing, taking input from others, and interpretations by producers, directors, and actors).
Even using settings from traditional fiction is problematical. A big issue often is the mechanics don’t jive with the setting. Another issue is that the settings are very narrowly tailored to the fiction being written (and may have inconsistencies when multiple books, plays, or movies are set in the same setting).
On the other hand, I don’t have a problem with using commercial settings that players might know significant detail from. With good players, that will enhance play (not to mention that it’s realistic that people know something about their world).
Frank
Book, movies, etc, are stories, we play games that make stories, we write them as we go, to try to turn a story back into a game is create a new story with another writer, so of course it can never be the same.
You can get some stock setting and ideas from a book or movie, and a get a movie or book from setting and ideas from a game, but to replay a story as a game and stay with the story is called acting in a play even if the director lets you improv a little.
A couple thoughts I had that were sparked by this…
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It’s also possible for players to know too much. My D&D group has a couple of guys who can reference just about any rulebook, chapter and verse. For that reason, besides preferring homebrew settings, I also like to customize my monsters, adding some class levels here and there to offer an interesting challenge. My big bosses are crafted with TLC.
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When I build a homebrew world, I keep in mind what the PCs would know and give the players background info. If something comes up mid-story that the PCs would know that I didn’t tell them initially, I fill them in. The first session is generally an introduction to everything the PCs know about the world, party generation, and the first hook.
The reason I like to roll my own setting is that after a while I’ve found the world and its contents take on their own life in my head. I’ve never felt that sort of immersion with any setting with a lot of canon built up. I understand everything about the way the world flows, so things seem to happen almost on their own. One of my weaknesses is improvisation, but I can shore that up by following the thought processes of the NPCs involved — and since I made them myself, including the world around them and all their influences, it’s very easy for me to follow.
(While I’m not a writer, at least no more than any GM is, everything I’ve heard about the writing process and worldbuilding in that arena is that it works very similarly. I’ve heard comments about stories “writing themselves” and authors surprising even themselves with what happens. A life of its own…)
Maybe it’s a personal quirk. I’m sure others have fun running things in a canon-full setting…I just don’t think it fits my style preference.
Has anyone played the Heroes of the Lance modules for Dragonlance? At least, I think that’s what they were called — it was the series where you basically played through the novels, and you played as the heroes.
How on earth did that work?
To me, it seems like the basic idea that DWD is getting at — emulating fiction as closely as possible in an RPG — is fundamentally flawd. And yet…those modules exist, and apparently were a lot of fun. 😉
Thanks for the links — both were excellent, and the HeroQuest one makes me want to go find a copy of HQ, stat!
The DL modules were developed prior to/concurrently with the novels, so it’s not quite the same as the example above. I mean, in this case, the novels are adaptions of the game, not vice-versa. So I’m not sure your assumption (emulating fiction) is valid.
The playtesting of adventures “gave birth” to elements crucial to the novels: Raistlin’s raspy voice, the affectionate gully dwarf, etc.
It did create problems in novel development, however.
If I recall, Tracy Hickman said or wrote something to the effect that in making sure there was a character type that reflected each of the main D&D classes at the time, the novel ended up with character types that were basically carbon copies in terms of advancing the story. Specifically, Sturm’s motivation/role in the novel basically duplicated aspects already held by other characters, which made for headaches in the novel’s construction (and made the character itself expendable, eventually). If the novel had come first, then the issue of character development would have been resolved.
My memory is a little dim, but for the most part, the modules played pretty well.
To think of it, adapting DL to third edition was a more difficult task, because the “canon” of all those novels written since had to be accommodated. But in the beginning, it was game first, novel second.