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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteelDraco" data-source="post: 383662" data-attributes="member: 359">I'd seperate this into two groups of games - those that need an excellent GM, and those that need both an excellent GM and an excellent group of players.The first group is all about knowledge. Some games require a depth and breadth of understanding that is far above the norm for RPGs, or they just fall flat. This is mostly due to involved worlds and campaign information. I'd place Call of Cthulhu, Blue Planet, and all superhero games in this category. CoC requires you to have a deep understanding of the Mythos before you can even start to get a campaign off the ground. It's a very nice, simple system, but if you can't get the mood of Lovecraft's works going, it's just a bad game of D&D where the characters can't defend themselves. Sure, you can run a one-shot with just a basic grasp of the setting, but to do a solid campaign requires that you've read and retained quite a bit of setting, and that you can convey the mood of that setting to your players. That's a hard thing to do, and not all GMs are up to it.Blue Planet is just... odd. It's a very hard sci-fi game, which is not something most people are used to in gaming. The setting is very interesting and detailed, but I've never really thought of a campaign there that I would want to run for more than about a half-dozen sessions. You could play GEO Marshalls, but that loses flavor when you realize you're just in a flooded Wild West movie. You could play miners, just trying to survive, but is that enough to sustain an interesting campaign? The best one I've thought of was a Native game, where you could do stuff with both the wars between the corps (what are they called in that setting?) and the aborigines. There's a considerable amount of interesting stuff going on in the game, but I'm just not sure how a GM would make a campaign out of it. Furthermore, the rules (first edition, anyway - I haven't looked at the 2nd edition stuff) are REALLY harsh. This fits with the gritty frontier-ness of the game, but I'm not sure it would be that much fun to play. If I were to run a game of Blue Planet, I'd likely use Alternity for the rules.I've never seen or heard of a good supers game where the GM wasn't a comic book nut. You have to be, I think, to do the genre justice. Not only that, but you have to be damn good at pacing and setting a mood, or the game just collapses. I tried running a GURPS Supers game once, and this is what happened to us. It was fun for about a month, but then everything just fell apart.Then there are games that require a good GM AND a good group. I'd put all White Wolf games here, particularly Mage and Werewolf (though I'll admit I've not read Wraith or Changeling). In Mage, you need both players who can use the spontaneous magic rules effectively, and a GM who can control his players. This is really hard to do in a setting where the fabric of reality is about as pliable as saran wrap. For Werewolf, you need players who can get in the mood of the game. I really LOVE Werewolf, but have never seen a game of it that I would actually enjoy. Every game I've seen has just been a bunch of hack-n-slash killing sprees, and that's not what the game is about. I'd run a game of it, but I'm not sure I could do it justice. I want to be in a good Werewolf campaign before I try and run my own, 'cause I don't want to screw it up.All horror-based games require a good GM and a good group, as well. The GM is responsible for setting the mood of the game, but the group is CRITICAL in letting the GM do that. Too many times I've seen horror games ruined by the players not helping the GM create the mood. Crack one joke in the middle of an immersive horror game, and the whole thing just comes crashing down, the tension shattered. If the group isn't into it, even the best GM isn't going to get a good horror game going.Then, of course, there are the games that were never intended to actually be RUN. I'd put quite a few GURPS books in here (off the top of my head, Goblins, Illuminati University, Discworld, and Y2K). Human Occupied Landfill (HoL) and Og (the caveman game) fit here as well. They're fun reads, and that's pretty much it.</blockquote>

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