Saturday, March 21, 2015

Lessons Learned #1 , A Lot of Gaming Ideas are Daft in Practice

One upside to our current gaming setup is that we get to try a lot of experimental games either when player's can't make it or just as a break between games.

One of the more daft ideas i ran with was "Inherent " in which the characters were defrosted convicts sent by a failing A.I. to repopulate the Earth.

my pitch for this was

 Back in the 1980's they started freezing Felons. A hundred years later you defrosted convicts and your slowly failing computer system are the last of mankind. Can you restart the species while avoiding all the behaviors that got you frozen in the 1st place. Basically Morrow Project meets Fallout meets Oz.


This well, sucked.  Bad concept, mediocre implementation and while the players were fine and even had some fun , it just was stupid.

Another bad idea, letting the players play themselves as Super Heroes . This have been great back in 1981 with Villains and Vigilantes but in 2014? Made of suck.


Other ideas I won't even try are Suds which I describe as "A tabletop RPG designed explicitly as a soap opera rather than an adventure game. There will be some action but its mostly drama drama drama in the vein of Melrose Place and the OC" and The Mighty which is another soap game, this time more along the lines of Dallas, Falcon Crest and Dynasty. Not only have my players never even seen any of these shows, no one us, me included could pull off the drama. Not gonna happen.

Even ideas that are partially useful and can be played such as

Starlight, Iron and the End of Days:
This is DeLint style Faerie tales set in a 2050 where the demographic prediction of Phillip Longman et all are true. Less Men means the Fae have crept slowly back into the world. Normal people, poignant empty cities and the greening.

can't necessarily be stretched too much and something like 

Revolution Rock: set in the same Universe where a band of teen age friends try to get into the rock concert of the century.

are just not going to work 

So the lesson I learned in the end is that as  I look over my huge list of games I have to remember  lots of cool ideas but they are just that, cool idea and are  daft in practice

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