All-in-one games and cross-overs

[Herobizkit]

[Maxwell Smart voice]Ah, the old "Starship AI imprisons unconscious heroes in a fantasy virtual reality while it tries to destroy the world" trick.[/Maxwell Smart voice] Good to see it in action...

Seriously: that sounds like a freakin' cool game.

Heh, thanks. I need to spread around xp before giving some to you.

Just to clarify, the computer didn't put the PCs under - their real-life commanding officer did (who was, basically, Deckard Cain from Diablo, but an Angel and ersatz-DM mouthpiece in the Matrix) before he died... oooOoooOOoo...

 

[Wolf1066]

Some great stuff showing up here.

Have been thinking of how to come up with a team of mixed-TL, mixed culture characters - would just love to see someone from 1700s Earth out and about in space with some non-humans and humans of varying tech/skill level. Could well imagine that, while his grasp of certain tech would be sketchy, he'd have survival skills that a some of the higher-tech characters would not. They might be lost without electricity while he's happily scraping flint and steel to light a fire.
Mixing different tech levels could be fun from a perception angle as well - 1100's character surrounded by C20 stuff may well view it as magic. Even if you explain it's machinery, (s)he's going to be in awe that it is so compact and does not require huge water wheels to drive it... Now try to explain electricity and batteries...
1700s people would recognise certain things - watches, spectacles, firearms, TV would be an advanced "Magic Lantern" and it's not a big step to work out that "camera" comes from "camera obscura" - just more advanced. Even electricity would be explainable - the miracle would be what can be done with it. Move up to the late 1600s/early 1900s around the time of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, acceptance of high tech things would be higher - especially amongst those predisposed to reading the budding "Scientifiction" genre. They would readily accept machines that fly through space and would be knowledgeable enough to know why you don't just wander out the airlock mid-flight to have a pipe or cigar...

Though they might be disappointed to discover Mars and Venus aren't as well-populated as ERB imagined (unless, in your game, they are).

Plenty of scope for fun role playing.

Perhaps it's time to dream up a Time-Travel game...

 

[Herobizkit]

I have one word for you, Wolf1066: Stargate.

If you've never watched it, do so at your earliest convenience. It fits exactly what you're looking for.

Also, check out Etherscope for some Victorian steampunk/Shadowrun-esque goodness.

 

[Wolf1066]

Have seen Stargate - quite good. And thanks for the Etherscope link - looks interesting.

Have been thinking of a game wherein the players are all from different time periods - Roman Empire up to C21 - and wandering around a strange place where they keep encountering people from other times. Already come up with some interesting scenarios. All have equipment, clothes and weapons from their period, all speak their own languages but inexplicably understand each other's languages.

Their mission - find out where/when they are, how they got there and why.

Everyone they meet is also wondering how they (themselves) came to be there. Not surprisingly, a number of people are pretty freaked out...

 

[Wolf1066]

Thanks, Ghostwind.

Quite a bit of history for them to encounter - so many different cultures/races/creeds, too.

So many different theories and "only obvious answer"s they could encounter along the way depending on who's talking - "We were transported by Black Magic or Sorcery", "God/Allah, in His wisdom, delivered us here", "Satan maliciously stole us away and put us here", "fell through a worm hole in space-time", "abducted by aliens", "hallucinating", "this is the afterlife - we've all died" and so on.

 

[Ariosto]

I find that the range of game mechanics tends to have more to do with the focus of the game as a game than with the particulars of "genres, time lines, tech levels or whatever".

For instance, old D&D and old RuneQuest dealt with the same basic range of activities in play. The processes with which they treated those activities were different because the games as games had different "feels" -- partly from the difference between D&D's "character class and level" scheme and RQ's "skill ratings" scheme.

Both included rules for missile weapons, so it was easy to go from bows and arrows to firearms. Neither OD&D nor 1st/2nd ed. RQ treated aging, IIRC, so if that became something one wanted to address then it would call for additional rules.

 

[Ariosto]

The "Stargate" premise is reminiscent of Richard Tucholka's Fringeworthy RPG, which I greatly enjoyed. Because people with the titular quality -- the ability to use an interdimensional network of portals -- were literally one in a million or so, there was a great excuse to deploy characters not in the typical "action hero" mold.

 

[Ariosto]

Few would step outside the box and have firearms in a "fantasy" setting - not even single-shot match- or flintlocks - and other high tech things are generally right out.

That may be. I don't know where you get your data. It seems to me rather at odds with trends in genre fiction, though. My impression is that guns and magic mix even more commonly today than back when, e.g., Tunnels & Trolls 5th ed. -- and later Warhammer FRP 1st ed. and then AD&D 2nd. ed. had 'em thrown together.

The past three decades have yielded quite a raft of popular genre fantasy novels, movies and video games departing from the ancient or medieval secondary-world model. Final Fantasy? Recluse? Harry Potter? His Dark Materials? Stardust? Howl's Moving Castle? More romantic vampires than I care to count?

The lovely Castle Falkenstein game comes to mind as well, and I am sure there have been similarly "gaslight and faerie" themed works from other publishers.

 

[dm4hire]

Dragonstar was an interesting fantasy/sci-fi crossover/hybrid. Too bad FFG retired it though I think the writers responsible for it have moved to another company or are doing some independent stuff for it. Still for it's time it was a good attempt though the weapons damage was really off the scale. I think that's the biggest problem with doing something like that; finding the balance between tech and fantasy in terms of damage ratio. However if one would treat them the same as mentioned that might make balancing them easier.

 

[Wolf1066]

@Ariosto: I was thinking more in terms of the fantasy RPGs I've played - D&D and early AD&D - where we did not have access to firearms - bows and crossbows were the only player-portable non-magical ranged weapons. I'm not up with the play on later editions.

I certainly think that there is nothing in the fantasy genre at large that precludes the use of firearms but when I was playing [A]D&D, they weren't "Middle Earth" enough for the GMs I encountered and they weren't, AFAIK, in the manuals' equipment lists.

I've got a copy of the Arcanum of Steamworks and Magick Obscura computer game that does a dandy job of mixing firearms, dirigibles and small powered aircraft etc with fantasy creatures and magic. But, as I said, my experience of fantasy RPGs was that only bows were "kosher".