Stealing from the Best; assuming youre not talking about breaking copyright for profit, here are my two penneth. Ill start with a scenario, imagine were playing a TRADITIONAL fantasy RPG. Im the GM, you are the player. Your character is exploring an ancient and mysterious forbidden forest, just outside the border of your kingdom. As you walk along the twisting paths you round a corner and suddenly arrive in a clearing. An Elf Sentry is standing in the clearing and demands to know what you are doing here. Now imagine that Elf Sentry in your minds eye....... How many of you gave the Elf a Bow? Or a Sword or Spear? Heck, how many gave him any sort of Weapon - I only said he was a Sentry, I never said he was armed! Heres the point - EXPECTATION. In a game session (what 4-6 hours on average?) you have a limited time to get the important parts of the story across, the rest can be imagined or ignored. The more familiar you are with a system the less description youll need for certain things: Playing Star Wars, a relatively unimportant NPC Jedi who uses her powers at a critical point can just be described as such and move on if you all know the franchise, if not you have to stop and explain what a Jedi Knight is if the players somehow have never read the books/seen the films, for the story to make sense. Then you move on. If you are playing Cthulu and have an Archaeologist unashamedly similar to Indiana Jones and your party are whisked off to Cairo, you EXPECT to be exploring trap-infested pyramids hunting a Sacred Idol and fighting mummies - if the GM doesnt have anything better for you to do. If not, Cairo? May as wellve been Cardiff! (No offense my Welsh friends, nothing against Cardiff but you get the point). You WANT to get in the same sort of situations as your heroes to see if you can pull off these daring feats and Old Schoolers are arrogant enough to try and come up with a BETTER solution to the CLASSIC adventure elements, its what boosts our overinflated egos. Imagine the opposite. A DM runs a Dragonlance Campaign with a twist - the entire campaign takes place on a small undiscovered island on Krynn that has absolutely no Dragons, Dragon-kin, etc. So there are no Dragons to fight or ride and the inhabitants may never have even heard of one. Kudos to the DM who manages to make every player feel they are still playing Dragonlance, EVERY session. Stealing from the best reminds us WHY WE PLAY in the first place. In the playground, or wherever you were a Jedi with a lightsaber, or a soldier or knight, etc. RPGs are just the evolution of that, which we can cling on to as we mature. Likewise in games, we look for these opportunities that remind us why we fell in love with Roleplaying in the first place - because we wanted to recreate the sort of scenes we enjoy from our favourite books and movies. The wish I could do that effect. BEGINNING Players, especially GMs will naturally fall back onto Classic Elements because A. Being inexperienced they might be stuck for ideas & B. They know they are doing something right because Everybody does it. Even experienced Roleplayers love classic situations though, as I said because they can show off. Its great to come up with a new twist - Spike Pit & descending roof (Pah!) BUT you are on the moon and your spacesuit is gonna get ripped.... You can overdo it of course: Last week, Ark of the Covenant, this week Holy Grail - whats next week, Crystal Skull? Twist it, modify it, leave it for a session or two but dont overkill it! Always, always leave room for more than one creative solution too and absolutely dont be afraid to let the players completely change the situation and run with it (as long as it doesnt give them an incredibly unfair advantage [i.e. boring]). My three kind of Rules of Gaming are Fun, Balance and Believability in that order. Believability is what this week is all about - If I cannot picture it I doubt the players can, like you guys Id say I have a pretty good imagination, that is where falling back on these Classic Elements gives you the solid foundation you need so we all understand the basics of where the adventure is coming from. Oops, bit long winded. Soooo.... I wouldnt call it Stealing as such myself - more The-Required-Payoff-from-Familiar-Core-Adventure-Element-Expectaions-that-the-Genre-Dictates-are-Essential-for-a-Successful-Adventure, but yours is shorter!
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 10:44:31 +0000
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