Thwarted campaign ambitions

[Thomas Shey]

I've got a couple, but its mostly a case of incompatibility to the players I have.

 

[jdrakeh]

I deeply love OD&D, Holmes BD&D, and B/X D&D but all of my real life friends think that they are "too dumbed down" to be fun. I run them online irregularly, but I'd rather run them face to face.

 

[aramis erak]

I've been considering another Twilight 2000 or ALIEN game, but the wife isn't interested in either.

I've been considering a MYZ game but hadn't actually acquired my own copy... but the Humble Bundle cured that. ($43 for all 4 cores: M:YZ, M:E, M:GLA, and M:M) plus a bunch of sectors, and two campaign books... I went overbudget this month... but... the wife is interested in MYZ, vaguely. I might be able to get a bit of loopy mutant action in.

For 4 of the last 5 years, I never had to consider her tastes, because we weren't RP gaming together... but she's back in my Wed. group, and I do need to keep her tastes in mind. Which rules out a BUNCH of games. Including Alien and T2K 4E. She's not thrilled about Blade Runner coming up, either.

Justifiers has the hangups of it being a largely serious anthro setting, and people not being able to play anthro games without assuming it's supposed to be a Looney Toons special knockoff... instead of the moderately hard (harder than Traveller, but not much) Sci-Fi setting with Anthros. It also has the issue that the PC's start out as indentures for the lab expenses in their creation.... The anthro willing players I've got won't touch it because of the slavery issue. The players who wouldn't mind the "working ourselves out of bondage" angle won't touch it because it's an anthros game.

Albedo has similar issues with Justifiers. But it's also got the hardest SF ships of any RPG I own Fusion Torches, combats are single pass, and preprogrammed before engagement, PC's just have to ride it out as their programs get executed by the ship's AI during the pass, and the best weapons are KKMs...

I've long considered a Batlleforce 1E + Mechwarrior 2E campaign. The players I had who wanted me to run Mechwarrior hated Battleforce. The players I had who liked Battleforce hated Mechwarrior 2E. (Battleforce 1E is a much faster, simpler, and somewhat more abstract combat system than Battletech itself.)

Jovian Chronicles... Get to the point about mechs, and the hard SF fans say "No Way!" Get to the "Hard SF with Spin Grav and newtonian movemet" and the Mecha Players tend to bolt. I've got this idea for a CEGA assault on one of the cylinders in the trojan asteroids. Was thinking of PC's as residents thereof. (Inspired, of course, by the Gundam novels.) WHich, being on the defensive chases the last of the willing players right out the door.

I've considered a Mekton Empire game for YEARS.... Wife isn't even vaguely interested, and I have lost my love of Interlock as a system.

I'd love to run the setting/scenario from The Mechanoid Invasion, but I'm way too lazy to convert it to a decent system. It's such a rich potential as a setting. I could easily pastiche it with Alien... but...

I also get half a dozen harebrained campaign ideas a month... but most just drop off once I think about who would be willing to play.

 

[thullgrim]

I have two. Planescape, as mentioned up thread, is a great read but lousy at trying to give a gm insight on how to run a campaign about ideas. That said I think you still make an interesting and fun planescape game based on traditional fantasy campaign tropes. It just wouldn’t satisfy.

Number two: Earthdawn. I used to have the entire 1e run of the game and currently have the entire 4e run. I love the setting but don’t think I have it in me learn another heavy crunch game. And the game mechanics are intrinsically tied to the setting. Trying to run the setting in another system I feel, would fall flat.

 

[MarkB]

Oh, this is easy:

Planescape

I always loved the Planescape boxes (even though I wasn't a huge fan of Torment which I still never finished). After I ran a 5th edition D&D campaign and that one went really quite well, I decided to get serious and finally make a Planescape campaign happen after some 20 years of first encountering the setting.
And a few weeks into the preparation process, I discovered that Planescape is a wonderful fantasy world, but a really poor campaign setting. There really isn't anything meaningful for PCs to do. Sure, you could kill cranium rats in some old lady's basement, throw out a gang of goblins squating in an abandoned building, or go find an old treasure in a ruin in the Outlands. But that's just the same stuff you can do in any other D&D world. There are of course the factions, which are made a really big deal and are all very evocative. But what do the factions actually do? They have philosophies, but they have no goals. There is a lot of great worldbuilding, no doubt about that. But there is barely anything in the way of content that D&D player characters can actually play with.
It's a setting with no meaningful conflicts that drive events. The DM guide says "this is not a setting for treasure hunting dungeons crawls and monster bashing, but a setting about ideas!", but it then doesn't have any suggestions of what PCs might actually do in a campaign.

It's a setting that is amazing to look at, but without playable content.

Thinking about it, a Blades in the Dark approach might work well for the setting - they share a lot of common elements, with the urban setting, various factions, well-codified supernatural elements, and prolific criminal activity. Setting it up as a series of largely player-driven jobs to establish their little gang within the setting, and allowing themes and goals to emerge naturally in the course of play based on their interactions with the factions, might be a good direction to go.

The main issue would be that D&D isn't as inherently flexible as BitD when it comes to setting up and running scenarios off-the-cuff.

 

[Imaculata]

Jurassic Park. I'm a big fan of the books and the original movies, but if I were to run a campaign set in Jurassic Park, there wouldn't be a whole lot of surprises, unless I completely changed the story. Players should also be able to make their own characters, who should be central to the story... so do I scrap most of the original cast, including beloved characters?

Besides, how do the players find themselves trapped in a failing dino park in a believable way, since that plot point is pretty much a given? The park has got to fail, right? Or are they exploring the island for... reasons? If so, why don't they just leave?

The original novel also didn't come with a map. The movie does have a map, but it differs wildly from the descriptions in the book, and is seriously lacking in locations. Some fans have tried to make their own maps, and getting pretty close to accurate. But a hybrid of the two maps would be even better. One that has all the locations from the movie as shown on the big screen, yet is also book accurate. Argh, the horror!

When you really think about it, designing a JP campaign is hard! Which is why I've never done it.

 

[payn]

Jurassic Park. I'm a big fan of the books and the original movies, but if I were to run a campaign set in Jurassic Park, there wouldn't be a whole lot of surprises, unless I completely changed the story. Players should also be able to make their own characters, who should be central to the story... so do I scrap most of the original cast, including beloved characters?

Besides, how do the players find themselves trapped in a failing dino park in a believable way, since that plot point is pretty much a given? The park has got to fail, right? Or are they exploring the island for... reasons? If so, why don't they just leave?

The original novel also didn't come with a map. The movie does have a map, but it differs wildly from the descriptions in the book, and is seriously lacking in locations. Some fans have tried to make their own maps, and getting pretty close to accurate. But a hybrid of the two maps would be even better. One that has all the locations from the movie as shown on the big screen, yet is also book accurate. Argh, the horror!

When you really think about it, designing a JP campaign is hard! Which is why I've never done it.

Huh, id assume its hard to do because people would want to level up while killing piles of velociraptors.

 

[Imaculata]

Huh, id assume its hard to do because people would want to level up while killing piles of velociraptors.

Well, that's another thing. Jurassic Park isn't really about fighting dinosaurs. Giving the players weapons kind of goes against the spirit of the IP. So is it all just a bunch of chases then? That might get old quickly. I fear the tension of JP simply might not translate well to tabletop roleplaying either.

In my view, a JP campaign should not be a dino shoot 'm up, but about survival amidst unpredictable tech problems and a slight bit of corporate espionage.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I've been considering another Twilight 2000 or ALIEN game, but the wife isn't interested in either.

It may be time to end the marriage. The two of you seem hopelessly incompatible.

I'd love to run the setting/scenario from The Mechanoid Invasion, but I'm way too lazy to convert it to a decent system. It's such a rich potential as a setting. I could easily pastiche it with Alien... but...

Is that the Rifts scenario?

 

[payn]

Well, that's another thing. Jurassic Park isn't really about fighting dinosaurs. Giving the players weapons kind of goes against the spirit of the IP. So is it all just a bunch of chases then? That might get old quickly. I fear the tension of JP simply might not translate well to tabletop roleplaying either.

In my view, a JP campaign should not be a dino shoot 'm up, but about survival amidst unpredictable tech problems and a slight bit of corporate espionage.

Yeap, I'd probably do a one shot using something by Free League or a PbtA hack. They seem more thematically suited to it then D&D and other crunchy combat driven systems. Im getting real curious about Hexsys and anxious for Cowboy Bebop to drop. Wanna check that system out. Think its ripe for this kind of thing. YMMV.