Licensed Role-Playing Games: Threat Or Menace?

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Let's just get the controversial statement out of the way: I'm not a fan of licensed settings in role-playing games. Today's column is rolling out of a Skype conversation that I had with a friend the other day. There's a lot of cool RPGs out there that are based upon cool movies, comic books, novels and cartoons. None of them are bad, and I'm not trying to call out licensed games or anything, but this column is going to be an exploration of different tastes and approaches to gaming. I know, something that I never do.

Before we get too far into things, let me just say that the headline for this article is a joke. In 1980 something amazing happened to role-playing games: the first licensed RPG was published. Just in case you don't know, that was the Dallas role-playing game from SPI. Yes, the first ever licensed role-playing game was based on the television show Dallas. I'm sure that the people at SPI thought that it was an excellent idea, I mean millions of people were watching the show. Millions. I was one of the 83 million people who were watching the episode of Dallas where JR was shot. I'm sure if I had known about the Dallas game I would have given it a try, but I also watched the reboot of the show a couple of years ago so I am a glutton for punishment.

But this opened the doors to every other licensed RPG over the years. From Rocky And Bullwinkle to The Dresden Files and from Masters of the Universe to Doctor Who, every licensed game out on the market has been sown from the seeds strewn by the Dallas game. There have been some really great games to come from those seeds, and a few mediocre ones but that is the breaks. The D6 System from West End Games was brought to us because of a number of licensed role-playing games and became a game of its own based on the system's strengths.

Now that I have you past the jump I am going to admit that this piece isn't just going to be about licensed games. I'm going to talk a bit about games with strong settings to them as well, but first a confession. I have never played an RPG in any of the following settings:

• Star Wars
• Star Trek
• Game of Thrones
• The Dresden File

The reasons that I haven't played in any of those settings are different, because a couple of them are settings that I'm not a fan of and wouldn't play in because of that. No, I'm not going to say which ones I don't like. But, for a variety of reasons, these represent some of the reasons why I don't play in licensed games. One of the biggest reasons that I don't play them is because the cool stuff has already been done in the primary media (and, really, how many times do we need to blow up the Death Star anyway?) and I think that the strategy of playing around the edges of the setting doesn't have as much of an appeal.

When I do play in an established, licensed, setting I will play around the edges of things. I've run a Doctor Who game where the players were a timelost group of UNIT soldiers and researchers trying to find a way home again. For some reason early on the group decided that they had to avoid the Doctor (I don't remember the reason the players came up with, but it was a suggestion of the group) so they would bounce around in a few episodes of the show, and a couple of novels, while trying to not be noticed by the actual characters of the show.

I also extend this to a number of the "stronger" settings that have developed out of role-playing games, too. The Forgotten Realms. Glorantha. Warhammer 40K. Now, I've never played in The Forgotten Realms, but all three of those settings have one thing in common, they have taken on a size and life of their own. They have been developed through their games, and in a couple of case other media as well, until they have become as involved as many licensed settings. This weight can make them as difficult to use as licensed settings, because their development has lead to what can be an overwhelming amount of detail over the years. After "What do I do that the media's characters didn't already do?" the next mark against some settings can be that there is so much detail that it can be overwhelming. How do you deal with that? Sometimes you have to just focus into a tiny part of the setting and work from there.

As a GM I'll say that there are settings that scare the bejeezus out of me because of the amount of detail involved in them. I'm not one to commit myself to the amount of detail that you get from a lot of members of fandoms, which sometimes means that what I think is a good amount of setting knowledge ("Yeah, I've seen all of the Star Wars movies in the theaters.") ends up only being the tip of the iceberg. What I consider to be knowledgeable about the setting and what someone who has read a lot of novels and tie-ins and comics and watched a bunch of television shows considers to be knowledgeable tend to be different things. This can sometimes lead to friction within a group when there are two dramatically different sets of expectations that can clash with each other. Being open about what a campaign based on a pre-made setting will and won't contain is a good starting point for trying to alleviate those frictions. This is why a campaign pitch of "We're going to be playing in the Star Trek and/or Star Wars universe" isn't a good starting point. Both of those settings contain multitudes, and the aspects that appeal to one person about them might not appeal to another.

I've written before about one of my favorite games, which happens to be a licensed RPG. I've always been more of a fan of DC Comics than Marvel Comics, but the system from TSR's classic Marvel Super-Heroes Role-Playing Game always had more of an appeal to me than most of the DC Comics role-playing games that have happened (although I will always have a weak spot for the D6 version that West End Games put out). Luckily, TSR was really good about putting out support in the form of converting Marvel characters to the game, and giving you background on their stories. I have also usually worked around this by having the Marvel characters typically out of the way ("Yeah, the Fantastic Four is in another dimension, or something, and their helpline gave this number instead."), leaving the player characters to do things without being overwhelmed by the more famous heroes. In our college Marvel Super-Heroes campaign this ended up becoming a metacommentary as the player hero group started calling themselves "The World's Most Convenient Super-Heroes." Sometimes a work around can become a fun part of the game.

Not wanting to sound like I'm focusing on the negative here, I'll talk about a couple of games I like and their settings. Both of these I've talked about before: Stormbringer/Elric and Palladium's Rifts. I am not a huge fan of fantasy fiction, but the work of Michael Moorcock has been a favorite of mine since I started reading him as a kid. While the Elric books were my favorite when I was younger, they've been supplanted over time by his Jerry Cornelius and Dancers At The End of Time cycles. Both of these series are woefully underrepresented in role-playing games. Admittedly my intimate knowledge of the Elric stories are probably why I felt comfortable with games set in it. The main issue that comes up with playing a game in any of Moorcock's worlds comes from his periodic revising of his stories, or revisiting an earlier concept in a later book and casting it in a different way. Moorcock's multiverse from the early Elric stories and from the more recent Second Ether books like Fabulous Harbors are almost two entirely different settings. You get the extra challenge of "Which version of how the author addresses things do we use?" thrown into the mix.

I came to terms with my uncritical love for Palladium Games' series of Rifts games and setting books a long while ago. I'm not much of a fan of class and level systems, but I will drop everything for the chance to run a Palladium game. It doesn't make much sense to me either, at times. And I don't know if there are any settings that typify "OMG THERE IS SO MUCH GOING ON IN THIS SETTING I CAN'T EVEN" than with Rifts. I've played in a game where there was a player with a character who was a Rogue Scholar and another character was a centaur that was a ROM-like Spaceknight knock off. Both of which were made using official character classes for the game. It becomes a worked example of "this is the stuff we pay attention to and let the rest become background noise" approach to a setting.

So, despite starting this column by talking about how I don't like to play in licensed or "heavy" settings, I end by talking about two of the settings that fit the criteria for things that I shouldn't like and then talk about why I like them. Much like our real lives, our gaming lives are filled with contradictions and sometimes it is better to focus on those contradictions rather than the absolutes. I think in the long run it ends up making us all happier as people and gamers.

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[Hussar]

Oh, hey, absolutely, this is a YMMV situation. Sorry, I should have been clearer about that up front. This is 100% my own personal bugaboo, and not something I expect to be shared by anyone else. This is why *I* don't run these settings and in no way should be seen as any sort of condemnation or shade being thrown on anyone who does.

I KNOW I'm an outlier here. I don't care for world building and setting canon bores me to tears. I simply don't care that much. To the point where the group I play with unanimously awarded me Inspiration in a session a few weeks ago, because, completely unprompted, I remember a proper noun from an adventure and no one else did. For some reason Gulias Tree stuck in my head and I managed to use it properly in a sentence.

Otherwise, my speeches in game tend to be, "We're here looking for the.... dammmit... insert proper noun here in order to save Princess.... buggerit... Whatserface from .... ah crap... Baron McEvilton."

It's a sickness, I know.

 

[Majestic]

I've done quite a bit of role-playing in five different decades, and have a ton of experience both creating settings whole-cloth and using established ones. To me I don't get the "but the Death Star has been blown up!" logic. To me that makes as much sense as saying "I went to a basketball game once, and saw the basket go through the hoop once; there's never a reason for me to watch or play that game ever again!".

Just to give one example, I've played (and GMd) a ton of the WEG Star Wars d6 game. I also play in a Star Wars FFG ongoing campaign, and have played the d20 and Saga versions. Last year, a friend ran a D&D 5E game at our local con where it turned out we were (unbeknownst to us) actually playing in the SW universe (it was brilliant!). Another ongoing, once a year at a convention event had a different GM running a huge group of us as part of 'Bandit Squadron', where we were all rough-around-the-edges Rebels and affiliates who were doing stuff "on the edges" of the stories from the movies (along with the Zahn trilogy). This year I played in two different convention games, the first with (mostly) strangers (d6) and the second where we all played Rebels (FFG), both completely unrelated to any campaign. In all of those sessions, literally hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of game-play, there was never an attempt to blow up a Death Star. Yet we had countless hours of running into strange creatures, shooting stormtroopers, playing Jedi, interacting with droids, and flying starships at breakneck speed in a familiar galaxy far, far away.

I've played games and systems where sometimes it is in an established (or licensed) universe, and other times it was completely homebrew. For example, I've played in a Marvel Heroic Roleplaying campaign where we had completely self-created heroes. No established Marvel characters or setting, just using the MHR system. I've also run the game in a campaign where people played the Marvel PC characters in the Marvel Universe setting. In both cases, the game plays exactly the same!

In all those decades of play, I have never once had a player argue with a GM over some established canon. It just doesn't generally happen!

If it's not your cup of tea, that's cool. But to suggest it's ever badwrongfun, because of hypotheticals that don't actually end up being an actual 'thing' is pretty ridiculous, IMV.

You only really ever get into trouble if you have players that treat the thing as a religious text. That seems to be a lot more rare in real life than it is on the internet. I've never had a player say "but you can't do that or that can't be true because of X". Maybe I've been lucky, maybe they get that this is a game, I don't know, but you can have a ton of fun with licensed or established settings if you aren't afraid to make them your own. That's kind of the point of playing in them.

I've just quoted this snippet, but I completely and wholeheartedly agree with this entire post by Lord_Blacksteel.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

You only really ever get into trouble if you have players that treat the thing as a religious text. That seems to be a lot more rare in real life than it is on the internet. I've never had a player say "but you can't do that or that can't be true because of X". Maybe I've been lucky, maybe they get that this is a game, I don't know, but you can have a ton of fun with licensed or established settings if you aren't afraid to make them your own. That's kind of the point of playing in them.

IMO "canon lawyering" is just a variant of "rules lawyering". In many respects it's really a method of backseat DMing because it's highly controlling behavior. I haven't encountered it a lot in real life either, but it does show up from time to time. Usually players like that have other obnoxious tendencies. I get the point that some people feel that the setting should be reasonably true to itself, but this does not extend to micro-level details.