Kung Fu Cowboys . . . with Lasers

I am seriously tempted to make this the basis for my next campaign.

(Washington) D.C. Superheroes

So I spent the weekend in New York, and came back with another patch of roleplaying ideas. Last time I went I had some ideas about generating cities using random tables, and I gave a bit more thought to that idea. (Mostly about pregenerating businesses to drop in as necessary.) And I thought some more about hacking together a system to run a cyberpunk campaign. (Perhaps using Basic Roleplaying as a base?) But mostly I got this strange idea about running a superhero game set in Washington D.C., in the early 70s.

Setting a game in the 70s was an idea I'd had while surfing Wikipedia. Specifically, those pages where it lists all the events of importance from a particular year. This struck me as a great way to generate background and color for a historical game, and such a time period would have a number of advantages along those lines, even if I was making some tweaks in the timeline. The 70s in particular appeal to me as a decade because it's outside my personal experience but not remotely distant, the culture is distinctive and recognizable, and the mood contrasts with the current era's in interesting ways.

But I wasn't really sure what kind of game I would really want to run in a the 70s, until I remembered my long-standing interest in running a superheroes game. I put it off for a while because my group didn't seem into it and I wasn't sure what system I'd use, but now I've got enough superhero-obsessed players that I could wrangle the rest into it, and I've done enough research to decide that Mutants & Masterminds would be worth taking for a spin. Washington D.C. is the obvious choice for a home base, seeing as it's close by and I know it fairly well, and particularly the early 70s were an interesting time to be in the city. It also has some persistent institutional dysfunctions that would make it very attractive to crusader-types; this would be right around the dawn of (limited) home rule, and a natural time and place for such personalities to get involved.

After talking with my brother for a while, we decided that brand new superheroes with a street-level focus would be the way to go, and that works very well with both the city and the time period. The players would be one of the first real supergroups to start working together, and they'd take on the various gangs in charge of different parts of the city, all the while dealing with other territorial supers, a suspicious but embattled federal government, and the city government itself. There'd be politics and international goings on happening in the background, but the majority of the action would be based on fighting over control of turf and maybe solving a few of the city's problems along the way.

All The Characters Are The Same! or Why I Spent Six Hours Reading The Expanded Psionics Handbook

As I hinted at the end of yesterday's discussion of some of 4E's limitations, there's another more important distinction between 4E and 3e. In the new edition, each character has roughly similar capabilities. Sure, there's the striker/defender/leader/controller thing, and the variations on each of those themes, but it's all pretty much doing damage and deciding when to use your encounter powers and whether to burn your dailies. Occasionally you stick some interesting effects on the monsters, and there's a fair bit of moving around, but it's all just variations on a theme. It's a fun theme, and if the DM is on the ball you can get a lot of mileage out of it by changing the environment and monster behavior, and even more by building different characters in different ways.

But it's all one kind of fun.

There are a lot of different ways to generate varieties of fun -- call those ways the dimensions of fun, if you like fancy phrases -- and 4E drops a lot that 3.x had. One of the big ones, the one it had to give up to get the tactical complexity it's designed around, is variation on the mechanics behind character powers. 3.x has feats, skills, Vancian magic (of divine and arcane quality), psionics, incarnum, shadow magic, truename magic, binding, whatever that dang Tome of Battle stuff is, plus a bunch of class specific doo-dads like bardic music, rage, and dragon shaman auras all stuffed under "special abilities." All of which makes characters a lot harder to build, and a lot harder to predict how everything in the greater system will interact, but it allows for tremendous variety in the way the game plays. It also opens up a lot of headspace, creating a convenient source of ideas on how societies and environments might interact with the powers that drive them.

4E has one way. It's a good way, but it's not the only way.

It's Like the Best Apple Pie in the World When I Want More Than Just Those Damn Apples

Okay, so maybe being over 4E doesn't quite mean I'm going to stop thinking about it. Particularly, I've been trying to figure out what exactly it is that bugs me about it. This is a game I had all kinds of crazy fun running, and could easily have all kinds of crazy fun running again. So why don't I have much interest in it anymore?

That has more to do with obsession cycles than any intrinsic feature of the game, but my gut feeling answer is that it's much more limited than 3rd edition and its variants.

This is mostly nonsense. 4th Edition isn't significantly less complicated than 3rd Edition, it just increases tactical complexity at the expense of character complexity. With the exception of fighters, rogues, and other non-magic-using characters, 4E characters have fewer moving parts than their 3.x counterparts, and there's much less variety in the kinds of parts they use. However, this reduced complexity means its easier for the designers to ensure that all those moving parts have interesting interactions with each other, and that the characters have interesting interactions with the rest of the party. 

Which means, for pure combat, and even combat with motivational doo-hickeys (I'm fighting for the queen!) backed up by interaction scenes, 4E is superior. 3.x characters have an unfortunate tendency to find one best strategy and use it in every fight, to suck up table time with calculation, and to blow through opposition, though that last is mostly because the CR system rests on some assumptions that aren't supported by the game as she is actually played. On the DM side, 4E has much better support for making fights interesting, from making monsters easier to tweak and run to gearing its environmental design advice towards making terrain that gives players interesting choices.

On the other hand . . . 4E doesn't do a whole lot beyond that. There are precious few non-combat abilities, and it's impossible to build a character that doesn't focus on combat. It does have the skill challenge system, which I like a great deal and could see using to use to run a game by itself -- because it's a seperate system that's been bolted on to the main, power-based core where most of the game's complexity resides. 

If you want to run a game that revolves around exploration, or bullshit hi-jinks, or anything else where the point of combat isn't to have fun with the fight itself but to cause problems for the players, then whenever combat does come up it will invariably pull attention towards itself and away from the main point of the game. And if you don't use combat much, you're looking at a character sheet that you never use and making lots of character decisions that are never meaningful. 3.x often has the same problem, especially when you start adding in splat-books, but that's a function of the particular moving parts in the system -- what spells your wizard picks or whatever -- rather than being cooked into the arrangement of the moving parts themselves. It doesn't intrinsically assume, no matter how you build a character, that the character will be about "combat and occasionally some other stuff."

When I wrote this post, it ended up being crazy long, so tomorrow I'll pontificate about another, related difference between 3.x and 4E. As a player of mine used to say, "All the characters are the same!"

Dungeons and Dragons and . . . Gladiators

With 4e, my long simmering idea to run a gladiator campaign has re-emerged. Not in anything approaching full force, mind you; the tropes of classic heroic adventure and sandbox-y wilderness exploration sing their own siren songs.

But ever since I read Dragon #303 (the only issue of Dragon I have ever owned, though now I'm not sure now where it is) I've thought that having an entire campaign revolve around the gladiatorial arena was a pretty neat idea. I put it aside in favor of other things, but what's got me thinking about it again is that I think 4e would be a much better fit for it than 3e.

Having just one fight per day wouldn't massively skew the power curve or the XP system; I'd just have to take into account that the players would pretty much be able to use all their dailies, if they wanted to, and make the fights a little tougher than usual. And the game seems geared towards big, set-piece battles, so I can use lots of monsters and throw in lots of gimmicks and I'd have a lot of support from the books on how to do that. It's also an excuse to use mechanically interesting but plainly bizarre monster combinations.

If I was going to do this, I'd make the party a team of gladiators, and the setting would revolve around them and other teams fighting monsters and occasionally each other. Put together a tournament system, some kind of rankings they could work up in, and probably use an actual, numerical system so the players have something to keep track of. Then add in enough behind the scene schemes within their stable and between stables to keep things interesting outside the fights, and to make ways to make the fights meaningful. Rivalries, bets and so on; maybe the start out in some small town, outskirts ring and have to work their way up to the big leagues, maybe there's an emperor who they can impress by pulling stunts and doing daring deeds in the ring, or particular kinds of daring deeds.

I'm still considering whether they'd be slaves or whether gladiatoring (gladiateering?) is legitimate employment. To a certain degree it depends on the death rate, and how final death is. I'm kind of leaning towards the former, based on its potential to generate subplots, but figuring out why they're crazy enough to want to be doing this could be interesting in itself. The free-agent model would also work better with mixing the idea with some urban adventuring/mystery solving.

There's a lot more I could do with this, but right now I haven't figured out where it ranks in the ever-shifting pantheon of games I want to run. I really badly want to do a straight up, 1st-30th sword&sorcery-ish exploration game, but I doubt that's particularly realistic. I'm also not sure which one I'd get more players for, as I don't yet have a solid college group, and might need to do some recruiting.

Wherein I Discuss Time, and Also Doors

One interesting thing that could be in a dungeon would be doors that open only at certain phases of the moon. This would work best with large dungeons, or if you otherwise had a reason to return to it over time. Then the dungeon would cycle through different areas being open; the players might even need to complete some task or puzzle in one area to get further into another.

Some doors might be open for relatively long periods in the moon's cycle, others for only a single day. And if there was more than one moon, a door might open at certain specific combinations of phases. There'd probably have to be some kind of notation system, a code for the PCs to figure out, that indicated when these doors would be open, so the players wouldn't have to go through and check every door every time they entered the dungeon.

Other time-based doors are fairly simple to imagine. Doors based on time of day, days of the week, months, seasons, and specific times of the year would all be fairly straightforward, though, again, it's a good place for a puzzle, especially if the time when it opens is fairly specific, or a long way away. It wouldn't necessarily have to be code-based (my group likes codes); the information they need might be written down somewhere, or known by other inhabitants of the dungeon.

More exotic time-based requirements are possible. Eberron's planar conjunctions would make an interesting criteria; any fantastical, regularly occurring even would work well, especially if it was somehow important to whoever built the dungeon. (If it was built by mortal hands, that is.) Doors like these would also make a good place to use fantastic calendars. Using the contemporary calendar of the world would encourage the players to actually pay attention to it, while a calendar constructed specifically for the lost civilization responsible for the dungeon could help illuminate its culture and strangeness.

Dinosaurs Make Everything Better

The PCs are all dinosaurs. You run around avoiding meteors and stomping things.

This could be played totally straight where the players are all dinosaurs doing dinosaur things. I spent a lot of time pretending I was a dinosaur as a kid, so there's got to be some fun there.

Or it could be more of a reverse Turok kind of deal, and the dinosaur-PCs eat Marines or Lost World explorers or scientists or whoever it would be entertaining for dinosaurs to eat.

Maybe Dinosaur Escape: Washington, D.C.

Multi-DM Persistent World Campaign

Crazy idea: a sandbox game with no regular group, in the style of the West Marches but with the setting that powers it shared between multiple DMs.

This could just be on the design end: you have multiple people collaborating on a setting that one of them then uses to run a game. Co-operative worldbuiling. Or you could get fancier, and have each participating DM run their own player pool through the game.

Which could, in turn, run a couple of ways. You could have multiple independent games, seperated geographically or by convention, or you could have multiple DMs supporting the same player pool, with players switching back and forth between games. My personal situation better supports the former option, since I don't know many other DMs locally. But the second option could be interesting.

There big issues I've identified so far are time-keeping, DMing style, and griefing.

That last is also the least important; though I assume there's some potential for one DM to put way to powerful monsters in places they're not supposed to be, without warning for the players or the other DMs, a little thought put into who you invite into the project ought to keep the chance to a minimum. A bigger problem would be people doing that kind of thing accidentally, but that would happen even in a single-DM game.

Slightly bigger issue is time-keeping; if you put everyone on personal time, affected solely by in-game activities, as I tend to do in my normal games, then you could potentially end up with some groups way behind others, depending on how active the different DMs are. Then you get weirdness like dungeons that haven't been cleared out yet, but will be, so you can't go there because of what will happen, but hasn't. My solution would be to put everyone on universal time, perhaps locked to real-world time, and your character hangs around in taverns until you take them out on another adventure. (Which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a character to do.)

Finally, DM style. Part of the idea behind the set-up would be to produce an environment with greater depth and variety than one DM can provide, but this could go too far. And everyone involved would have to use a similar format in their world notes, and a similar level of rigor in applying those notes.

This could work, and it might be fun. It's not something that's likely to happen; I'm probably too distractible to pull something like that off. The vision I have in my head is of a game that keeps going for years, with different players and different DMs, but one persistent world. But at least in my case, it's more likely to stay just as an idea.

EDIT: Reposted because I just realized I misspelled the title. Why do I keep doing that?

What I Want to Play, In No Particular Order

• Eberron
• human dragonmarked artificer of House d'Cannith
• elven wizard from Aerenal
• a megadungeon
• fast cars and the idiots who drive them
• pirates!
• interplanetary sailing ships with that baroque/victorian feel, "aether" and the spinning models of the solar system and everything
• perhaps a captain of a ship like that
• or an aether surfer, something like Ray Tracer
  
• Tamriel (Elder Scrolls Setting)
• ancient desert ruins
• Promethean: The Created (though I'm a bit off White Wolf, at the moment, for non-game related reasons)
  
• Exalted (same caveat as above)
  
• dawn caste/other fight-y solar using those artifact throwing ring thingies
• freedom fighter against the corrupt dragon-whatever government
  
• maybe another solar type, or another exalt entirely, since I don't know much about the world
• Vampire (again, same caveat)
• Malkavian!
• or one of those annoyingly pretentious artist types
• Werewolf (yet again, same caveat) (also, assuming it's possible to play this as something other than "science is evil" eco-terrorists)
  
• Girl Genius
• kitchen sink post-apocalyptic: "wizards, dinosaurs, mutants & lasers"
• something like the setting of Jak 2, and the parts of 3 that weren't stupid
  
• something sandbox-y
• a halfling wizard, specializing in rays
  

I Read Too Much Science Fiction, And It Shows

How well would it work to have the PCs all play individuals who were part of a greater "over-person?" This is basically a trans/post-humanist concept, worlds where the basic unit of society isn't individual humans, but groups connected chemically or psychically or what-have-you. It works pretty well in fiction, and I think it's a cool idea just on a pure conceptual level, but I wonder how it would work in a game setting?

Partially, it would just allow the game world to really process what happens at a table naturally. Characters can have close to perfect information about what their fellow party members are up to, even in the heat of battle, when when separated by time and space.

But the concept would logically demand less character conflict than most of the games I've seen actually end up with, and are fun with. If the characters are all basically the same person, why would they have different, sometimes conflicting goals? There's probably a way to build an architecture that supports some of that, and still makes sense, but it would probably require some thought to get the reasonable/playable balance right.

Would this be worth it? Or would it be just an intellectual exercise? Seems like something that might make a good hook for a one-shot.

What I Want to Run, In No Particular Order

• something sandbox-y
• a published module
• a megadungeon
• the party is a group of young, bored, reckless nobles who occupy themselves by causing trouble for their elders and their rivals
• kitchen sink post-apocalyptic: "wizards, dinosaurs, mutants & lasers"
• the new 4e default world
• Eberron
• something really dark ages
• fantasy Europe -- "Europa" or something of that nature
• pirates!
• old west
• ancient desert ruins
• steampunk
• interplanetary sailing ships with that baroque/victorian feel, "aether" and the spinning models of the solar system and everything
• everyone rides dinosaurs
• something like the setting in Jak 2, and the parts of 3 that weren't stupid
• Tamriel (Elder Scrolls setting)
• dragonriders for the Queen, who lives in an airship
• Expedition to the Moon!
• fast cars and the idiots who drive them
• magic fast cars and the idiots who drive them
• noble families based on hereditary wizardry
• 1st-20/30th: the players ascend to godhood and found an empire in the process
• that same world, 1000 years hence