The appeal of licensed properties

[Agamon]

I think there's appeal in that the players may already be familiar with the setting details without the GM having to plead, coerse or bribe them into reading his minimal setting info that they won't remember, if they bother reading it in the first place.

We're a session or two left in a 4e conversion of EtCRL and some of my players still call Strahd, "Count von Whatsisname". I can assure you they'd not call Palpatine, "Emperor Whatsisface".

 

[Crothian]

Right. But you can (and presumably will) do that absent any 'official' version of the Terminator: The RPG. You'll take what you already have and run with it. What does an official book offer you that you don't already have? You've got the basic concept and the creative urge to do something with it. Anything more, as I see it, is limiting rather than liberating.

It feels better and usually better then what we can come up with on our own. It's like the old argument of why do people need sourcebooks when they can just write and create the stuff themselves?

With a license I'm paying for someone else to do the work for me. Sometimes things to translate perfectly between TV show/book/movie to RPG and professional writers can deal with that better then most gamers. And I like the pretty pictures they have in most licensed RPGs.

 

[Agamon]

Right. But you can (and presumably will) do that absent any 'official' version of the Terminator: The RPG. You'll take what you already have and run with it. What does an official book offer you that you don't already have? You've got the basic concept and the creative urge to do something with it. Anything more, as I see it, is limiting rather than liberating.

Ah, I get the gist now. Why not just take what you know and apply to a set of rules you already know, right?

Well, hopefully the liscensed product's rules work well with the setting and mood of the what it's trying to replicate. I find that the SIFRP rules look like they'll work so much better than GOO's d20 GoT adaption. And even GOO's rules were heavily changed d20 rules.

It's also nice to have the work done for you. You could use whatever rules you want to play Star Wars, but then you'd have to either squeeze some square pegs in round holes or convert or create some rules yourself. The number of different ships and droids in SW is huge, I wouldn't want to stat them up every time I needed one. The House Creation rules in SIFRP are a good example, too.

 

[Cadfan]

1. Wish fulfillment. You want to be a character in Action Movie X, and the game provides it.

2. Environmental knowledge is already in the players heads. This can be incredibly useful when creating a believable game world. The players already come into the game knowing half the data and most of the flavor of the game world, and they'll make more believable decisions as a result. Getting this much information into a player's head in a homebrew game is quite difficult, particularly if you want to avoid info-dumping in some sort of book like handout. Its a major reason why so many homebrews amount to generic european medieval fantasy worlds, plus one or two extra things the DM thought up that the players mostly never engage.

Don't get me wrong, I tend to prefer generic D&D games over licensed properties. But I can see the appeal- its a lot of the appeal of playing in a published setting, really.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Well, hopefully the liscensed product's rules work well with the setting and mood of the what it's trying to replicate. I find that the SIFRP rules look like they'll work so much better than GOO's d20 GoT adaption. And even GOO's rules were heavily changed d20 rules.

Ditto. Were I to run a Westeros campaign last year, I'd have used Grim Tales. Now, I'd likely use SoIaF (and have, for a couple one-shots). But I'm still not really interested in a Westeros campaign, at least so far as the current setting, since it's already fairly proscribed by the novels. One set 1000 years ago, though....

My favorite campaign, ever, was a d6 Star Wars game that occupied most of my a year of college. Back then, all we had for source material was the first three movies and the Brian Daley Star Wars books. We set the campaign in the years leading up to Episode IV and had an absolute blast. Nothing even remotely according to canon nowadays; our Clone Wars bear no resemblance to Lucas', etc. We could never run that now, because so many of the blank areas we filled in have already been covered. I think that's why the KotOR stuff appeals to Star Wars gamers so much, precisely because there's so little of it developed.

 

[Scribe Ineti]

With a license I'm paying for someone else to do the work for me. Sometimes things to translate perfectly between TV show/book/movie to RPG and professional writers can deal with that better then most gamers. And I like the pretty pictures they have in most licensed RPGs.

This is it pretty much for me as well. I could take My Favorite Game System and shoehorn in My Favorite Setting, but it's so much easier if someone else does the heavy lifting in a full-color hardcover I can pick up off the shelf and run with in much less time and much less design effort on my part.

I can make up my own settings and worlds and so on no problem, but getting player buy-in on an original world is a bit more challenging than saying "OK, peeps, we're running a game in Eberron or the Forgotten Realms or Middle-earth or whatever." Using an established setting gives the players and GMs an immediate common baseline, and probably some novels, movies, or tv episodes as background material.

And there's the other issue I've run into, sort of like, "Ok, so I want to run this sci-fi game where you're all crew members on a starship that's part of a galactic federation of planets, working together to explore the unknown."

"So it's like Star Trek? Why don't we just play Star Trek?"

Why reinvent the wheel, I says.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Yes, I think they are. I can't think of a licensed product I have that I wasn't a fan of the source material before I bought it.

Agreed, I bought the Serenity RPG sight unseen because I liked the movie/TV show. I found out later that I was one of the lucky ones that got a printing with a character sheet and many other major holes fixed.

I later sold it because I didn't care for the system.

I've never bought any other other RPG before or since sight unseen. That should speak to the power of that license.

 

[timbannock]

I think the best example is Star Wars. The universe was big, and the West End RPG literally expanded the expanded universe to a huge degree (I recall a story about Timothy Zahn receiving tons of Star Wars RPG books when he was going to write the Thrawn Trilogy).

I think other properties wish they could get that kind of setup: a widely known setting that new and old players alike can come into and have a shared perception of what it is.

As for players, the big deal is definitely wish fulfilment. I think a lot of people see/read/experience something and go "Wow, that would be cool, if I could ..." The best properties have a ton of open space wherein you can do that and not be restrained, but there are plenty of properties that can be too tightly focused. I think some great games have come out that were limited by their property (Robotech), while others were great properties that were limited by the system (um....Robotech again? Actually, also the Aliens RPG). Both situations can be overcome, but the key is to not have these issues in the first place, because then the game's accessible (people know the world through whatever media it appeared in), has lots of open space (so people can come up with lots of ideas of what to do as player characters in this setting) and the system doesn't scare them away.

Again, I think those aspects are what made Star Wars a great RPG property. Buffy also worked because you already had several spin offs, which is basically like a big example of "See how we can make this different, but still work in the same coherent place?"

 

[billd91]

Sorry, what I meant was, when playing Star Wars / LotR / Firefly, you're appealing primarily to people that are already familiar with the source material.

At first, sure. But I find that there's usually someone who's uninitiated into the fandom at the gaming table but willing to give it a go. With a licensed product, you can pretty easily present them with the tools they need to bone up on the subject. Doing a Firefly/Star Wars/Star Trek game? Lend them your DVDs.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

I think the reason people like to play in worlds from their favorite TV Shows or Movies or Books is because they are already familiar with it, and it is easier to get the players to care about the world than some homebrew that the GM has made up.

I can still create plenty of plotlines in a licensed RPG. I find that I actually prefer playing in other worlds over making my own. It just seems more fun that way for me. Sure, making my own world could be fun, but no one else will really care about it.