So, we decide to run a sci-fi game. I just shotgunned Star Trek discovery in two weeks, and now I’m pumped to get something in front of my players. Sure, SpellJammer fills a bit of it, but it’s silly and all fantasy based. I want to run something nitty, gritty, and violent like Firefly. Oh, and then there is the whole Star Frontiers thing that got me thinking of that setting. That game was good, but I never really liked the rules. I’ve got my “Stars are Fire” book for Cypher, and I’ve been trying to become an expert at that so I can spin that up. Okay, so we will do a sci-fi game using the Cypher rules system and base it on a cross between Star Frontiers and Star Trek. This should be good.
So now we have to define the setting a bit more. So, we have a big galactic bad guy, let’s call them the Federation, but have them controlled by a corrupt council that functions more like criminal syndicates that have carved out various star systems as their own. They have a hierarchy, but there is serious infighting that makes them overall ineffective at expanding their territory anymore.
This leads to the other planets that have no desire to be taken over by them but don’t want to give up their sovereignty. Let’s call them the Alliance. That covers Richards’s idea for the name Star Alliance. Okay, this is good.
But sci-fi is more than just spaceships and empires because it’s about technology and alien encounters, and now I’m shot gunning Night Flyers on Netflix. It would be so great to do a Horror Space setting, but that doesn’t work with the general idea of Star Alliance. Well, maybe it could. But then there is Westworld, that’s sci-fi, and it’s a great show, so can I figure out how to fit Hosts into the setting? Well, they are like replicants from Blade Runner, so if we combine them and make them slaves to the Federation, we can run Cyberpunk-style games in the Star Alliance setting, but now I need to figure out computers…
And thus, the path my mind wanders down daily as I try to figure out what I want to play, develop, write, or even read about. And this is medicated. I usually run three games weekly, and none are in this setting. The one Richard and I have been talking about designing for our workshop program. The setting I was all stampeding to work on three weeks ago, that I don’t care about because I’m thinking an espionage game would be good. Maybe one set in the 1970s. And honestly, that idea just popped into my mind while typing the paragraph above.
So, what’s the problem? You might ask. Or maybe you know it already. Too many choices. This many choices are a double-edged sword for people like me and often a colossal reason we never move forward on anything. It’s the opposite of writer’s block. I’d say it’s more of writer’s congestion, where so many ideas are trying to fit through your mind and into your word processor (does anyone use that term anymore?) that they all block each other, and nothing comes out because you are crippled with choices.
And GMing is different from writing because it’s more group-oriented; even if you were not allowing players to modify your world, they still could impact it through their character’s actions. So, while all your ideas were fighting to get out, all sorts of other ideas brought to the table by your players made it even worse. And the inability to get those ideas out impacted everyone.
Mind you, this is a GM issue, so if you were a player thinking like this, it didn’t cause that many problems. You sat and sulked, modified your character in the current game to do things you wanted to do in the other game, or started a side game. In the end, the other players and GM could ignore you if you wanted.
If you were the GM of the group, your decision to switch something around impacted everyone.
In the early days, it was easy to keep this under control. You could play fantasy (AD&D), spies (Top Secret), Sci-Fi (Star Frontiers, Traveler), or the old west (Boot Hill). And all the rules were unique to each genre. You couldn’t play fantasy very well with the Top Secret rules, and even though Gamma World rules looked like AD&D rules, they were very different in how they played. That doesn’t mean we didn’t try to fit things together.
And external influences were minimal. TV shows and movies were unavailable on demand, and if you wanted good fantasy or sci-fi inspiration, you needed to go to the library and read. When I started playing, Comics were in racks at the supermarket that you read while your parents shopped or chased you out of the store because you never could afford them (well, I couldn’t). Minimal selection. It was easy to keep a focus on your D&D fantasy game when all you had were the rule books and some fantasy books from appendix E (and maybe you managed to possibly catch Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger on the ABC movie of the week).
And then all sorts of games started coming out of different types. Many took the genre and went in different directions with the same concept (Tunnels and Trolls, Aftermath). Others brought new genres into the RPG world, such as superheroes (Champions). Others created unique and exciting creations (Empire of the petal throne, Dallas the Roleplaying game). Still, if you wanted to hop between genres, getting your friends to quit playing the characters they had been working on for months to try out something you thought was great was a challenge. Especially when they knew you would want to do something else in two or three months.
Chaosium was the sole exception at this time with their Basic Role Playing system and decided to allow people to play in different genres and settings with the same familiar rules. If you knew Call of Cthulhu, you knew the basics of Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, RuneQuest, Super World, Ring World, Elfquest, Future World (part of Worlds of Wonder), and Pendragon. In the beginning, they had a 16-page rulebook called Basic Role Playing that was included in each box that was the game’s basic system. All the rules needed to play anything in one booklet; the added Runequest rule book was just there to give you a setting and special rules for that setting. Now your gaming group didn’t need to relearn rules every time you wanted to play a different genre; you just had to convince them to play a different setting, which was a lot easier sell.
But then came the question of what to sell to your players. Yeah, Elfquest was exciting, but then again, once you started playing it, maybe you thought the magic rules for Stormbringer were better, but they didn’t fit together as well, but they did, kind of. So you spend a week mapping out how to get them to work together, but then James Bond was on the TV the other night and…
And since the rules were so similar, as long as you were a good GM, the players usually didn’t mind hopping around between stuff. Which, in all honesty, was not helpful to the situation.
And let’s not even bring up GURPS because that was the beginning of the end. Well, kind of. It was the beginning of the end of my playing a single genre and starting a new way of thinking about managing campaigns. And I mean multiple campaigns, simultaneous. One of the biggest complaints about my games is how they never end or have a conclusion. Yeah, that is true, but most of my players still will play anything because I like to think they learned something I figured out a while ago (like maybe two or three years ago when my wife told me, but it only became something, I realized a couple of weeks ago). It’s not the destination that matters; it’s the journey. It’s not the end of the campaign. It’s everything you do to try to get there.
Of course, you have to have significant milestones, and early on, I didn’t have any memorable ones, so it didn’t seem like a “good” stopping point. But I managed to develop a connecting mechanism that made transitioning between my games keep it feeling like the same game. Essentially a way to carry on a campaign across multiple campaigns. A method for moving my game from genre to genre (and system to system, possibly with a new idea I had) and keeping a rational continuity structure.
Truly a campaign setting for people who can’t decide on a campaign setting. Is it easy to pull off? Not sure. It seems complicated for people whose brains are not constantly flooded with competing ideas and can focus on the one setting they know they want to play in. For people like me, though, it seems like a logical outgrowth of our way of thinking, and it does help in controlling our focus by providing more to focus on than one single thing.
So next time, we will look at the basic concepts of this structure and compare it to other ways to structure game campaigns and sessions.