What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[Bedrockgames]

I reckon it would be objectively easier to survive if you didn't have those pesky morals and ethics.

I think the show asks interesting questions and produces a good conversation. I don't think I fully agree with this though. People are still people. They still have human needs beyond survival and in order to survive things like trust and love are probably pretty important. Part of what probably helped people survive in the first place was our ability to work together. So I don't think it is as simple as, if civilization resets to zero, so does morality.

 

[Thourne]

There is as well, but it's more steps. The 3 vertical dots on the bar at the top drop down some more options. Do that, highlight the words and then click the strike through. It's easier to just highlight and ctrl-s.

Yup I am blind. I never even noticed the 3 dot option button.
thx again

 

[Imaro]

Fantasy, particularly historical fantasy, is a reflection of things that happened in the past.

Dark Sun is apocalyptic fantasy...slavery is a real part of the setting. Hell, the first module of Dark Sun during 2nd edition was called "Freedom," and was about a slave uprising while witnessing the death of a sorcerer king.

This doesn't really address my post. I'm not arguing that slavery be removed from Dark Sun but appealing to "our past" and learning from it as a justification doesn't really hold much water IMO.

 

[Bedrockgames]

On the Walking Dead it sounds like it is going to be a helluva line to walk in development.
The terrible conduct and horrible situations are apparently part of what makes it compelling viewing but that just dosen't translate well into a good gaming space.

One thing I always thought Walking Dead would be great for, in terms of gameabilty, is it really lends itself to a functioning sandbox that also includes dramatic elements. What I think would be great from a GM perspective is every campaign could be a blank map, where you take the real world and overlay the changes, populate it with bands of survivors and bastions. For example you could take a thirty mile area around where you actually live to start and just start marking up a real map with red pen. There is something very gameable about the way the show is structured around finding supplies that would work, I believe, as well as something like D&D did, in terms of long term, sustainable activities: there is a core activity to it. But I think blending that with drama could also work really well.

 

[Thourne]

I think the show asks interesting questions and produces a good conversation. I don't think I fully agree with this though. People are still people. They still have human needs beyond survival and in order to survive things like trust and love are probably pretty important. Part of what probably helped people survive in the first place was our ability to work together. So I don't think it is as simple as, if civilization resets to zero, so does morality.

I agree with you. Living and surviving aren't necessarily the same thing. Community matters to most.
That said, situations could arise where the more ruthless and least ethical survives at the expense of others and is to what I meant to address.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Actually just initiating a combat encounter could trigger someone with PTSD on the wrong day.
The building layout was accidentally to similar, or something someone said was to close to what someone somewhere said on a bad bad day.
Not really anything has to be hardcore to cause it.
I remember an account from a vet who suffered a panic attack when driving down the road and seeing a plastic bag blowing across it. Instantly triggered them like it was an IED.
The mind is a maze.

Edit: That said yah, none of that makes the table hardcore

Yup.

PTSD happens outside of vets too, as is being increasingly recognised. It's still unclear why some people are traumatized by stuff and others not at all*. I have a close friend who has PTSD-like symptoms triggered by a certain kind of common, innocuous, even positive-seeming imagery (don't ask the details please). They've had breakdowns at work because of it before, and they are a person most people would describe as "tough", "strong" and "not very emotional" and so on, so it's particularly surprising. It's an image which might potentially common up in almost any kind of RPG too, and it's thinking about stuff like this that convinced me that even though we've never used the X-card (well except me lol), we should have the X-card. Because you just don't know about what everyone is carrying with them.


* = For example, At 14 I got chased, punched unconscious, kicked in whilst regaining consciousness, robbed, and had to stagger home through empty streets, and... basically zero trauma beyond vague annoyance at losing my stuff (I had no permanent injuries, thankfully), not even really fear from the same route. I was actually more traumatized by the police detective who interviewed me and got angry that I didn't agree that it was a specific set of black kids (because it was four definitely-white kids and two kids who might have been bi-racial).

 

[Thourne]

One thing I always thought Walking Dead would be great for, in terms of gameabilty, is it really lends itself to a functioning sandbox that also includes dramatic elements. What I think would be great from a GM perspective is every campaign could be a blank map, where you take the real world and overlay the changes, populate it with bands of survivors and bastions. For example you could take a thirty mile area around where you actually live to start and just start marking up a real map with red pen. There is something very gameable about the way the show is structured around finding supplies that would work, I believe, as well as something like D&D did, in terms of long term, sustainable activities: there is a core activity to it. But I think blending that with drama could also work really well.

It sounds like an interesting mix of survival and social expermintation. I think for me it would probably lend itself to a more narrative system.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It sounds like an interesting mix of survival and social expermintation. I think for me it would probably lend itself to a more narrative system.

You can actually do both I think. I have a very old school mindset when it comes to exploration adventure and things like investigations in RPGs, and mostly I tend to run sandboxes or monster of the week. But I also love the game Hillfolk, and I took a wuxia game I had made, which was mostly about wandering the Jianghu and interacting with different characters (there was drama but it was all flowing from character interaction and the tools in the game weren't narrative), and kludged it with Hillfolk. So for combat and procedural portions of the game, we used the wuxia system. For dramatic scenes we used Hillfolk. It worked quite well. I could see something like this working for Walking Dead. Where the finding supplies and exploration portion is largely old school sandbox, but where the dramatic stuff operates more like a hill folk game (which would be interesting because the GM would still prep in a very old school way but the players would effectively have world building input at the dramatic scene portion----which the GM would need to incorporate). The only thing I would say is in order for you to maintain the walking dead feel I do think there would have to be some limitations on what the players can narrate into existence.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It sounds like an interesting mix of survival and social expermintation. I think for me it would probably lend itself to a more narrative system.

I hope not. It sounds very interesting, but I generally can't get behind narrative systems.

 

[Thourne]

You can actually do both I think. I have a very old school mindset when it comes to exploration adventure and things like investigations in RPGs, and mostly I tend to run sandboxes or monster of the week. But I also love the game Hillfolk, and I took a wuxia game I had made, which was mostly about wandering the Jianghu and interacting with different characters (there was drama but it was all flowing from character interaction and the tools in the game weren't narrative), and kludged it with Hillfolk. So for combat and procedural portions of the game, we used the wuxia system. For dramatic scenes we used Hillfolk. It worked quite well. I could see something like this working for Walking Dead. Where the finding supplies and exploration portion is largely old school sandbox, but where the dramatic stuff operates more like a hill folk game (which would be interesting because the GM would still prep in a very old school way but the players would effectively have world building input at the dramatic scene portion----which the GM would need to incorporate). The only thing I would say is in order for you to maintain the walking dead feel I do think there would have to be some limitations on what the players can narrate into existence.

Oh you could absolutely go hardcore management and rigid statblocks etc.
I'd just prefer to use a narrative system if tackling that sorta stuff or probably cortex prime to split the difference, truthfully.
It is why I said "for me", I didn't intend to assert it couldn't be done any other way.

Edit: Interesting mix of game systems by the way. We have done slightly similar things here. The 1st one to pop to mind was years ago we used Rolemaster combat system from Arms Law in a completely different game that was enjoyable but had poor combat.

2nd Edit: You know, I've reread your post like 5 times now and I am really starting to feel like I would want to use Cortex Prime to try a knock off of the setting, maybe replace the zombies with something else (just no one I game with cares for them, myself included). I just think CP could cover all the points your raised well.