What Do You Want to See in the New John Carter Roleplaying Game?

CoreyHaim8myDog · Jul 19, 2015

I'm one of the developers at Mōdiphiüs, and we want your input on John Carter.

What would like to see in the game?

What areas of Barsoom are you most interested in?

What mysteries (if any) do you want answered or addressed?

Are you more interested in playing John Carter and canon heroes, or making your own PCs?

Please offer any ideas you want to see as a player or a GM. We want everything to be faithful to Burroughs, but that does not exclude new ideas. Burroughs created a weird, wonderful dying world that hasn't seen an official game since 1978.

What do you want that game to look like?

Thanks for your input!

Waller · Jul 19, 2015

A sense that the designers have some idea of what type of game they want to make?

Umbran · Jul 20, 2015

CoreyHaim8myDog said:
Are you more interested in playing John Carter and canon heroes, or making your own PCs?

While playing someone else's character may be a thing in videogames, tabletop is full of people who want to make their own stories. I don't doubt that doing a weak job on character generation has doomed a game or two (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, as an example).

fuindordm · Jul 20, 2015

I love Barsoom but the books are a bit sparse on detail. This is actually a good thing, since it leaves plenty of room for you and individual DMs to add their own bizarre ideas.

Frankly, I'm unlikely to buy such a book for play, but if it has lots of great art and high production values then I might splurge because I enjoy the setting.

As for the content:

Several different races, with an effort to balance Earthlings like John Carter with super-strength against the local races. That's a big challenge already. Carter killed a Thark outright with his fist! But on the other hand, the super-strength could easily be toned down to reasonable levels by invoking Science.

Few classes--a fighter, a skill user, a technologist, and a psychic would be enough, if each one has several choice points for the player.

Lots of technology interpreted into game rules, and a mini-game supporting interaction with the tech (repair, upgrade, sabotage, invent).

Lots of monsters.

Mature themes and romanticism. Barsoom is larger than life, brutal, glorious, honorable, desolate, and tragic.

Extrapolation--the martians knew about and perhaps colonized other planets in the distant past. Allow sword-and-planet to encompass other planets in the solar system, and the large moons of Saturn and Jupiter are good candidates for low-gravity martians. Barsoom has lots of tech and creatures never mentioned in the book. It has millions of years of its own history, and you probably can't turn over a rock without finding evidence of ancient civilizations. It has hundreds of enclaves and city-states, not just Helium, with their own eccentricities and particularities.

In short, get creative. Dream a Barsoom vaster than the one in the books. Make the setting an attractive one for over-the-top, swashbuckling, sword-and-planet adventure.

Neonchameleon · Jul 20, 2015

Simple answer for any licensed RPG: The official characters (i.e. John Carter) should be reasonably achievable PCs under the rules and not have special snowflake abilities that you can't do with a starting PC. Making them example PCs works - giving them special snowflake powers really doesn't.

Umbran · Jul 20, 2015

Neonchameleon said:
Simple answer for any licensed RPG: The official characters (i.e. John Carter) should be reasonably achievable PCs under the rules and not have special snowflake abilities that you can't do with a starting PC. Making them example PCs works - giving them special snowflake powers really doesn't.

I'd say that the official characters must be achievable under the rules... but you don't have to be able to do it with a *starting* PC.

A great deal of fiction (especially older stuff, like John Carter stories) *don't* have much power increase over the course of the novels - older serializations often had the main character be much the same for extended periods of their time. If you have that power level achieved with a starting character, but you have character power growth like most modern games, you soon blow the roof off the power seen in the original property.

Hand of Evil · Jul 20, 2015

1) The Setting
2) The Races - playable and non-playable
3) The Air Ships - which means air to air combat, air to ground and ground to air and chase rules
4) Good rules system that reflects pulp action
5) Compatibility to any other ERB setting

Neonchameleon · Jul 21, 2015

Umbran said:
I'd say that the official characters must be achievable under the rules... but you don't have to be able to do it with a *starting* PC.

Agreed. That's why I said "Reasonably achievable". Especially in the case of translating from a solo star to a team of PCs.

A great deal of fiction (especially older stuff, like John Carter stories) *don't* have much power increase over the course of the novels - older serializations often had the main character be much the same for extended periods of their time. If you have that power level achieved with a starting character, but you have character power growth like most modern games, you soon blow the roof off the power seen in the original property.

I'm going to disagree here. Pretty much the only game with character power growth the way you indicate is D&D where character power doubles every two to four levels (depending on class and edition).

JeffB · Jul 21, 2015

A different rules system.

Umbran · Jul 21, 2015

Neonchameleon said:
I'm going to disagree here. Pretty much the only game with character power growth the way you indicate is D&D where character power doubles every two to four levels (depending on class and edition).

Well, I disagree with your disagreement.

D&D has a major increase in character power over time. So do most other d20 games, including Pathfinder, by extension. So do most of the retroclones, by extension as well. So does every game ever produced under the White Wolf banner. So does classic Deadlands, Earthdawn and WEG's d6 Star Wars. So has every edition of Shadowrun. So does GURPS.

That's *dozens* of games, just off the top of my head. Many of them very popular. So, no, hot "pretty much the only".