HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
I’ve been playing CyberPunk since the beginnings of time itself, it feels. And it was because of the R. Talsorian Games name on the book that I bought Dream Park. I had never (and still haven’t) read either of the Dream Park novels, but the concept intrigued me.
Dream Park is in part a meta-RPG – and the first meta-RPG I had yet experienced. The players make characters who are in turn going to a huge live-action RPG environment called the Dream Park. There, their characters use the points they’ve accumulated from game to game to… make characters that they will play in an RPG run by a GM who is in turn run by the GM. Effectively, the core of the game is a simple point-buy system that works across all genres – and since the game is modeled after a game instead of after real life, the point-buy system maintains a strong semblance of balance between cyber-enhanced high-tech assassins, superheroes of 2044, and medieval knights. The point-buy system takes up huge amounts of the book actually, as it has to provide stats for everything from pre-historic to post-futuristic melee and ranged weapons and armor, as well as cybernetics, magic spells, psionics, magic items, and so on.
The game book also included a variety of sample characters from a variety of genres – pirates, ninjas, knights, cyberassassins, wizards, clerics, thieves, super heroes, and so on. All printed on little perforated cards in the back of the book that of course get used and lost shortly after buying it. But they do provide a nice starting point for creating iconic characters.
As players go from game to game, they gain XP in the form of points that they can spend on their characters. Events (games) are rated based on the point values of characters allowed, and typically also include limitations of technology, magic, psionics, etc, based on the setting in question.
One interesting element of this level of meta-gaming is that the GM is encouraged to create a set of four or so in-game GMs to use, and to give each their own personality – for example, GM X really has a thing for pirates and tends to use buried treasure a lot, while GM Y is known for genre-bending and GM Z is really big on mutants. This allows the players to get a hint about what the next session will be like just from the name of the session and the GM running it. A good campaign of Dream Park will go one step beyond that and also incorporate GM-Player rivalries and other events outside of the Dream Park environment into the Dream Park games.
I am a fan of Larry Niven (well, at least of his Known Space setting and the Ringworld RPG set there), so I find it somewhat odd that I have never actually gotten around to reading any of the three the Dream Park novels (for that matter, it was only while writing this article that I discovered there are three novels in the set, I thought there were only two). According to the RPG, the novels focus on meta-game content just as much as the actual game at hand – it is more about revenge trips between DMs and players and some real-world politics going on outside the Dream Park than about the adventures taking place in the Dream Park. The RPG book alludes to doing this as an advanced story telling technique to improve the immersion in the game, but because my own games have been so short, we’ve never had the opportunity to do so.
The core system of the game is a very simple Stat + Skill + d6 vs Difficulty system (basically the same system as used in the other Interlock games, with a d6 as the die). Since you can change your character’s stats from session to session (RADICALLY change them no less – last week I was a frail old wizard, this week I’m going to be a high tech marine corps sergeant in power armor, next week I’m planning on playing a ninja pirate shark with a laser on his head), the system has to remain simple enough to handle these major changes without confusing the actual players of the game.
The real charm of the game is it ends up being an extended series of one-shot adventures, with a few serial adventures thrown in when you really want them (just tell the players tomorrow’s event in their category is “Quest for the Marshmallow Golem, Part 2” or whatever). In effect, you can use whatever game world you want, whatever adventure you want, and feel free to also go on a genre-bending spree. Except, of course, that you aren’t encouraged to kill off half the characters in a game, like you are in a standard one-shot game.
I’ve run Dream Park on several occasions, but never managed to get anyone interested in running it for me, or in playing an extended campaign of it. Dream Park is the origin of my “Tank Girl 1066” D&D setting – a D&D campaign set in medieval Europe with magical chariots that are “just like the tardis - small on the outside, full of crap on the inside”, orcs that act like mutant kangaroos, autoloading crossbows, and bizarre steam-powered cybernetics. For me, Dream Park was all about genre-bending – the initial sample adventure in the book is a Cyberpunk-era game that is actually a classic Pirate Gold adventure, with the bonus of it all happening in a small version of the islands from Jurassic Park.
In the end, I only ever ran five games of Dream Park – and none were huge successes. For the first game, I re-designed the armor and weapon rules & tables in order to bring random damage and protection back into the game instead of set damage quantities for each weapon vs armor result, and provided cheat sheets that I printed out for designing characters with the point values of everything in the game. However, none of the games really caught. I don’t think my players were really interested in either the meta-game aspect of the game, nor the genre-bending that the game encouraged in me.
It is only in response to these Game-A-Day posts of mine that I’ve even thought of Dream Park. In two different venues I’ve had people talk about how much they enjoy the simple game mechanics and well constructed point-buy system of character creation in Dream Park, and these have encouraged me to think back on this old game again.
In fact, it reminds me that Dextra bought me a mint copy of the game in early 2000 from the local used book store for $3. I should go dig it out and read it again.
Dream Park is in part a meta-RPG – and the first meta-RPG I had yet experienced. The players make characters who are in turn going to a huge live-action RPG environment called the Dream Park. There, their characters use the points they’ve accumulated from game to game to… make characters that they will play in an RPG run by a GM who is in turn run by the GM. Effectively, the core of the game is a simple point-buy system that works across all genres – and since the game is modeled after a game instead of after real life, the point-buy system maintains a strong semblance of balance between cyber-enhanced high-tech assassins, superheroes of 2044, and medieval knights. The point-buy system takes up huge amounts of the book actually, as it has to provide stats for everything from pre-historic to post-futuristic melee and ranged weapons and armor, as well as cybernetics, magic spells, psionics, magic items, and so on.
The game book also included a variety of sample characters from a variety of genres – pirates, ninjas, knights, cyberassassins, wizards, clerics, thieves, super heroes, and so on. All printed on little perforated cards in the back of the book that of course get used and lost shortly after buying it. But they do provide a nice starting point for creating iconic characters.
As players go from game to game, they gain XP in the form of points that they can spend on their characters. Events (games) are rated based on the point values of characters allowed, and typically also include limitations of technology, magic, psionics, etc, based on the setting in question.
One interesting element of this level of meta-gaming is that the GM is encouraged to create a set of four or so in-game GMs to use, and to give each their own personality – for example, GM X really has a thing for pirates and tends to use buried treasure a lot, while GM Y is known for genre-bending and GM Z is really big on mutants. This allows the players to get a hint about what the next session will be like just from the name of the session and the GM running it. A good campaign of Dream Park will go one step beyond that and also incorporate GM-Player rivalries and other events outside of the Dream Park environment into the Dream Park games.
I am a fan of Larry Niven (well, at least of his Known Space setting and the Ringworld RPG set there), so I find it somewhat odd that I have never actually gotten around to reading any of the three the Dream Park novels (for that matter, it was only while writing this article that I discovered there are three novels in the set, I thought there were only two). According to the RPG, the novels focus on meta-game content just as much as the actual game at hand – it is more about revenge trips between DMs and players and some real-world politics going on outside the Dream Park than about the adventures taking place in the Dream Park. The RPG book alludes to doing this as an advanced story telling technique to improve the immersion in the game, but because my own games have been so short, we’ve never had the opportunity to do so.
The core system of the game is a very simple Stat + Skill + d6 vs Difficulty system (basically the same system as used in the other Interlock games, with a d6 as the die). Since you can change your character’s stats from session to session (RADICALLY change them no less – last week I was a frail old wizard, this week I’m going to be a high tech marine corps sergeant in power armor, next week I’m planning on playing a ninja pirate shark with a laser on his head), the system has to remain simple enough to handle these major changes without confusing the actual players of the game.
The real charm of the game is it ends up being an extended series of one-shot adventures, with a few serial adventures thrown in when you really want them (just tell the players tomorrow’s event in their category is “Quest for the Marshmallow Golem, Part 2” or whatever). In effect, you can use whatever game world you want, whatever adventure you want, and feel free to also go on a genre-bending spree. Except, of course, that you aren’t encouraged to kill off half the characters in a game, like you are in a standard one-shot game.
I’ve run Dream Park on several occasions, but never managed to get anyone interested in running it for me, or in playing an extended campaign of it. Dream Park is the origin of my “Tank Girl 1066” D&D setting – a D&D campaign set in medieval Europe with magical chariots that are “just like the tardis - small on the outside, full of crap on the inside”, orcs that act like mutant kangaroos, autoloading crossbows, and bizarre steam-powered cybernetics. For me, Dream Park was all about genre-bending – the initial sample adventure in the book is a Cyberpunk-era game that is actually a classic Pirate Gold adventure, with the bonus of it all happening in a small version of the islands from Jurassic Park.
In the end, I only ever ran five games of Dream Park – and none were huge successes. For the first game, I re-designed the armor and weapon rules & tables in order to bring random damage and protection back into the game instead of set damage quantities for each weapon vs armor result, and provided cheat sheets that I printed out for designing characters with the point values of everything in the game. However, none of the games really caught. I don’t think my players were really interested in either the meta-game aspect of the game, nor the genre-bending that the game encouraged in me.
It is only in response to these Game-A-Day posts of mine that I’ve even thought of Dream Park. In two different venues I’ve had people talk about how much they enjoy the simple game mechanics and well constructed point-buy system of character creation in Dream Park, and these have encouraged me to think back on this old game again.
In fact, it reminds me that Dextra bought me a mint copy of the game in early 2000 from the local used book store for $3. I should go dig it out and read it again.
