While looking at the TV Tropes Wiki for inspiration for my next trope post, a recurring idea kept coming back.
You know that thing where a bunch of gamer geeks come out of the latest Superhero/Spy/ Action/Sci-Fi/Fantasy movie and they have this discussion:
“Dude, this, like, totally rocked!” says the extroverted enthusiastic geek!
“Yeah, ’twas cool” says the cautious, analytical one.
They both turn toward the third one, often the group’s DM or the Supercool-seeking player. They know what he’s going to say…
“This would make such a cool game… ”
And both nod without answering… having heard it a thousand times. They know that it almost never does.
As I was pondering this, several ideas formed in my mind to try to prove this thing wrong. Insights were had, things were discussed with friends, and a project was born…(More on this later)
Then it hit me, I got me an honest to god RPG trope on my hands here. Heck I even started talking to other people about it by saying ‘You know that thing where…’, which is basically TV trope’s entry page for creating new tropes…. and the people I talked to knew about that trope of mine! Weeee!
Now a caveat, there have been numerous successful adaptations of stories to RPGs. The various incarnations of the Star Wars RPGs are a prime example… and technically so is D&D. So the list could go on for quite a while… killing my own argument in the egg.
Ah I love writing when I think on the fly… I’ve got quite a few levels of painting myself in corners it seems…
That’s when the windows exploded inwards in thousand of gem-like shards! Once again, the NaNoWriMo Ninjas attacked our poor writer to save him from his poorly planned plot dead-end!
What I mean is that I strongly believe that when Joe Gamer runs out to buy the Serenity RPG after seeing the movie/series he does not find what he’s really looking for. While I was told that Serenity is a pretty decent game, I believe that buying it, learning it, and then setting up a game is a large investment that often fails to bring the same emotions and thrills felt during the movie.
Which is what sparked the comment in the first place. The gamer wants to re-live the emotion of the movie in his games.
Like many things in life, I strongly believe that there is a cheat out there that allows a crafty DM to capture the thrills of a cool (insert favorite media narrative) in a game session without actually making a game/adventure specifically about it.
And I think that the cheat is to explore and exploits the tropes of that cool movie/novel/etc… and add a sprinkle of crunch when necessary. You then mix together and apply them in your game. Voilà! Feeling recaptured.
I’ll put my money where my typing fingers are and try to do this with a classic scene (Tackling something bigger is part of a special team project… stay tuned).
Hollywood has only actually filmed one chase scene and they simply reuse it over and over. Often features a Cool Car. It frequently results in Television Geography, since the scene is edited together to be dramatically compelling, not physically possible.
The Chase Scene is a gimmick I have very rarely seen done right in RPGs. Mainly because what’s cool about a chase scene is often killed by overly complicated (and/or quite boring) mechanics or it becomes an overly crunchy mini game that can derails from the feel of a chase.
For example, in D&D, if played straight, the fastest character wins the chase… end of story. Or you can do an extended opposed Dexterity check (A series of rolls vs each Dex scores) with hopefully some color commentary from the DM. Zzzzz…
But look at the entry on the TVTrope wiki, there are a ton of tropes associated with the Chase Scene. So to make a successful chase scene in your RPG:
- Pick the coolest conflict resolution you have in your game system and base the chase on it using some sort of metric to keep things honest (Relative Distance ranks, Chase Hit Points, actual range, etc.).
- Assume both parties have approximately the same speeds. If needed, give a very slight bonus to the faster party whenever a conflict resolution is needed.
- Chart the chase on a simple Decision Diagram.
- On the chart, add your favorite trope-based ‘encounters’ in the decision boxes. Pick the ones that force interaction with the environment in a cool way (a Chain-link fence, a Road block, an Exploding vehicle, a fruit cart, a canyon/alley ripe for a Wronski Feint, etc)
- At each encounter point:
- Have the opposed party be near each other enough to interact with both the environment and each other.
- Give PCs key choices that can affect the outcome of the chase.
- Have conflict rolls to resolve the encounter.
- Adjust chase metric based on result
- Aim to have the chase end at one of the key encounter point.
- If it’s your style, fudge rolls (to prevent bad NPC or PC failures) when needed to make the scene build to sufficient tension before acting out the final resolution.
So you see, while mechanics are necessary, your players will recognize and react more strongly to the chase-associated tropes and will probably enjoy it more than just rolling on Chase Chart F and cross-reference it to Armour types and local Humidity…
Expect more on this soon…
Have a nice week!
Ah! The chase scenes… What a classic source of bad RPG execution.
I’ve done only once something that felt like a chase and it was a boat that was trying to board the one that the player where on…
There was no roll at all involved and no map. I think it’s the main reason that it felt like a chase. I was describing with ever growing detail the closing ship and the player where trying to shake it while preparing for the potential boarding.
Although it was not formalized with a decision diagram it basically felt like what your suggesting. The player where steering the chase on a decision basis not on an actual map with a bunch of rule to move about.
If you want an idea of how to do a chase well, take a look at this:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dufe/20071121a
This is an adventure sysnopsis for a poll going on right no on WotC. The winning adventure gets made and published in the new online Dungeon magazine.
This adventure (Cross City Race) won for week 1.
Hopefully it goes all the way, but even if it doesn’t, the synopsis alone gives enough tips on chases to let you do your own.
Speaking of car chases. You might find this car chase generator interesting. It was done up by a dude on the theRPGsite forums.
http://www.colugo.org/jmcmurra/generators/chase/chase.htm
My preferred hack: The chased determines the difficulty and nature of rolls by deciding where to go (the chaser pretty much must follow). This means setting the DC for everyone involved. Driving DC 20 for some Bond-like stunts, say, and DC 10 for simply driving a bit too fast. If either or both sides fail, they get repercussions as per normal rules and the situation where they went (e.g. collision with another car, falling off a cliff, whatever).
The chaser can give up after hearing the DC, in which case the chased gets away.
If the chaser succeeds at three (adjusted by /-2 for relative speed) consecutive checks, the chased has nowhere to go. If chased is faster than chaser and succeeds at three consecutive checks, freedom has come.
If both would qualify for winning at the same time, play more rounds until someone fails.
Extending the outline above to allow for all kinds of tricks and shortcuts is not terribly hard, either.
As we walked out of the iMax theater, all I could say to my friend was “THAT is what D&D is supposed to be. Beowulf ______ing his own ______ so he could reach far enough down the _______’s _______ to rip out its _______ with his bare ______.” (Edited for spoilers 😉 )
Ooohhh… Madlibs!
Beowolf eating his own underpants so he could reach far enough down the tyrannosaurus‘s nose to rip out its spleen with his bare buttocks.
…how’d I do?
If you’re looking for a good implementation of chases, using rules not too dissimilar to d20 norms, look at Spirit of the Century. The rules do a good job of working a lot like a typical chase.
For your overall point, I suspect the best/most true to TV and movie reality games are systems made to emulate that reality. Primetime Adventures does a good job of modeling TV reality.
Hmmm… I might have elaborated too much on the chase and missed my main point…
I believe the best way to make the ‘oh man, this would make a great game’ RPG trope ring true, one must focus on the tropes brought up by the movie more than on the mechanics or the actual setting of a movie….
Choose tropes, fit mechanics to them, add fluff… feeling reproduced!
It needs work… and it’s a harder sell than I initially thought.
I get the felling that people go ‘oh yeah, sounds ’bout right’ and then jump right into the crunch…
Sounds like a challenge to me…
If you want to recreate the experience of a series or a movie, you need to reproduce the drama. That requires players who are into a it, a system that tries to do it, or good luck. I’d argue mere tropes are not enough.
(I do nevertheless suggest checking out Spirit of the Century SRD. The game is rated among the best at rpg.net and the SRD is free.)
Cracks Knuckles…
We’ll see Tommi… My gut feeling screams I’m unto something. And I’m a very intuitive person.
My best games were the ones my players were most involved with (duh!) and the ones that featured more fluff than crunch. (Or where near-perfect synergy of fluff and crunch was achieved)
I believe that using tropes is one of the great ways of hooking the player’s attention and expectation to what’s happening in the game.
But I’ll stop arguing, I recognize that I may be wrong, but I’ll do my best to prove it otherwise… 🙂
And if all fails, well there’s always the Chewbacca defense!
P.S.: Yeah, those SotC chase rules are good!
Just to make it explicit: I am not saying that tropes are a bad idea (on the contrary; tropes and cliches are extremely useful tools). I just think that there is a lot more than those that is important in replicating the mood of a given work of fiction.
That is, tropes may be necessary, but they are not sufficient.
Oh for that I agree … It’s a ‘feeling the elephant from different parts’ thing. And tropes are just part of the elephant, granted.
We may just disagree as to how big a part of the elephant it is. And I’m sorry not to have rational arguments to give you at this stage.
But I will have them…. I must exorcise this Trope as Driver of a campaign beast one way or another!
Hey, Ronin… thanks for the advertisement. 🙂