By the end of my university days, I'd amassed an important collection of role-playing games. The question then became: What do I do with it all? Then my current pool of players finally acquiesced to play a little game from R. Talsorian based on Niven & Pournelle's SF novel ABOUT role-playing, Dream Park, and that gave me the answer I was looking for. Dream Park was a fairly simple, I'd go as far as say BROKEN, little game that encouraged you not only to play in all kinds of genres, but to merge them as well. In Dream Park, you play a player who, based on a vague invitation, selects the skills, powers and gear he thinks he'll need for a one-shot scenario put together by a GameMaster (played by the GM) in a sort of holodeck/animatronic/actor-filled environment. The players play for points that will allow them to purchase even more stuff for their next game, but risk losing them if they die, although some can be recouped if they come back as villainous NPCs later in the game. It's a nifty gimmick, and the published scenarios highlighted multi-genre concepts (1001 Nights/Star Wars, Superheroes/WWII, Postapocalypse/Zombies), though there was definitely a pulp feel about all of them.This allowed me to adapt a lot of the adventure scenarios, setting books and RPG magazines I'd purchased over the last few years (and lead me to buy even more). I didn't stick with that particular group very long, just long enough to gauge what was missing from Dream Park as published. I would dabble with old favorites in the late 90s (DC Heroes, Planescape, Paranoia), but I would eventually return to DP when I recruited a whole new batch of players as we entered the 2000s. By then, I was almost exclusively recruiting improv players into my games. There are some very good reasons for this. 1) I was (and still am) deeply involved in improv/theater games, and most of my friends are improv players. 2) There's a natural relationship between improv and role-playing, though in the latter, you have to stay in character a lot longer. And 3) improv players tend to be naturally quick witted and funny, which makes for an enjoyable laugh-filled role-playing session. I could probably write a paper no one would read about how improv skills and flaws translate to the role-playing environment. In any case, this choice would mold my role-playing activities a heck of a lot. Playing with people who are more used to acting out scenes than the nitty gritty of rules has led me farther and farther into New School territory.
(LARP aside: In the late 90s, I tried my hand at LARPing with the improv gang, organizing two or three events that relied very little or not at all on rules, but were heavy on role-playing. Great fun, and the fewer the rules - in other words, the less fighting there could be - the more fun we had. My thanks to White Wolf magazine's diceless columns for many of the ideas. Some people have been pestering me about doing some more, and I just might. They better get their sowing machines out or it won't be the same.)
Before jumping back into Dream Park, I tried my hand at Last Unicorn's Star Trek TNG game, but it was a less than stellar success. Players shrugged off the show's conceits and played it more (too) realistically. The captain refused to get off the bridge and the department heads sent their underlings into danger. It turned the NPCs into the real heroes, and though the players seemed fine with it, I chose to end the campaign. There were other changes in the air. More people were asking me about playing, and yet were afraid of the committment a campaign represented. Everyone was either in university or working, and schedules were tight. I took ST: TNG's surviving players, grabbed a few new guys and started running Dream Park again.
I crafted a website with all the player options, so that players could pick their skills and gear beforehand. Soon enough, I'd added a lot of missing options, created new Professions, ported skills and a more granular Tech Level over from GURPS, and tons of superpowers from all those Supers games I collected. (The site is still active and people I don't even know have told me they use it.) With Dream Park, my pool of players ballooned to the teens. It was easy to assemble whoever was available for any given one-shot, while players also racked points and felt they were progressing. For my part, I got to use all manner of material from my shelves (or Pyramid Online which was a great source of multi-genre material): Call of Cthulhu (especially the non-Mythos Blood Brothers books), GURPS, In Nomine, 2300 AD, Space 1889, AD&D: The Horde/Spelljammer, Time Master, Torg, Chill, Shadowrun, James Bond 007, Weird War II, DC Heroes, Ghostbusters, and more all provided adventure material for those games. Every game was completely different.
GURPS Heads, GURPS Heads, Suck 'em up, yum!
But I still wasn't using everything I owned. That, along with my desire to run something other than one-shots (as fun as they were), pushed me to come up with a GURPS campaign that could make use of the 100+ sourcebooks I had. That campaign was Shiftworld, in which we changed settings every few sessions, but the characters remained the same, except not. The frontier town sheriff would turn into a motorcycle cop and later into Mars base security chief, for example. However, he would still remember the other timeline when the setting shifted. His memories would also hold the revised timeline. Aside from the heroes (and one recurring villain), no one noticed the "shifts". So while we took advantage of the settings' potential for adventure, there was an overall arc about figuring out this mystery. Old West, Autoduel, Mars, Ice Age, Mecha, Steampunk, Vikings, Time Travel... and then too many of the key players moved away, so the mystery was never resolved. It was probably the single best campaign I ever ran though, and I'd love to get the old guys together again to put a button on it once and for all.Between that disappointing unfinished business and an overdose of one-shots, something had to give...
In Part IV: The Mini-Series
Further reading about this era :
Remembering a Dream Park scenario
RPG award shows started in this era
Lesson from Dream Park: In Medias Res
Lesson from Dream Park: Multiple GM personalities
Nazis and dinosaurs: Part of EVERY genre
Hosting a one-shot LARP
Culling the massive collection... possible?
Profiles of my players from this era:
-The Obsessive
-The Flusher
-The Noble Hero
-The Hipster Doofus
-The Dud
-The Rest
No comments:
Post a Comment