Licensed Role-Playing Games: Threat Or Menace?

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Let's just get the controversial statement out of the way: I'm not a fan of licensed settings in role-playing games. Today's column is rolling out of a Skype conversation that I had with a friend the other day. There's a lot of cool RPGs out there that are based upon cool movies, comic books, novels and cartoons. None of them are bad, and I'm not trying to call out licensed games or anything, but this column is going to be an exploration of different tastes and approaches to gaming. I know, something that I never do.

Before we get too far into things, let me just say that the headline for this article is a joke. In 1980 something amazing happened to role-playing games: the first licensed RPG was published. Just in case you don't know, that was the Dallas role-playing game from SPI. Yes, the first ever licensed role-playing game was based on the television show Dallas. I'm sure that the people at SPI thought that it was an excellent idea, I mean millions of people were watching the show. Millions. I was one of the 83 million people who were watching the episode of Dallas where JR was shot. I'm sure if I had known about the Dallas game I would have given it a try, but I also watched the reboot of the show a couple of years ago so I am a glutton for punishment.

But this opened the doors to every other licensed RPG over the years. From Rocky And Bullwinkle to The Dresden Files and from Masters of the Universe to Doctor Who, every licensed game out on the market has been sown from the seeds strewn by the Dallas game. There have been some really great games to come from those seeds, and a few mediocre ones but that is the breaks. The D6 System from West End Games was brought to us because of a number of licensed role-playing games and became a game of its own based on the system's strengths.

Now that I have you past the jump I am going to admit that this piece isn't just going to be about licensed games. I'm going to talk a bit about games with strong settings to them as well, but first a confession. I have never played an RPG in any of the following settings:

• Star Wars
• Star Trek
• Game of Thrones
• The Dresden File

The reasons that I haven't played in any of those settings are different, because a couple of them are settings that I'm not a fan of and wouldn't play in because of that. No, I'm not going to say which ones I don't like. But, for a variety of reasons, these represent some of the reasons why I don't play in licensed games. One of the biggest reasons that I don't play them is because the cool stuff has already been done in the primary media (and, really, how many times do we need to blow up the Death Star anyway?) and I think that the strategy of playing around the edges of the setting doesn't have as much of an appeal.

When I do play in an established, licensed, setting I will play around the edges of things. I've run a Doctor Who game where the players were a timelost group of UNIT soldiers and researchers trying to find a way home again. For some reason early on the group decided that they had to avoid the Doctor (I don't remember the reason the players came up with, but it was a suggestion of the group) so they would bounce around in a few episodes of the show, and a couple of novels, while trying to not be noticed by the actual characters of the show.

I also extend this to a number of the "stronger" settings that have developed out of role-playing games, too. The Forgotten Realms. Glorantha. Warhammer 40K. Now, I've never played in The Forgotten Realms, but all three of those settings have one thing in common, they have taken on a size and life of their own. They have been developed through their games, and in a couple of case other media as well, until they have become as involved as many licensed settings. This weight can make them as difficult to use as licensed settings, because their development has lead to what can be an overwhelming amount of detail over the years. After "What do I do that the media's characters didn't already do?" the next mark against some settings can be that there is so much detail that it can be overwhelming. How do you deal with that? Sometimes you have to just focus into a tiny part of the setting and work from there.

As a GM I'll say that there are settings that scare the bejeezus out of me because of the amount of detail involved in them. I'm not one to commit myself to the amount of detail that you get from a lot of members of fandoms, which sometimes means that what I think is a good amount of setting knowledge ("Yeah, I've seen all of the Star Wars movies in the theaters.") ends up only being the tip of the iceberg. What I consider to be knowledgeable about the setting and what someone who has read a lot of novels and tie-ins and comics and watched a bunch of television shows considers to be knowledgeable tend to be different things. This can sometimes lead to friction within a group when there are two dramatically different sets of expectations that can clash with each other. Being open about what a campaign based on a pre-made setting will and won't contain is a good starting point for trying to alleviate those frictions. This is why a campaign pitch of "We're going to be playing in the Star Trek and/or Star Wars universe" isn't a good starting point. Both of those settings contain multitudes, and the aspects that appeal to one person about them might not appeal to another.

I've written before about one of my favorite games, which happens to be a licensed RPG. I've always been more of a fan of DC Comics than Marvel Comics, but the system from TSR's classic Marvel Super-Heroes Role-Playing Game always had more of an appeal to me than most of the DC Comics role-playing games that have happened (although I will always have a weak spot for the D6 version that West End Games put out). Luckily, TSR was really good about putting out support in the form of converting Marvel characters to the game, and giving you background on their stories. I have also usually worked around this by having the Marvel characters typically out of the way ("Yeah, the Fantastic Four is in another dimension, or something, and their helpline gave this number instead."), leaving the player characters to do things without being overwhelmed by the more famous heroes. In our college Marvel Super-Heroes campaign this ended up becoming a metacommentary as the player hero group started calling themselves "The World's Most Convenient Super-Heroes." Sometimes a work around can become a fun part of the game.

Not wanting to sound like I'm focusing on the negative here, I'll talk about a couple of games I like and their settings. Both of these I've talked about before: Stormbringer/Elric and Palladium's Rifts. I am not a huge fan of fantasy fiction, but the work of Michael Moorcock has been a favorite of mine since I started reading him as a kid. While the Elric books were my favorite when I was younger, they've been supplanted over time by his Jerry Cornelius and Dancers At The End of Time cycles. Both of these series are woefully underrepresented in role-playing games. Admittedly my intimate knowledge of the Elric stories are probably why I felt comfortable with games set in it. The main issue that comes up with playing a game in any of Moorcock's worlds comes from his periodic revising of his stories, or revisiting an earlier concept in a later book and casting it in a different way. Moorcock's multiverse from the early Elric stories and from the more recent Second Ether books like Fabulous Harbors are almost two entirely different settings. You get the extra challenge of "Which version of how the author addresses things do we use?" thrown into the mix.

I came to terms with my uncritical love for Palladium Games' series of Rifts games and setting books a long while ago. I'm not much of a fan of class and level systems, but I will drop everything for the chance to run a Palladium game. It doesn't make much sense to me either, at times. And I don't know if there are any settings that typify "OMG THERE IS SO MUCH GOING ON IN THIS SETTING I CAN'T EVEN" than with Rifts. I've played in a game where there was a player with a character who was a Rogue Scholar and another character was a centaur that was a ROM-like Spaceknight knock off. Both of which were made using official character classes for the game. It becomes a worked example of "this is the stuff we pay attention to and let the rest become background noise" approach to a setting.

So, despite starting this column by talking about how I don't like to play in licensed or "heavy" settings, I end by talking about two of the settings that fit the criteria for things that I shouldn't like and then talk about why I like them. Much like our real lives, our gaming lives are filled with contradictions and sometimes it is better to focus on those contradictions rather than the absolutes. I think in the long run it ends up making us all happier as people and gamers.

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[Doctor Futurity]

This really feels like a strange article on "you're having badwrongfun" and is a classic example of the "YMMV" clause.

While it's true that not all people regard or enjoy the same things out of a given IP with equal intensity....what I like in Star Wars or Star Trek is not what another fan might like....it's still an IP with which a baseline common familiarity can be very strong and helps both GM and players to sidestep the issue of how to learn about an unknown setting from whole cloth. For some, this is really helpful.

Has anyone ever repeated the Death Star destruction in a campaign, anyway? I'm sure it's happened but I've never known any Star Wars player/GM in any group to use the various iterations of that RPG to emulate the films....most people tell whole cloth original and interesting stories set in that universe, and appear to be unbothered by whatever the Skywalkers are up to.

I'm personally a GM who prefers to create unique settings which cater to my own interest and strengths of design. I don't really get into premade settings, whether from literarary sources, film or other designer's game worlds (Rifts). But I've met more than enough GMs over the years for whom designing their own setting is not natural, and having one ready made to use is a godsend, so I completely understand the appeal.

 

[Henry]

I like licensed settings, as long as (as you noted) there is room to play at the edges. Some settings like Dragonlance are harder to find those edges, but it can still be done. In general, I'm more of a fan of homebrew, but homebrew has its own disadvantage: Lack of personal investment.

Tell a player that they are walking into the taproom of the Green Medusa Inn
in the city of Jilkond, capital of the Mavong Empire, and they picture a nondescript taproom in some inn, and you have to give tons of description to breathe life into it. Instead, tell them that they've walked into the Inn of the Last Home in Solace, and Dragonlance fans immediately have the imagery in their heads, the Vallenwood tree in the middle of the tavern, the niche where Raistlin would sit, the smell of Spiced Potatoes in the air, and likely a mental picture from some Elmore or Easley art. You can get there with a homebrew, but it takes a LOT more work that has been done for you already elsewhere.

Same thing with the Gotham Museum of art versus The Met - set a game in the alternate real world, and you have tons of imagery (and in some cases personal experience) to draw from. There's no "licensed property" quite like Reality.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I'll admit - setting with the detail of Forgetten Realms are things I avoid - inevitably a player knows more than I do, so I won't run it.

A "single campaign" side mission in a published setting can work. I GMed a part in MERP - There was this monster in Rolemaster that was like an unstoppable demonmonsterthing.I borrowed the idea, and adjusted power level. the characters did normal (but ME flavored) fantasy stuff, then I dropped in hints about a danger to the west. It turned out a group of nasties summoned/created one of these unstoppable menaces to kill Aragorn. That became the campaign focus, and when they beat it, the campaign was over. Everyone had a great time. And they were important - if they hadn't done that, the west would have lost to Sauron. So the PC look like background characters, but can say to themselves "heh, if it wasn't for us, this wouldn't happen".

Of course when it was over, Aragorn came over and thanked them. He knew, and knew they were good enough to take care of it, without his help - and acknowledges that if it hadn't been for them, he would have failed. So they did get a private moment in the sun with a primary cannon character.

But I tend to avoid licensed setting, more for the reason that I love inventing my own worlds than any other reason.

 

[Von Ether]

I quit a few FR/ licenced games because I seem to have the sense of the plot of these things despite hardly reading any of related books.

"You can't do that, done one in a book already did that/ was that."

I also not a fan of having my PC race nixed because it wasn't the right time period. But I didn't know we were playing a different time period until we made PCs. So many changes, the GM couldn't keep track of them all.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Tolkien's Middle-Earth is a good example for something like this, since there have been four different RPGs using the setting. I managed to muddle through a few years of Middle-Earth Role Playing, the "simplified" version of the Rolemaster system. I read, but never played, Decipher's Lord of the Rings RPG. Then Cubicle 7 put out the excellent The One Ring RPG, but finding players is difficult where I live. And finally, Cubicle 7 combined 5E D&D with Tolkien to make the also excellent Adventures in Middle-Earth. The C7 games solve some of that problem of feeling like a small fish in a big pond, as they are set in the years in between The Hobbit and LotR, allowing your characters to be more of a major player in the world.

 

[Blue]

This is how I feel about the Forgotten Realms.

 

[Blue]

For me, this depends on the setting. for example, the Enterprise isn't the "prime mover" of the glaxy in either TOS or TNG. You can have other ships, meeting same and different aliens, hazards and menaces. Maybe YOU are the group that ended up negotiating the neutral zone, or whatever. There's a lot to do.

Compare to something like Firefly or Star Wars where the type of story is so closely tied to the featured group. "I want to play the lovable scoundrel." These you need to really go out of your way to play something significantly different. I like the idea of the recent Star Wars system because they broke it up into three parts that makes it likely that you won't start with expies for the main shows.

Dresden is somewhere in the middle - it's shown to be a bigger world, but there are a lot of large happening that are because of one Harry Dresden, and the world isn't showing a lot of new events the size of the vampire war happening off-screen (off-page?). We were collaboratively building a setting to play, based in New Jersey right after Hurricane Sandy, dealing with what all that salt water did for lot of old time protections, bindings and wards.

 

[Blue]

Something not talked about here is the opposite - settings designed to inspire but done in broad strokes so that each table can make it their own. 13th Age's Dargon Empire is one of these - lots of hooks and inspiration, but also great amounts of details to be filled in at the table. Of course, that system also has mechanical supports for tying your character into the setting that can also be used to help define it in terms of your PC - their One Unique Thing and their backgrounds.

 

[Deset Gled]

A couple disjointed thoughts:

For most of the history of RPGs, D+D has been the monolith that controls the industry. Since the inception of the TTRPG concept, talking about RPGs has generally been synonymous with talking about D+D. It wasn't until the 4e days that any other company was able to beat them in book sales; even then, the game that beat them (Pathfinder) was based off of D+D v3.5, and most estimates I saw still made D+D the most played game if you summed together all versions of the game.

From that standpoint, licensed games have historically been pretty much the only way for non-D+D rules to get any traction. So, whether or not you like licensed games or not, if you like playing any game other that D+D you probably have a license to thank for the fact that your preferred system exists in anything beyond a self published manifesto.

Second, it's worth noting that many licensed RPGs have actually been quite influential in changing the licensed material. Star Wars in the classic example of this. If you were a real Star Wars nerd in the age between when the original movies had gone out of style and when the prequel trilogy was released, you know that West End Games was extremely critical in defining the Expanded Universe. Books talked about how a TIE was faster in sublight than an X-Wing, but the RPG is what gave us speeds of 10 vs 8. The sourcebooks told the real story of how the Sarlacc worked and how Boba Fett escaped. Overall, WEG was really the biggest force tying the expanding universe together and working to keep it consistent.

I'm certain that RPG licenses have also helped keep other IPs alive through rough times. Firefly, for example, hasn't had a movie since 2005, but still has an active RPG community that helps keep the fandom going. Ghostbusters and Robotech also come to mind. I'm sure there are other cases where RPGs are havens for diehard fans with nowhere else to turn.