Thwarted campaign ambitions

[Dannyalcatraz]

Martial arts campaigns can be tricky to launch. I tried to launch one based on movies like Enter the Dragon, Bloodsport etc., where the characters were participating in a competition as the launching point.

Buuuuuuuut we only did the first round of combats, and things got derailed.

 

[Malmuria]

Thinking about it, a Blades in the Dark approach might work well for the setting - they share a lot of common elements, with the urban setting, various factions, well-codified supernatural elements, and prolific criminal activity. Setting it up as a series of largely player-driven jobs to establish their little gang within the setting, and allowing themes and goals to emerge naturally in the course of play based on their interactions with the factions, might be a good direction to go.

The main issue would be that D&D isn't as inherently flexible as BitD when it comes to setting up and running scenarios off-the-cuff.

Well there’s this:

DriveThruRPG.com

www.drivethrurpg.com

I think running planescape as a mega city faction intrigue type game, with some short missions to outer planes, is probably the way to go. But you have to make the factions more goal oriented and prosaic. In my experience everyone ends up hating the harmonium, so maybe a plot around them.

My other goal is to one day turn the infinite staircase into a procedurally generated mega dungeon.

Outer planes are tricky because they are infinite. You can’t reasonably -crawl through those environments. They work if you just need a high fantasy environment where the pcs come in to try to achieve a very specific goal. I think that’s why most published planescape modules were railroads.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I lived in D/FW for years! Why the heck didn't you run anything for me?

Which brings me to my thwarted campaign ambitions- Superhero RPG's. It doesn't matter which one, be it the old FASERIP Marvel Superheroes, Guardians, TORG, GURPS Supers, Aberrant, TRISTAT, BESM, or Champions- any time I sit down the run a superhero game, it falls flat. The players make characters, they're all very creative, and completely mismatched in power level. I try to run a few scenarios, and either one character is overpowered and can deal with just about any threat single handedly, or one character is completely worthless due to no real fault of their own.

Because it turns out, most superhero characters in comics have their own "niche" and there are few threats that everyone can tackle together. Usually what I end up doing is having side objectives, so the team splits up to handle different things, leaving one group twiddling their thumbs while I resolve what the other group is doing (kind of like Shadowrun's "Decker problem").

That’s tricky stuff, too.

I try to minimize the number of side missions or make them interesting (and brief) enough to observe for the other players. ive also resorted to having the non-involved players run NPCs.

And I REALLY try to create challenging group conflicts and other challenges. Doing that can sometimes mean knowing a PC’s strengths and weaknesses almost as well as their players- the vulnerabilities, enemies, whatever. Those can turn the difficulty of a challenge WAY up, and change an encounter a certain PC could handle effortlessly into something he might not be able to handle at all.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Martial arts campaigns can be tricky to launch. I tried to launch one based on movies like Enter the Dragon, Bloodsport etc., where the characters were participating in a competition as the launching point.

I had one player who always wanted a martial arts campaign. No one else in the group was interested. Finally I worked out a martial arts angle for a bait & switch modern campaign, so he at least got the PC of his dreams.

A couple days before the campaign started, David Carridine was found dead in, shall we say, unusual accouterments.

Needless to say, the ribbing from the other players completely ruined that PC.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which brings me to my thwarted campaign ambitions- Superhero RPG's. It doesn't matter which one, be it the old FASERIP Marvel Superheroes, Guardians, TORG, GURPS Supers, Aberrant, TRISTAT, BESM, or Champions- any time I sit down the run a superhero game, it falls flat. The players make characters, they're all very creative, and completely mismatched in power level. I try to run a few scenarios, and either one character is overpowered and can deal with just about any threat single handedly, or one character is completely worthless due to no real fault of their own.

If you don't mind some advice from someone who's probably run more superhero games than anything including fantasy:

There's basically two solutions to this problem if you don't want to try and micromanage every encounter and every event so the power levels match up (which I can't really recommend; I did it with first edition Scion, and while it worked it was hyper-structuralized and felt overly artificial):

1. There are systems who's approach is such it functionally compresses the differences in power level and/or makes them less relevant. I'm not familiar enough with most of them, but the Cortex Marvel was decent in this regard; its hard to find now, but Cortex Prime should be able to recreate it, and if you don't want to do the lifting yourself, there's a current Kickstarter that I suspect might be useful at least on a rules level: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...domitable-rpg?ref=profile_saved_projects_live

2. The alternative, which is my own take, is to recognize medium matters, and a bunch of differences in power level in comics or movies where everyone is effectively being "run" by the same person are a different dynamic than a game where they aren't. So don't do that; set people to a common power metric and get them all approximately there. You're not going to get a perfect match-up, but if people work to cover different ground you should at least have people who can all contribute. Just make sure you don't get overly overlapping types (a Superman and a Captain Marvel/Shazam can work in the same team in an animated show because they rarely show up together and have very different personalities, but you don't really need expies of them in the same team) and try to give them each some individual screen time when possible.

 

[thullgrim]

I would love to run Earthdawn, the system is amazing. But I can't seem to get anyone interested in even trying it...

If you play online let me know. There’s an official game system and resources for Foundry VTT for Earthdawn. FASA continues to are content.

 

[thullgrim]

Also Blades in the Cage is such an awesome combination of ideas. I may have to play around with the that.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Whenever we have a player cancellation, and the campaign is at a point where it doesn't make sense to push on that week without them, I propose running a one-shot. I get shot down every time. Which I understand--some players are more into XP progression than others, and some just hate learning a new system, even a super simple one--but it's a bummer. I'll often explain that the one-shot will have a direct effect on the main campaign. Still no dice. Means I haven't been able to get Mothership, Trophy Dark, Alien, etc. to the table.

 

[Jmarso]

Jurassic Park. I'm a big fan of the books and the original movies, but if I were to run a campaign set in Jurassic Park, there wouldn't be a whole lot of surprises, unless I completely changed the story. Players should also be able to make their own characters, who should be central to the story... so do I scrap most of the original cast, including beloved characters?

Besides, how do the players find themselves trapped in a failing dino park in a believable way, since that plot point is pretty much a given? The park has got to fail, right? Or are they exploring the island for... reasons? If so, why don't they just leave?

The original novel also didn't come with a map. The movie does have a map, but it differs wildly from the descriptions in the book, and is seriously lacking in locations. Some fans have tried to make their own maps, and getting pretty close to accurate. But a hybrid of the two maps would be even better. One that has all the locations from the movie as shown on the big screen, yet is also book accurate. Argh, the horror!

When you really think about it, designing a JP campaign is hard! Which is why I've never done it.

What about Jurassic Planet? An abandoned theme-park world where the players survive some sort of starship crash, and have to make their way over land and sea to the park's control center in the hopes of finding something that will get them off planet, or at least a working transmitter to call for help.

And what if dinosaurs weren't the only thing to contend with in this preserve? What if portions had been seeded with xenomorphs, and the Predators liked to come to play...

You've got some possibilities there. There's also the Land of the Lost angle. Everybody loves them some sleestak served as a side dish of dinosaurs!

 

[aramis erak]

I would love to run Earthdawn, the system is amazing. But I can't seem to get anyone interested in even trying it...

My Earthdawn CD was buggered from the factory.... (but I didn't buy it, so no money of mine wasted).

Wow, I haven't thought about Albedo or Justifiers in years. Speaking of Justifiers, I remember playing a demo of Guardians when I was in or just out of high school, which uses pretty much the same system.

Guardians is also available in PDF... but no nostalgia for it from me, as I'd only heard of it when I saw it on DTRPG a few weeks back.

I've run justifiers. Enjoyed it.

Which brings me to my thwarted campaign ambitions- Superhero RPG's. It doesn't matter which one, be it the old FASERIP Marvel Superheroes, Guardians, TORG, GURPS Supers, Aberrant, TRISTAT, BESM, or Champions- any time I sit down the run a superhero game, it falls flat. The players make characters, they're all very creative, and completely mismatched in power level. I try to run a few scenarios, and either one character is overpowered and can deal with just about any threat single handedly, or one character is completely worthless due to no real fault of their own.

Because it turns out, most superhero characters in comics have their own "niche" and there are few threats that everyone can tackle together. Usually what I end up doing is having side objectives, so the team splits up to handle different things, leaving one group twiddling their thumbs while I resolve what the other group is doing (kind of like Shadowrun's "Decker problem").

It's very disheartening, because I have a love for the genre.

Sentinel Comics does the genre a lot of justice, and avoids the niche problem by not having concrete limits.
Marvel Heroic did likewise before it.
So does Smallville. (Smallville and MHRP are different implementations of Cortex Plus... but both have similar approaches to powers)

I have similar problems with Star Wars, because it's either everyone has Force powers or no one has Force powers- I hate to say "no Force powers", since it's one of the coolest parts of the setting, but they quickly get out of hand. And if one person doesn't play with such powers, they quickly become "the guy that flies the ship" as the Force users dominate every aspect of play.

at least under FFG, it need not be. A single force user or two in a party is not unbalancing, and a non-force used isn't incapable of being useful in an almost all jedi party. My players playtest group for Chronicles of the Gatekeeper included my upper elementary daughter playing R2-QT2... who saved the party from their own mishaps more than once, and was contributory in many ways besides astrogation and repairs. (the added built-in blaster and jump jets were, shall we say, "valued additions to the party"...