Gamma World: Did it have a "Core Story"?

[AdmundfortGeographer]

There's a thread going on now in the D20 Forum about Gamma World that got me to wonder something about the setting.

I understand that it has morphed through about 10 iterations. I asked which version of the setting Omega World was over on the thread and I got this response: "Metamorphosis Alpha, GW1, GW2, GW3, GW4, MA to Omega, GW5, OW, MA3 and GW6, Omega World is 8th."

So there has been many iterations of the setting that I was curious if there was a specific Core Story (as Mike Mearls recent post spoke brought the concept to greater publicity). Not just one that has transcended every iteration, but I was curious if any iteration of GW had a Core Story. All I know about Gamma World is that it is post-apocalypse, has mutants.

If you haven't read Mike's Core Story post, here it is to better familiarize yourself with what I have in question.

Or Is Gamma World pretty much the same as D&D with a different era?

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Or Is Gamma World pretty much the same as D&D with a different era?

Yeah, pretty much.

Metamorphis Alpha had more of a story though. It took place on a gigantic spaceship, IIRC, so you were on your way to somewhere.

 

[Henry]

Its story has morphed between two or three stories over the years. The first story was similar to D&D's: "Explore once-familar places that are now exotic, meet cool beings, kill them, and take their stuff to become the biggest badass on the block."

Later, it became, "civilzation is going to destroy itself if it doesn't change present course. You explore it, become powerful, and find ways to restore it."

Still later, it became, "explore the familar from an unfamilar perspective. Don't worry about becoming the biggest on the block, someone's always bigger."

Finally, it more recently with Omega World and SSS's Gamma World, went more back tot he original premise, which in my opinion is its most fun.

 

[Dark Psion]

Third Edition Gamma World (the one with the colorful chart) did have a series of adventures that was designed to introduce the Ancients and was leading to a finding a space ship and to an adventure in space.

Alpha Factor: Find a lost vault of the ancients
Beta Principle: Confront an AI in a futristic city.
Delta Fragment: Meet Nort and Scar (see cover above) and includes city rules.
Gamma Base: Launch site for a space shuttle.
Epsilon Cyborg: Track down some missing robots and new cyborg rules.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Henry, that's perfect, phrased just like Mike's column describes. It makes me wonder if the shifting "core story" could be reasoned as a contributor to growing its fan base years ago, and a contributor to the split in the fan base that prefers different core stories not being large enough to make any re-incarnation stay around long...

I wonder if it would be possible to maintain all three core stories simultaneously effectively. Appease all segments of the fanbase, so to speak... Or might that be an undertaking to difficult and unprecendented in the industry?

 

[mmadsen]

If you haven't read Mike's Core Story post, here it is to better familiarize yourself with what I have in question.

Mike Mearls actually made that same point years earlier in Ryan Dancey's forum at GamingReport.com, in a thread on Call of Cthulhu d20, and I think his post there is extremely apropos (particularly when I think of my own early Gamma World experience):

I see this as a problem with game design in general, not one confined to d20 CoC. Most RPGs are not designed in a particularly user friendly manner.

Way back in the early 90s, I received my first exposure to non-D&D/TSR RPGs via White Wolf magazine. After reading over articles on Warhammer FRP, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, Ars Magica, and Millenium's End, I made an effort to spend my measly weekly RPG budget on new games. After a few weeks going without new BattleTech or D&D miniatures, all 5 of those titles were on my bookshelf. Of them all, we played CoC to a great extent, used WFRP material in our D&D games, and never really used the others. I think we played SR a few times, but the "adventures" were really nothing more than creating characters and running extended combats. Our characters would do things like blow up a nightclub full of monsters or engage in a running battle with a biker gang, but we never actually played through anything comparable with our CoC and AD&D games.

Ars Magica looked really neat. The magic system was interesting, and the troupe style play was intriguing. Shadowrun's background was fascinating, and though the rules were confusing we managed to puzzle them out enough to run simple battles. Millenium's End had this funky template overlay hit location system. It used overhead transparencies to drop a hit table over a hit location template. Warhammer is a great fusion of CoC and D&D, with a great background and very easy to learn rules.

But none of that mattered.

Why?

Simple: I and the other primary GM amongst my friends had no idea what the heck we were supposed to DO with those games.

I clearly remember spending a week poring over SR, learning the rules, making up characters, and then sitting back on a Thursday evening and trying hard as hell to come up with an idea for an adventure that weekend.

I couldn't think of one. I had no idea HOW I was supposed to use all this stuff.

Same thing happened with Ars Magica.

And Millenium's End.

And Warhammer.

When it came time to make up an adventure or plan a short campaign, I didn't have clue one about what I was supposed to do.

Except with Cthulhu. Reading the rules and devouring a paperback of HPL's stories didn't help me at all, but the adventures in the back of the book made it crystal clear what we were supposed to do with the game. The classic haunted house scenario laid the entire game down in 4 pages: characters hear about weird events, go to investigate, uncover bizarre horrors, possibly go insane, gain sanity if they "win".

I ran that adventure, along with the others in the book, a couple from White Wolf magazine, and then ran out and bought two more adventure collections while making up a bunch of my own. We were hooked.

Contrast that with SR 1st edition. The sample "adventure" is basically a firefight in a convenience store. The characters go into the store, some thugs show up to rob it, and a fight breaks out. It has *nothing* to do with the archetypal Shadowrun adventure. In fact, it blatant discusses running the sample adventure between other adventures, and I distinctly remember literally slamming the book shut in frustration because I had no idea how to build the adventures that were supposed to bookend the sample "scenario."

The problem with RPGs, IMHO, is that they all have a stereotypical adventure structure buried within them, but precious few take the time to actually spell out that structure. The old red box D&D basic set from 1983 did a good job with that. It basically gave you a sample stocked dungeon and a second dungeon map and said "fill this with monsters." CoC did that, too, though more by example with the half-dozen example scenarios it includes.

Wampire is successful in this regard, too. It draws on the Anne Rice novels and with all that talk of theme, symbolism, and other literary devices it's easy for a new GM to figure out what he has to do to get his game going. The fiction snippets in the book make it pretty obvious what vampires do.

I think the key to building a successful RPG doesn't begin with the rules or setting. I think it begins with creating an easily understood, highly customizable, and very flexible core scenario that a GM can duplicate again and again. The setting and rules are all window dressing on top of that core scenario.

As for d20 CoC, it's an extremely well-done book. I plan on running a fantasy version of it after my Warhammer FRP and Dragonstar mini-campaigns wrap up. I agree with Ryan that it's a top notch product, but I really wish it had followed the Chaosim CoC example and included 3 or 4 short adventures.​

 

[mearls]

Wow! That post is a blast from the past. Thanks a ton for digging it up. I've had plans to archive a bunch of my essays and forum posts on my web site. That's one I would've overlooked.

It's interesting to look at Gamma World in light of my comments about Shadowrun. My first version of Gamma World was 3rd edition. I had a very similar experience with that game as I did with SR - I tried to create "adventures" that mimicked the weird solo adventure booklet that came with that set.

It seems to me that Gamma World's core story is essentially the same as D&D's - characters meet up, go into ruins to fight cyborgs, recover possible dangerous artifacts, and return to town. Next week, they do it all over again.

The interesting thing is that you can easily design a Gamma World that handles both the serious and wahoo sides of things. A lot of designers get so caught up in the surface elements of a game - the art, the setting - that they forget that gamers are smart enough to bend games into what they want.

If I had a chance to design Gamma World d20, I'd draw on D&D's CR and treasure by level system to make the game work. Each artifact would have a level rating that would work a lot like a D&D magic item's GP value - it serves as a guide to help you place an appropriate balanced treasure. Same with CR - you can create all these weird mutants, but if the CRs are right the GM will only use them when the PCs are ready for them.

The real key is for a whacky, random game, you can just tell the GM to ignore those guidelines. If anything, you encourage a wildly over the top game by showing the GM which monsters and items are really powerful and easy to toss into the game to shake things up.

The CR and treasure by level systems are, IMO, continually ignored by most publishers and designers. They are very handy tools that you can use to regulate the flow of resources to the PCs, regardless of the game. In D&D, it might be magic items. In an SF game, super high tech weapons. In cyberpunk, advanced cybernetics, and so on.

In a properly designed d20 system, there's no such thing as an item that's too powerful. Such an item (or feat, or spell) is simply undercosted.

(How's that for a tangent!)

 

[mmadsen]

Wow! That post is a blast from the past. Thanks a ton for digging it up.

You're very welcome. It's an essay that really hit home for me.

It seems to me that Gamma World's core story is essentially the same as D&D's - characters meet up, go into ruins to fight cyborgs, recover possible dangerous artifacts, and return to town. Next week, they do it all over again.

Agreed -- only that wasn't at all clear to me as a kid, when I got the first(?) edition of Gamma World, and I certainly didn't know how to design an appropriate "dungeon" for that setting.

The real key is for a whacky, random game, you can just tell the GM to ignore those guidelines.

That's a good general game-design rule: provide guidelines and examples for the newbie; the experts can easily ignore them.

In a properly designed d20 system, there's no such thing as an item that's too powerful. Such an item (or feat, or spell) is simply undercosted.

True of any system, really.

 

[Vigilance]

It seems to me that Gamma World's core story is essentially the same as D&D's - characters meet up, go into ruins to fight cyborgs, recover possible dangerous artifacts, and return to town. Next week, they do it all over again.

Agreed.

I have always contended that post-apoc is a subgenre of Fantasy (at least the way it works in games).

Conan explored a lot of ruins of a once great, long dead society and occasionally found an artifact to bring back and sell or use.

If you replace the name Conan with "Sere the mutant wanderer" you have GW 1st edition.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

(How's that for a tangent!)

Seeing how the whole "core story" thing is easily tangentiable (is that new word?) its fully appropriate. Because I had a nagging wonder over how to do a Post-Apocalypse campaign well. I guess in my mind, "Well" is mostly a subconscious idea for coming away with a sense of "that was fun and worth doing again."

I've seen enough movies, read enough books, played Fallout 1 and 2 enough that I have a strong grasp over what fits the genre... I hope . But translating that into a role-playing game that works "well" is another thing. And looking back at post apocalypse RPGs that have existed is exactly why I was asking about Gamma World. It's had staying power in the minds of gamers who have played it and I was wondering why hoping to learn something that I could adopt into running my own successful post apocalypse. And no, I don't want to run in the Gamma World setting, I have my own I'd prefer which mostly breaks down to something closer to Darwin's World II, Fallout, Road Warrior.

So I guess it comes down to translating familiar elements of D&D into a post-apocalypse campaign. Home base and how they come together, adventuring, dungeons, treasure and doing it all over again next week... all in a way that doesn't lose the specialness of the genre... I dunno. But I'm certainly going to do some more thinking on how to get it right before I take the leap into running it.

Anyone else have some more thoughts on anything about this?