Thomas Shey
Legend
I've got a couple, but its mostly a case of incompatibility to the players I have.
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.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.
Huh, id assume its hard to do because people would want to level up while killing piles of velociraptors.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.
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.Huh, id assume its hard to do because people would want to level up while killing piles of velociraptors.
It may be time to end the marriage. The two of you seem hopelessly incompatible.I've been considering another Twilight 2000 or ALIEN game, but the wife isn't interested in either.
Is that the Rifts scenario?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...
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.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.