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December 23rd, 2005
08:25 am - More on "A Brother's Price"
I would like to think out loud a little more about my idea for a campaign set in the world of Wen Spencer's "A Brother's Price". I posted about this several weeks ago under Roleplaying in the World of "A Brother's Price". Since then, I've been thinking more about the system, and a recent post by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) heron61 was eerily similar to my own thinking -- which he gives as Thoughts on RPG rules systems: Benchmarking.
John Snead's description of benchmarking is a good description of what I'd want in one sense. To give a bigger picture, however... - I would like play to give a good impression from play of the places and things being real and what they are like. Game values should generally have a real-world meaning.
- Physically, I would like the players to generally be sitting around comfortably and chatting. i.e. There need not be a large tabletop which everyone sits around. There should be some papers or other material in the middle, but they should be there for reference rather than constant use. Given this, I would like card draw rather than die roll, since dice can be a pain without a table in front of you. I'd like character sheets to fit on index cards, ideally.
- Gunfights should be crunchy, realistic, and interesting, but still resolve quickly. I am considering the card game Up Front for inspiration of a low-detail but still realistic game.
- Lastly, I'd like the game to include the passage of months and years -- something like Ars Magica's seasonal mechanics, or perhaps more like the newsreel mechanic from Sun, Moon, Cross.
Given these thoughts on what I want and inspired a bit by John Snead's post, I am leaning more towards rolling my own system for this.
I'm still somewhat stuck on how to make men be interesting as player characters. I have pondered dumping this, and instead have the PC family be unmarried with riches but no brothers, thus making one focus of the action finding a suitable husband.
The tricky issue for me at the moment is balancing a system for gunfights that is both fun and realistic. I don't want it to be detailed, but I don't want to remove options to the point of making it a dull dice-off. There is also the social interactions aspect of play -- but based on my experience that is less of a sticking point for my group than combat.
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October 24th, 2005
11:12 pm - Roleplaying in the World of "A Brother's Price"
So along with the post-apocalyptic fantasy game idea I had (cf. Breaking Down D&D), I have also been pondering about another potential campaign for the future.
The idea is a game set in the world of Wen Spencer's "A Brother's Price" or a close parallel. The point is not so much to derive from or emulate the plot, but rather to draw on the setting. This would be an immersionist game, where a big part of the point is filling out the culture, society, and other aspects of life in that world. I recommend the book, but to describe it in brief: it is a world in a period roughly like early 19th century Europe, but for at least most of its history, nearly all male pregnancies miscarry -- resulting in men being only 3 to 5% of the population. So the point here is to focus on exploring this setting. There are a lot of details glossed over in the novel -- what is the religion like? What are educational institutions like? What is army life like? Answering all of these inherently means delving into gender issues.
However, I am not sure what the primary action of the game would be. My main constraint is that it should have intrigue and action mixed with family life. The big trick is -- how to make men be interesting as player characters? One thought is that I could set it several generations in the future, and have a nascent men's suffrage movement which is a focus of action. Or I could set it in the royal court where there are a series of well-policed balls which are a key part of the action. I might do what I did in the Vinland game, and have most people have a woman as their main PC -- while some people have a man as their alternate PC.
So I would want to keep the game very well grounded, realistic, and character-immersive. I'm slightly tempted to put in some emotional mechanics mainly to represent the group dynamics of a family -- like the stabilizing influence which a strong man. However, I don't want to go too deeply down that route. Another interesting possibility would be if the game could span generations. That would make character generation tricky, though, if I wanted to actually represent familial relations.
I'm not sure what mechanical system I would want to use as a base. In principle, something like GURPS would be appropriate -- but I have a distaste for that system from prior experience, although I realize that there have been a number of fixes in the fourth edition (which I haven't read). There are also similar systems like JAGS2, Action!, or EABA (which I also haven't read). But none of these options really grab me. On the other hand, I don't think I would get what I want out of something like, say, The Pool.
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