Finding Time to Get LOST

[RangerWickett]

I posted this on my blog, but I thought the folks here would be interested.


Who here watched LOST? Who here gave up watching because it seemed like the writers had no idea what the answer to their mystery was, and they refused to have the characters investigate? Well, I stuck it out to the end, and despite my frustrations I still enjoyed the show. But I had an ulterior motive.

About four years ago, my good friend R and I were complaining about . . . I dunno, probably about how even after getting clear proof that weird stuff was going on, the survivors of the crash never went to explore. Clearly they didn't have any gamers among them, who would see mystery and think, "Ah ha! A story hook! I should go investigate that."

So we concocted a plan. Once the show was over and we knew the answers to all the mysteries, I'd run a role-playing game for four of my friends who had never watched the show. They'd play some of the characters from the show, and have the same backstories and hooks, but they'd decide what was an effective and reasonable way to get off the island. I got my friends interested, had them promise not to watch the show, made a map and timeline and detailed notes for myself and then finally, three weeks ago, I ran the first session.

Since they politely declined to let me record the sessions and post them as videos, I'm just going to provide write-ups. Warning. I'm going to spoil stuff like crazy, because the huge appeal of this to me is to see stuff go wildly off the path that was set by the series. For instance, by the end of the second session (basically, their 'episode two'), they'd stumbled upon stuff that didn't come up in the series until Season Three.

Oh, and Paulo is a bad-ass.

If folks are interested, I'll post more details.

 

[howandwhy99]

Yeah, definitely post more details. RPG mystery solving is a driving force for most RPGers / gamers. Plus, I never watched LOST, so you won't be ruining anything for me.

Also, I was under the impression the show didn't really reveal the core elements of its mysteries. That the writers were trying to make it all up as they went along, which is always difficult when the viewers attracted tend to have good memories. Did they reveal everything in the end?

 

[RangerWickett]

Yeah, definitely post more details. RPG mystery solving is a driving force for most RPGers / gamers. Plus, I never watched LOST, so you won't be ruining anything for me.

Also, I was under the impression the show didn't really reveal the core elements of its mysteries. That the writers were trying to make it all up as they went along, which is always difficult when the viewers attracted tend to have good memories. Did they reveal everything in the end?

They either revealed explicitly or gave enough info to have a solid guess for pretty much everything. There were some things where the answer obviously was, "The writers had no idea," but a surprisingly large number of mysteries were well-planned, if not necessarily well-paced.

 

[RangerWickett]

First things first, the document I sent to the players. I gave them a character selection screen like for a fighting game (which is also a handy hand-out so they can keep track of all the NPCs floating around). The rest of the document are just quick-play rules adapted from Gamma World.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I've been curious about this game for what seems like years! About time you started.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

I didn't watch it at first. But everyone kept saying how great it was, so when it went into reruns I gave it a try. After watching about half of the 2 hour first episode I decided that the writers were idiots and never watched another minute of it. But maybe your take on it might be interesting...

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Oh, THIS I gotta hear. Despite occasional issues with the show I was hopelessly hooked from the outset. How the show was resolved was NOT what I would have done, but then that's because they were foolish enough NOT to consult me so I could straighten out their errors before they made them. AFAIK comments by the producers all but directly contradicted statements they made fairly early on about how it would ultimately end - in a decidedly "Luke, what I told you was true from a certain point of view," kind of way. They said they knew exactly where they were going with it but as the ending came closer it was clear that they were scrambling to get it to make an acceptible amount of sense.

The biggest, most irritating nitpicks my friends always had with the show was their unbelievable lack of curiosity about the island and strange events. Worst of all was the extraordinary ability of characters to keep the most amazing information to themselves without a shred of motivation to do so. The show was not about mere survival, but about "ordinary people" supposedly dealing with strange events and that made it all the more frustrating for some people.

I would love to hear how an uncontrolled group of "ordinary people" choose to deal with those strange events, unlike the characters on the show who repeatedly chose to ignore the strange and unsual.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

Much of the appeal of Lost for me was that the show had mysteries for the viewer to solve as well as mysteries for the characters to solve. I think one of the most enticing elements of the first season (and really throughout the series) was the use of flashbacks to unveil the backgrounds of these unknown characters as well as to seed clues about the current plot for the viewer to pick up on. Was that anything you tried to emulate for your game? Or was the purpose of the game to simply investigate how unscripted characters would react to the island?

Out of curiosity, how did you choose which characters would be NPCs and which would be potential PCs? I assume the "unavailable" characters were chosen as NPCs because they had specific roles/actions in the series. But most of the potential PC characters similarly had specific roles/actions in the series. If Jack the PC didn't do what Jack on TV did it could cause your games' plot to deviate from the series' plot as much as if someone playing Claire didn't do what Claire on TV did.

 

[CuRoi]

The biggest, most irritating nitpicks my friends always had with the show was their unbelievable lack of curiosity about the island and strange events.

Which is one very big reason why I couldn't stand watching the show. Not only did they have an unbelieveable lack of curiousity, it was a garauntee that if something came up which could resolve a plot item or advance the "island" story in a meaningful way, they'd utterly, completely ignore it. It was contrived at best.

I watched a few episodes, told my wife how the series would end (i.e. she would never get any substantive answers to any of the stuff they kept dredging up) and didn't watch again until the finale. I then forced myself to watch what amounted to 2 hours of commercials, interspersed with a Lost finale just so I could say "see told you so."

We've got a comfortable couch...

I agree though, if it weren't for the infuriating writing/plot, the idea/setting could make for a fun RPG idea. I think its a fabulous plan and look forward to reading how things will go. Put a couple of RPG minded folks on the island and they probably figure out the "truth" by session 5. If you are sticking with the same conclusion as the series, I'd be curious how long before they say "oh I get it, we're done."

Besides, be careful. If I had a DM that ran a game like the writers for Lost, I'd probably strangle him.

 

[Is_907]

I am very intrigued by this concept. I've often schemed up a game based on a tv show or film or book... but never have the guts to run it.

And I enjoyed Lost. At least, until the last two seasons. I stuck it out just to see what would happen and was underwhelmed by the finale, of course.


So yeah, post your summaries/reviews! I'm very interested.