Fuchs wrote:I agree with K. There's a GM to handle the NPCs if there's a roll needed. If you can roll for the bad guys you can roll for the good guys' staff as well. There is no need at all for a player to play NPCs. If he really wants to he can - if it doesn't hold up the game and doesn't give him way more screen time than the other players.
But now we're stuck in the D&D format and can't ever escape from it. Which means that we can't ever play a modern/future campaign that isn't structured like Shadowrun. And that's disappointing, because there are really a lot of stories that cannot (or at least should not) be told that way. As alluded to in the first post, games like CthulhuTech and MechWarrior do not work. And the reason they don't work is because the action necessarily jumps from reference frame to reference frame and individual characters cannot plausibly contribute to all of them. In order to tell those sorts of stories, an expanded cast is required.
By throwing your hat in the ring as refusing to consider players having a wider purview than the actions of a single POV character, you're essentially throwing in the towel as far as ever having a decent mech-based RPG. Which is a valid viewpoint I suppose, but basically amounts to thread crapping. This is a thread brainstorming how to make such games work, and you're popping in to say that you don't want to play in such a game. While fascinating, I don't see how you think you are contributing to this thread in the slightest.
-Username17
You can easily play a decent mech-based RPG - you just need to enforce a minimum competency in "Mech Combat" for every PC. Just like every Shadowrunner needs some stealth, social skills, etc. to actually Shadowrun.
If something is the main theme of a game, then the PCs need to be able to be proficient in it. For a mech game, that's mech combat.
Now, wanting to have more than one character is another thing, but no requirement for a decent mech game. Though honestly - if you really want to play multiple characters, many or almost all of them with bit parts... there's the GM role for you. If you have an entire group of people who actually want to play multiple NPCs... count yourself lucky for having always someone ready to GM.
Last edited by Fuchs on Thu Nov 15, 2012 6:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The "troupe-style" scheme -- that's what Ars Magica called it -- isn't really meant for a specific genre so much as a specific style of game. You don't need it to have a game about powerful wizards; you can just play Mage: The Whichevering. You don't need it to have a game about mecha pilots, you can play Bubblegum Crisis. You don't even need it to have a game about soldiers, you can play Top Secret/SI: Commando or GURPS Spec Ops or whatever.
Ars Magica was about individually powerful wizards in medieval Europe who banded together for various reasons but still cared as much about their own interests as those of the group. Would you have games where everybody played their wizard character? Of course. Some campaigns even made that the default. When you go to a big gathering of wizards, normally everybody tends to bring a wizard to that. On the other hand, sometimes you'd have things where one or two wizards had things they wanted to go off and do on their own (harvest mana, find a book of spells, get a familiar) and the others wanted to stay at the base and study for 3 months (which in Ars Magica is how you advance your magic skills). The point of having "troupe-style" games is so when Denise wanted to have her character go out hunting for faerie dust, you can make an adventure out of that and everybody can go along in some capacity or other.
If you only want to do adventures when "the main characters" are all together, you don't need to mess with this stuff. If the characters all pretty much stick together, you don't need it. It's for games where characters are more like member states of the UN (where they all work together in times of dire necessity, but can do their own thing and tell the others to fuck off if necessary) than is the case with traditional adventuring parties. It's for games where the "main theme" of a game is broad enough that characters cannot plausibly be proficient in everything needed for it, but you want to maintain a degree of gritty realism.
You'd use it if you wanted to play a game about a mercenary Mech regiment, not about four individual pilots. Or if you wanted to play a game about the Black Company, where old guys getting killed or leaving and new guys enlisting is part of the story. Games that use this play style are more about the institution than about the individuals.
TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.
The classic problem here is that more character specialization equals less character screentime, something which is bad for a game and fine for an film or TV series. Q from James Bond is a whiz with all things spy-tech, but he gets two minutes of every film.
Frank also points out that specialized characters also can be important characters in the storytelling aspect of the game even if they can't be in the game aspects of the game.
The problem is that multiple characters and multiple points of view for one player is corrosive to game and the story. People emotionally invest less in multiple characters and they game multiple characters to the benefit of a few. Red Shirt #7 is going to give his personal shield to the Engineer and then throw himself at the Borg because no one even cared enough to name the Red Shirt.
Firefly as a RPG would avert this problem as often as possible by usually having each character play some part of the adventure, but there is no way to avert it in a faithful Battlestar Galactica game because most of the characters are not going to be important most of the time.
There are two solutions:
1. Most of the setting is not playable. BSG is thus a game about starship combat and you can be as realistic as you want because away missions on planets is not something that the game covers.
2. The game is entirely meta. Firefly is thus a social game where bank robberies and chases are handled by single checks that only affect the overall social metagame that happens when all the characters are together.
The problem with both of these solutions is that they are also corrosive to the storytelling elements. RP involves "living the life" of the character, something that you can't do in an story where specialized characters exist because you either are forced into multiple lives or are forced into an edited existence.
At best, RPGs work in high-realism TV show format where everyone plays a very similar role like in a doctor show or a lawyer show. Low-realism TV show format means that for some reason Xander is not getting his heart ripped out at every combat even though we know that he can't take even a single hit.
In the end, BSG is most faithfully played as a tactical wargame, Firefly as a light card game like Chez Geek, and a multiple-viewpoint Start Trek as an improv acting exercise with no rules.
Otherwise, you have to abandon hyper-specialized characters and roles and Mal or Riker will sometimes fix the ship.
Last edited by K on Thu Nov 15, 2012 6:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
And Mal totally did fix the ship and then give himself a medical injection in the out of gas episode. He's not as good at it as Kaylee, but he can still do it.
Hicks wrote:In another thread, it was said that nothing details a military campaign more than one player ordering around the others. The captain and his XO should be NPCs while the Main PCs are department heads of the command staff. The PCs main source of agency is to brainstorm with each other and their commander and play a mini-game where the best and most convincing course of action is the one the commander will do to solve the plot problem of the session. During away missions, the caption stays on the ship and the XO is the commander. Players of Main PCs that are not present with the landing party get the consolation character of a throw-away red shirt grog.
I also said in the other thread that you could have the captain make major decisions by majority vote of the players. For day-to-day stuff the captain is either an NPC or a single-player PC (one of several controlled by that player), but all the players vote when it's time to do something that changes the direction of the game.
Whether you want command to be controlled by the players really depends on the game. In an exploration-heavy space opera I think it's better to put the players in control of the captain one way or another. In a paranormal-investigators game you'd want all leadership roles filled by NPCs, so that they can (inevitably) turn out to be in league with the psychic space vampires. Where a mech game falls on this spectrum, I don't know.
Last edited by ModelCitizen on Thu Nov 15, 2012 10:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You could always do it Space Station 13 style, where despite having a nominal Captain, you also have the Head of Security, the Head of Personal, the Head Researcher, the Head Surgeon, the Chief Engineer and the AI all be effectively equal in power to the Captain, and have the ability to override the others in their field of expertise.
A party would look like:
Head Navigator
Head Surgeon
Head of Security
Hal Skynetson
Chief Science Officer
and they make the ship-wide decisions by majority vote.
