Showing posts with label InSpectres. Show all posts
Showing posts with label InSpectres. Show all posts

Friday, April 26, 2024

The war of Dungeons and Dragins versus Time Management

 I recently watched a Mathew Colville video where he advocated for shorter adventures over big campaign books. (And I’m such an OG D&D player that big hard bound campaign books still look weird to me. Back in my day, Against the Giants came in three booklets. And we used THACO.  And we hated it! You kids can stay on my lawn with your new tangled games that you don’t need an engineering degree to understand)


And that parenthetical note went out of control.

Back to the topic I was trying to get to, his basic point was time management. You can finish a shorter module. As I understand it, the big campaign books are literally designed to be a year of weekly play. Life gets in the way a few too many times, it’s too easy for things to fizzle out.

So I totally agree with him. Yeah, in my twenties, multiple gaming sessions a week were a thing. But by the time I moved away from my old gaming groups, that kind of time sink just wasn’t possible.

However, I feel like you can go a step beyond Colville’s point. Dungeons and Dragons is designed for more long term play and there are systems that are intrinsically more friendly for time management.

Some games are essentially designed for one-shot play. Lady Blackbird or The Quiet Year, for instance, are clearly designed for a very finite playtime. And that is the simplest form of balancing time and tabletop RPG-play.

Which is hardly a new idea. I have friends who feel that the ideal format for Call of Cthulhu is a one-shot, preferably with everyone dead except one madman. Hey, I have some friends who believe in tradition.

Puppetland has a interesting approach to time management. The rules literally state that each session should only be a half hour long. I seriously doubt most folks follow that rule. And, indeed, if I had to travel to someone else's house, that would be interesting too much travel time for too little return. Playing it via video conferencing, on the other hand, sounds ideal.

However, the system that I find myself considering as a time management too is Inspectres. It is one of the early examples of a game where the players share the traditional work of a gamemaster. More than that, the game is centered around a branch of the titular paranormal investigators, not necessarily a specific group of characters.

As long as each investigation is self-contained, you don't need to have the same group of characters every single time. If you wanted to, you could rotate gamemasters or even play without one. (If you aren't used to GM-less games, that option might be one to work up to)

Still, the idea that a game doesn't get derailed by missing players or even a missing game master seems like a way of keeping a game going, even when you have adult responsibilities. More than that, having some kind of organization being the main character of a game instead of the actual players can allow for more freedom. I was in a D&D campaign centered around a mercenary company with that in mind.

Whicu actually didn’t work very well. You do need to a consistent group for continuity. 

In the end, Mr Colville is right. Shorter adventures are the best time management tool. But it was fun to consider other options.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

InSpectres: where you're the one the call

InSpectres has been around for many years and I've owned my copy for a while. It was one of the 'earlier' Indie games and I've been meaning to get around to reading it for some time.

Jared Sorenson makes no bones that the basic theme is Ghostbusters with the serial number filed off. In fact, the four basic four stat character sheets remind me of the official Ghostbusters RPG from the 80s. The characters are part of a franchise that specializes in supernatural problems. In fact, the franchise has its own stats and upkeep and going bankrupt is definitely an ongoing concern.

In theory, every session would be one particular job. The GM chooses how many franchise dice need to be earned to complete the job. The core mechanic is using small dice pools for conflict resolution/did you actually do it using six-sided dice with the high roll being the one that counts. On a five or six, you earn franchise dice.

Okay, let's talk about what actually makes InSpectres interesting. One of the driving forces behind Sorenson's goal design was to create a system where missing clues wouldn't drive the game off the rails. How did he do that? By having the players add clues and have some narrative control!

If a player succeeds, they get to narrate the success. Which doesn't just mean explaining how they hit a mummy with a folding chair but the results of things like research or gathering equipment. That gives them a lot of control steering where the story goes.

But the really interesting mechanic is the confession camera. Once per scene, one character can step through the fourth wall and give a confession camera monologue. Which can include talking about events that haven't even happened yet!

Back in 2002, this mechanic would have confused me all to heck. But by now, even I know what a confession camera is, which means probably everyone else in the world does too. It's a wacky mechanic that I've never seen anywhere else but, at least today, is one people would have no problems understanding.

InSpectres was one the earlier games that broke up the narrative structure of RPGs, although it wasn't the first. I'm pretty sure Trollbabe came out before it. Ars Magica had the option for troupe play. Baron Munchassen was already out.

Frankly, not only do I have no idea what game first gave players control over the greater narrative, I bet you could find examples from the 70s. I've found that many Indie ideas have seeds from the roots of RPGs, seeds that just needed refinement.

I have no idea what I would have thought of InSpectres if I had played in back in 2002. At the time, I was firmly entrenched in traditional RPGs with D&D being my main focus. (Come to think of it, since I'm in a D&D campaign on Roll20, it's back to being my main focus :D) It would have been very strange to me.

But, having played a bunch of Indie games now, including some with no GMs, InSpectres seems really accessible to me now. It comes closer to the traditional RPG structure than even some of its contemporaries like Trollbabe. Even the confession camera rule uses an idea that is now firmly a part of pop culture. This would be a great game to introduce people to non-traditional RPGs or even RPGs period.

More than that, given its light-hearted feel (seriously, you don't have confession cameras in dark, serious games) and minimal setup requirements (since the players help write the story as it goes along), InSpectres would be great for a casual summer campaign. Since the game is about the franchise, missing players would just be on other jobs and you could even rotate GMs.

I don't know when I'll next be in a position to be in a campaign. But InSpectres is definitely on the list of games I'd like to try as a campaign.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Games for seasons

The Since I left the world of playing in a weekly Dungeon and Dragons game that plays all year round, I have realized that different seasons favor different flavors of role playing games. I'm not talking about one-shots, although that's probably the case too. I mean shorter campaigns, ones that last one to three months.  

I was already aware that my old Indie group tended to play more serious, even sorrowful, games in the last few months of the year, fall into winter. Games that had a lot of bleed. Keeping in touch with them and occasionally playing with them online, that has continued to be the place.

And I have realized that my oldest DM, who has long stopped trying to run never ending campaigns, now regularly runs short campaigns every spring. Until I started to really think about it, I didn't really realize that.

So, at least in my circles, it seems like spring is the time for adventure and the end of the year is the time for sorrows. And no one ever seems to be up for gaming in January and February, when we're recovering from the holidays and gearing up for the new year.

For years, summer has also been an off season. Vacations and conventions and general summer time activities. However, I am now wondering if there are good systems or themes for summer. The fact that I live in Arizona and we're going through a heat wave and have to spend as much time inside as possible has nothing to do with that, I'm sure.

While I was reading InSpectres, a game that is totally going to get a blog entry of its own, I found myself thinking that it was both a system that I wanted to try and that it would make a good campaign for the summer time.

At the heart of that idea is because it is a very light and light-hearted game with a lot of comedic elements that also has a strong through line for a campaign, running your own Ghostbusters-style franchise. It's not serious or full or bleed but it does have an ongoing storyline to keep coming back to.

I've decided that a summer campaign should be like summer reading. Light and maybe with lots of explosions. Something everyone can laugh and have fun with but doesn't require that much raw, bleeding feelings.
 
You know, most of the comedy games I've played have been more suited for one-shots. Finding ones aimed at campaigns isn't as easy. (Although I've been in comedic 'regular' games) My theater friends all tell me that tragedy is easy. Comedy is hard. But I think summer calls for comedy.