OK, well, Hobo Joe. Greetings Hobo Joe! Glad you're still here...hey...Hobo Joe? Where ya goin'?
No, no Hobo Joe, you got it all wrong. I didn't forget about you, man. I've just been crazy busy with real life is all.
When I said expect the extraordinary, you didn't think I meant it would be coming this month did you? Heh...um...no, no. I meant in December. Yep. ^ ^;
It turns out I needed a temporary hiatus from blogging, although I didn't know I did until it happened. I also didn't exactly want one. Long story short, I may still be rather sporadic for a bit, but December is looking to be when everything will be back on track.
I hope.
In the meantime...
While I may not have been telling you lot about any of my gaming ideas lately, that doesn't mean I haven't been having any. Oh contraire! My brain has been a buzz! It's been bubbling with bonafide, brilliant, bursts of bombastic badassery.
The subject? Superheroes of course. Couldn't you tell by my use of alliteration?
With a more direct hand in character creation and design, I have managed to get the players to (finally) comprehend the type of campaign setting I'm going for, without actually giving them too much information about the campaign itself. The idea being that I already know the style, theme, atmosphere, etc. of the campaign, and I just needed the PC heroes to fit that milieu.
Not having the majority of the players know the ins and outs of the game's setting is quite liberating. I have noticed that many modern players (heck, even those who started gaming within the last twenty years or so) get very hung up on setting. To me, the proliferation of setting heavy games, as opposed to those that provide a 'generic' system, but not so much a canon setting, actually made things more difficult for us 'genre junkies'.
Stay with me here and I'll try to explain.
If you tell players you're running a Star Trek game for example, and they aren't people for whom that is an instant guarantee of compatible fun, you are liable to get several responses:
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I can't play that. I can't take all those rubber aliens and cardboard sets seriously.
I know a lot about Star Trek (but I don't have a Star Trek game mindset), so I'm going to come up with some cockamamie story so I can be a Q in your TOS era game.
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Yeah.
Meanwhile, if you describe a space exploration game, with a sixties style, space opera motif, in which the PCs all serve on a starship in service of an alliance of Humans and aliens, you'll probably end up with some very Trek appropriate PCs.
That's essentially what I've done here with our new Supers campaign. I've assisted the players in coming up with genre appropriate characters, as opposed to characters appropriate to a specific setting. Now, as a result, they not only fit the setting perfectly, but they add to it as well.
Final pre-production and production elements are going on this week. Hopefully I will be able to reveal the results of my efforts very soon
See you in December everybody!
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Barking Alien
Glad you finally managed to get it (them?) right! Playing genre appropriate characters is fundamental to get into the mood, yet some players have an innate instinct for doing the opposite. You know, the ones who are always eager to torture prisoners when playing Starfleet officers, noble knights or superheroes, but refuse to do so if playing Warhammer 40K inquisitors.
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