Out with the old (Game design traditions we should let go)

[Lanefan]

Parties. Everybody and their mother tries to shoehorn PCs working (and often even travelling) together for exactly zero reasons.

I get the sentiment here, but how do you then make RPGs work as a group activity i.e. something that involves a GM plus more than one other person at a time?

 

[Reynard]

I get the sentiment here, but how do you then make RPGs work as a group activity i.e. something that involves a GM plus more than one other person at a time?

The PCs just have to be interacting in the same place, not necessarily be allies. They could be a firefighter crew or the staff in an ER, or they could be various members of a magic school faculty.

 

[Yora]

Parties. Everybody and their mother tries to shoehorn PCs working (and often even travelling) together for exactly zero reasons.

What else do you propose?

 

[overgeeked]

There is no advancement in the original Traveller, which dates back to the beginning of RPGs.

Traveller’s a weird one. Advancement was part of character creation, but you risked death. You could take correspondence course after character creation to improve. A lot of people miss it because it’s in the Starships book (p40).

 

[loverdrive]

What else do you propose?

PCs just being major characters who we spend a lot screentime with, and preferably with conflicting interests, that's pretty much it. Like, say, Walter, Jesse, Skyler, Mike and Gus rather than Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli.

It works spectacularly well in Apocalypse World and Urban Shadows.

 

[overgeeked]

I get the sentiment here, but how do you then make RPGs work as a group activity i.e. something that involves a GM plus more than one other person at a time?

What else do you propose?

It basically doesn’t work in real-time games. If you’re playing asynchronously, say via forum, email, post, snail mail, etc it works.

 

[overgeeked]

One other thing that should go is specialty designed, bespoke systems for every minor variation of game idea. You don’t need 500 pages of rules to separate Mouse Guard from Mice Templar.

 

[Lanefan]

PCs just being major characters who we spend a lot screentime with, and preferably with conflicting interests, that's pretty much it. Like, say, Walter, Jesse, Skyler, Mike and Gus rather than Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli.

It works spectacularly well in Apocalypse World and Urban Shadows.

OK, gotcha. The anti-PvP crowd will doubtless have something to say on this as such a system could quickly turn into PvP, but I'm cool with it, and many of my games end up working like this even though they run in parties. (i.e. it'd be more representative to throw a few Boromirs into the LotR group)

Question, though: who are the bolded guys?

 

[loverdrive]

OK, gotcha. The anti-PvP crowd will doubtless have something to say on this as such a system could quickly turn into PvP, but I'm cool with it, and many of my games end up working like this even though they run in parties. (i.e. it'd be more representative to throw a few Boromirs into the LotR group)

Question, though: who are the bolded guys?

Main cast of Breaking Bad.

 

[overgeeked]

Question, though: who are the bolded guys?

Breaking Bad characters.