TV shows and movies make great inspiration for your game, and there are also plenty of RPGs based directly on visual media: Stargate SG-1, the various incarnations of Star Trek, James Bond, Star Wars and so on.
Have you ever run (or played in) a game based on a movie or TV show? If so, chances are you probably encountered at least a few spots where it just didn’t feel like the show.
If you want to run RPGs based on movies and TV that are true to the spirit of their source material, you have to tackle things a bit differently.
If you’re watching Star Trek and the away team — composed of the main cast plus one guy in a red shirt (with no last name) — beams down to a hostile planet, who’s going to get killed in a dramatic moment?
Right, the guy in the red shirt.
If you’re playing a Star Trek RPG and the same situation crops up, who’s going to bite the dust?
Probably the guy in the red shirt. But it could also be the Captain of the Enterprise, or one of the officers — because in most RPGs, things don’t work the way they do in TV shows and movies.
In a recent LiveJournal post, Setback Level, Robin Laws asked this question about the difference between watching a movie (or TV show) and playing one:
“Is this divergence a necessary component of the roleplaying form, or a failure of emulation?”
Most of the time, it’s both.
For example: The majority of RPGs — including every game I’ve ever seen that’s based on a licensed property (Star Wars, etc.) — put PC death on the line at least some of the time. For most genres of movie and TV show, that’s a failure of emulation.
If you’re watching a James Bond movie, you know Bond’s life isn’t at stake, despite the dangerous situations he finds himself in. In a James Bond RPG, Bond is just a few bad die rolls away from being shark food — and if that happens, the whole group will notice the disconnect: The game no longer feels like a Bond movie.
Sometimes, that’s okay. Part of the point of roleplaying is that it’s participatory, and that it doesn’t play by the same rules as movies or TV shows. If you’re running that Bond game mainly for the color (the gadgets and the high-adrenaline chases, let’s say), you may not care so much if it diverges from the movies in other respects.
But if you want to avoid those disconnects — those moments where everyone goes, “That would never happen on the show!” — then you need to handle things a bit differently.
3 Considerations for TV and Movie RPGs
These three items strike me as being the main things you need to look at differently when running a game based on a movie or TV show. That said, I know this list is incomplete — because while I’ve played in several such games, I’ve never run one myself.
• Take death off the table — the PCs’ lives are never at stake. Instead, other things of importance to them are on the chopping block, and their successes and failures influence those things, instead.
• Create vibrant NPCs whose lives are on the line, and whose survival depends on the PCs’ success. There’s plenty of room for cardboard cutout NPCs, too, like “SWAT guy who gets shot when he opens the door” — but secondary cast characters are critical.
• All major PC failures enhance the story. If the squad from Stargate Command gets ambushed and — because of a string of terrible rolls — fails to reach the Goa’uld base, the mission isn’t over. Instead, it changes shape: Their ambushers capture them and take them to the base — where they have a chance to escape, and continue their mission.
You can accomplish some of these goals without making major changes to the game rules — but not all of them. Some changes can be accomplished just by adding a few rules (like Jonathan Tweet’s excellent “Kirk rule”), while others — taking death off the table, for example — have far-reaching rules implications.
Another option is to switch gears and play a completely different game — like Primetime Adventures, which is specifically designed to emulate TV shows. PTA has no hit points, very few character stats — and clever mechanics for spotlighting different characters and making the game feel like a TV series.
If you’ve run a game based on a movie or TV show, how did you handle the potential differences between the RPG and its source material? Did you run into disconnects, jarring moments that made the game less enjoyable? Have you ever incorporated rules (like the “Kirk rule”) into your games to handle this? And what else should be on my list of considerations?
The Buffy & Angel RPG’s have a neat little mechanic called Drama Points that helps on both of these counts — DP’s can be used to get PC’s out of trouble (including Back From the Dead). So, death is still on the table, but it can be channeled to dramatic effect.
(There’s more to be said about Drama Points, but I don’t have the time right now.)
If you get time later, Jeff, I’m definitely interested in hearing more about DPs in Buffy/Angel.
I’ve been playing Buffy for a while. Buffy takes Death off the table by having a large supply of Drama Points. Drama Points can be used for several purposes:
1) Heroic Feat = +10 (to a basic roll of 1d10) on a given action
2) I Think I’m OK = halve damage taken thus far
3) Plot Twist = spend to enact a change to the background/situation
4) Righteous Fury = +5 hit and damage for the rest of the fight if sufficiently motivated
5) Back From the Dead = what it sounds like, and it costs more DPs the quicker you want to come back (the highest being 10 DPs to come back immediately)
An important thing is that there are fairly deep pockets to these. Normal “Scooby” characters start out with 20 Drama Points, while hero (i.e. Slayer/vampire/etc.) characters start out with 10 DPs. However, they are not gained at a very fast rate (average 1-2 per episode, maybe).
So as you’re going through an episode, you’ll almost certainly be able to survive and win in some sense. However, it might drain you of a lot of drama points. The more that you use for defensive purposes, the less you have to accomplish heroic things. They’re fairly well designed — the system has no death spiral, and saving yourself from damage works better the *more* damage you’ve taken. So DPs work well as a last resort — as opposed to systems like Shadowrun (1st ed) where it encourages spending early.
Hi there,
I’ve talked about this with people before, and a lot of players have preconceived notions about how RPGs “should” be played. For many of them (my current group included), if you take player death out of the equation, you take out the excitement of the possibility of losing. In order to avoid jargon and possible GNS disputes, I like to compare it to sports v. stories (and that should show that I don’t think one is superior to the other; they’re in different fields altogether). If you play RPGs like a sport, you want the win/lose option. If you want to play it in a story creating way (it doesn’t have to emulate any particular source, it could just be the goal of play to create a compelling story), then you don’t think in win/lose terms.
The disconnect in the world of RPGs out there is twofold: a) Very few systems actually mechanically support story play, even if the flavor texts say they do (see WoD); and b) players often don’t communicate well about what style of game they’re going to play with each other.
– Christian
John: Thanks for the summary — that definitely makes it sound like Buffy is well-suited for doing, well, exactly what it’s supposed to do. 😉
Christian: You’re preaching to the choir — I agree completely. 🙂
John — thanks for the summary of official DP uses. On the subject of gain rate, though, the official suggestion I think runs that they should be spent at a rate of about 4-5 per episode and gained at very close to the same rate.
Gaining DP’s can happen in a few ways — White Hats helping Heros through tough times (RP drama), good quotes, bad things happening to good people… I think I’m forgetting one, but the books aren’t easily to hand right now.
There are a bunch of unofficial uses that folks have created, with names like “Do or Die” (if you’ve watched the series, think Buffy’s duel with Angel in 2.22 Becoming, Part 2) or “Back to the Wall”.
Christian — there’s a rather funny thread at the 20 by 20 room written by Jim Henley under the title “Captain Princess and Edzilla”, that uses the author’s children to discuss exactly that point.
I’ll never forget playing the Temple of Doom adventure for TSR’s Indiana Jones RPG–AS Indy!–and DYING in the very first scene because, round after round, my percentile dice refused to roll a fairly easy number to grab the antidote “to the poison you just drank.”
If I remember correctly, the game didn’t have any “hero points” or similar mechanic to just skip the die roll, or add a big bonus to it, or anything.
Certainly would have made a difference to Dr. Jones…
Darth: That’s a perfect example of two tastes that don’t go great together.
Done right, that scene could be fun in an RPG — but not an RPG intended to model the things that make the movie fun, which don’t include Indy’s random, pointless death. 😉