All that said, there are some fun story types that tend to be less likely choices in these games, and while we'll be looking at some of the challenges that accompany these genres, please don't take it as a discouragement to consider some of these underplayed genres when you start looking into trying something new on game night.
#5 Westerns
The western genre has a rich pedigree in American culture. Many modern stories like the Jack Reacher series still borrow the trope of the mysterious stranger and the lone gunman. Shows like Firefly seek to reinvent classic tropes in new settings. Meanwhile, video games like Red Dead Redemption and movies like The Revenant are forming a revival of the genre for a modern audience.
The challenges attendant on a Western game are twofold. One, westerns aren't as popular as they once were. Put in the simplest possible terms, westerns were on their way out of the cultural consciousness as role playing games were on their way in, and it could be a hard sell to the typical gamer to get invested in a story like this. Two, the power fantasy is present, but lessened. Cowboys, ranchmen, and all the attendant players in events are larger than life, and the core audience served is one seeking a power fantasy; and yet, the fantasy is not as overblown and potent as in fantasy and science fiction. Players will be saving homesteads and towns, not kingdoms, planes, and planets.
The western genre is worth considering for creating a power fantasy that deals with old American ideals. Freedom is more important to the fantasy than rule or dominion. Individualism comes from isolation and the apathy or unavailability of greater armies rather than from the players simply dealing with problems out of the league of anyone else.
For the logical cap of the power fantasy, stories of the famed Texas Rangers may be good source material.
#4 Stone Age
". . . solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", the stone age is a genre seldom explored in fiction. Nevertheless, the nature of it incorporates elements of travelogue, survival, and man vs. nature in whatever form it enters the public imagination. Films and books like Clan of the Cave Bear explore a world familiar, yet frightening in it's harsh intensity.
As in the example of westerns above, the difficulties here deal with getting players interested in trying a game idea that might seem "weird", as well as in taking players who are used to wielding the elemental forces of nature and selling them on a game where they are left huddled against the deprivations of cold and hunger.
If wolves have become blase to your D&D power gamers, a trip to the primeval tundra may be just the thing to put the fear of man's ancestral foes back into the group. This can also be a great exercise for you as a game master in dynamic and challenging terrain design, environmental hazards, and many more of this type of mechanic that can be so easily left underutilized in the more common tabletop modes of play.
As stated above, Clan of the Cave Bear in either the book or movie form is required reading when embarking into this narrative genre.
#3 Superheroes
This one is iffy, but I'll include it here as a nod to my own experiences in tabletop gaming. Superheroes are certainly popular since Marvel's experiment in building their shared universe for The Avengers. Though, their popularity has been steadily gaining since their creation. Christopher Reeve's performance in Superman and even Adam West's fun and campy take on the genre in Batman got things rolling toward the earliest X-men and Spiderman movies, and Christopher Nolan's work in Batman Begins and onward have all together built a vibrant and robust genre of source material.
Unlike the prior examples, superhero stories can be an easy sell for players. The difficulties are coming, however. Most glaringly is the difficulty of ensuring a "Good always wins" tone to match genre expectations, without killing suspense in gameplay. The other difficulty is in managing power levels. The ability to level a city block in your heroes makes it hard to construct a plausible threat. Add to this that superheroes tend to value law and order as a means of narratively reigning in their awesome powers, and that tabletop players tend to justify their actions by their results, and you've got an out-of-control team of death that answers the question "What if the Punisher had Superman's powers?" The answer, of course, being, "The stories just turn into an unkillable deity smiting foes at will until bored."
That said, the popularity of the superhero genre means that, sooner or later, you'll have players at your table eager to roll up do-gooders or, more likely, morally ambiguous vigilantes, in order to take to the streets and clean up the scum. Best advice: cap the power levels. Street level heroes like Luke Cage or Spiderman are much more manageable for the game master.
For source material on superheroes, I mean, seriously? Just go outside. Leave your house in 2016 and you will know what superheroes are.
#2 Pirates
To be fair, there are a handful of solid pirate game expansions out there, but, in my experience they tend to be D&D on the coastline with rum in place of mead. What I'm talking about with pirate stories are stories of ocean-bound outlaws, facing the hazards of the sea and the crown. The first Pirates of the Carribean movie does a great job of this, and the sequels definitely have their moments of capturing the feel of buried treasure, unknown lands, oppressive authority, and a culture of rumors and legends cobbled together from homeland fairy tales, stories brought back by marauding conquistadors, and the strange and frightening beliefs of little understood native peoples.
The challenges here are similar to what one would find in attempting to run a hard science fiction game: that is, there is a high barrier of entry to get all the fiddly little details accurate to modern knowledge. Ship-board life, ship classifications, celestial navigation, and naval engagements are esoteric information not generally known to the average gamer or game master. Meanwhile, the social mores and beliefs of the time could prove uncomfortable for modern players. Lastly, the chain of command aboardship can put some players in direct authority over others, which can be a point of contention and resentment in some groups.
Despite all this, a mature, intelligent group, who are willing to do a little academic legwork for their fun, could find a lot here to love. Piratical stories of the unknown and potentially mystical can hit a sweet spot between power fantasy and disempowering horror (think Captain Jack's marching into the mouth of the kraken in the second Pirates movie).
Obviously, Pirates of the Carribean is a great source here, and also consider classics like Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
#1 Post-Apocalyptic
While there are some great post-apocalyptic games out there, they tend not to be the go-to genre for many game groups. With influences as diverse as Fallout, Mad Max, The Road, later entries in the Terminator franchise, Time Enough at Last, and I Am Legend; this is a difficult genre to give a more specific definition than "The world's different now, and we're still not quite used to it."
The challenges in post-apocalyptic gaming deal with the sheer breadth of material available to both the game master and the players. For the game master, the apocalyptic scenario needs nailing down, and the structure of the emerging culture needs enough definition to give structure to play. Neither of these would be too difficult if they weren't completely open-ended questions. For the player's options, the game master needs to constantly make rulings on what works, what doesn't, what knowledge humanity has, what knowledge the player character's have, and on and on. Can a man who can use a gun repair a gun? What apparatus and special knowledge is required to disassemble a grenade both safely and usefully? How far does science need to rebuild before players can power, but not reinvent, old world data systems? The list goes on.
Nevertheless, this can make for some fun gaming that takes our own world and empowers players to take what they like in clear conscience. Of all the genres in this article, post-apocalyptic most fits the playstyle and attitudes of most players in these types of games. In the post-apocalyptic world, the race goes not to the swift, but to the psychopath willing to break his opponent's legs. Nine times out of ten, your players are those psychopaths.
This is a hard one to give good influences for, since the genre is so large and loosely defined. Best I can suggest is to find material directly related to the type of scenario you'd like to explore.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Happy gaming, all.
No comments:
Post a Comment