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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5299157" data-attributes="member: 21169">Talking about old school games, and reviews thereof, there was a review of the post-apocalyptic game The Morrow Project in White Dwarf in which it was praised for solving the problem of how PCs can be both capable and ignorant of their surroundings. In TMP the PCs awake from cryogenic suspension, part of a project to rebuild society after a nuclear war, but they have overslept. They are highly skilled and well equipped. This also gives them a strong motivation. Central control of the Morrow Project organisation has, of course, broken down, leaving the PCs on their own.I've never run/played the game but I always liked this setup. It's very focused, character types would be fairly limited, not so much in terms of skills, but in motivation, competence and mental stability, and also very sandbox-y.It's often a weird feature of rpgs that the players begin knowing nothing about a campaign world, but their PCs are supposedly embedded in the setting, with knowledge, friends, family, responsibilities, etc. Traditional D&D solves this problem by making the PCs rootless wanderers, Conan-types. Well-armed drifters who have just rode into town. They don't care about anything except gold and power ups, and solve all their problems with violence. My problem with this setup is I find it very difficult to care about such people on account of them being total dicks.One of the local GMs often starts his campaigns with the PCs, like the players, having no knowledge of the campaign world. In one, we woke up with no memory, in another we were pirates from different worlds who died and found ourselves in 'Pirate Heaven/Hell'. On the one hand, this is good because player knowledge = character knowledge, the two can go on the journey of the game together. But on the other, the PCs don't really care about the world (just like players in most rpgs) and have no strong reason to stick together.This issue of the players not caring about the game world seems common on message boards. Again and again one will read about GMs who put a lot of effort, a lot of love, into their game universes, and are disappointed that the players just care about power ups and winning fights.Perhaps this is unavoidable, a creator is always going to care more, be more invested. It works better with published fiction, because that is cast wide, and only those who are interested will read it, whereas rpgs are typically written for a much smaller audience. Perhaps it's also realistic. Lots of people in real life are very pragmatic, and only want to know what they need to in order to succeed.I myself, playing crpgs, almost always skip the quest and world info, I'm much more interested in the game element. Though in ftf rpgs, I'm more interested in the world, probably because it's been created by a friend and I'm interested in seeing what my talented friends have built.</blockquote>

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