Roleplaying thoughts
Oct. 28th, 2005 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jcfialaWell, they've been calling for games to have at GenghisCon next February, and I sent in my latest adventure for Space Munchkin (which is called 'Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three', but that doesn't fit.) And I think I might just leave it at that. Maybe run a LG game or something to get my membership for free, and actually play some games at the con for a change...
That said, I've been considering writing a bit for RPGs, and in particular doing some game construction work. My first project is tenatively named The Book of the Unnameable, and in this case it's meant to be a replacement for Call of Cthulhu. The fact is, CoC has a lot of good things in it's structure, but there's a lot of problems too - random rolling for character stats, a lack of feat/advantage/disadvantage structure, the oddness that is the Credit Rating skill, too much detail on combat skills, no easy way to come up with 'an experienced investigator' other than eyeballing it... it really goes on for a while. So, I'd like to make something that keeps the good of CoC while fixing the bad, and also (hopefully), being fairly easily used with the huge library of existing CoC material. We'll see how that goes.
The other is something that leapt out of me - I was looking around at various things on the internet related to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. If you're not familiar, it's this mystery story that Charles Dickens wrote, got halfway through publishing (as he was doing the 'chapter at a time published in the magazine' thing he did), and then *died* without telling anyone the ending. It just stops.
Amusingly enough, a couple of people adapted this as a musical - you go to the musical, watch half of the story, and then the players stop and admit they have no idea what happens next, and the audience gets to vote on the outcome. Which is just about the coolest thing ever.
I was thinking that sounded like a marvelous title for a little roleplaying game. You could either play the roles of the existing cast, and finish the story, or you could come up with a general Dickensian RPG style. I'm not sure how the whole thing would hang together properly, but I just like the idea (and the title - Mr. Dickens could name a book, he could) too much to let it go.
That said, I've been considering writing a bit for RPGs, and in particular doing some game construction work. My first project is tenatively named The Book of the Unnameable, and in this case it's meant to be a replacement for Call of Cthulhu. The fact is, CoC has a lot of good things in it's structure, but there's a lot of problems too - random rolling for character stats, a lack of feat/advantage/disadvantage structure, the oddness that is the Credit Rating skill, too much detail on combat skills, no easy way to come up with 'an experienced investigator' other than eyeballing it... it really goes on for a while. So, I'd like to make something that keeps the good of CoC while fixing the bad, and also (hopefully), being fairly easily used with the huge library of existing CoC material. We'll see how that goes.
The other is something that leapt out of me - I was looking around at various things on the internet related to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. If you're not familiar, it's this mystery story that Charles Dickens wrote, got halfway through publishing (as he was doing the 'chapter at a time published in the magazine' thing he did), and then *died* without telling anyone the ending. It just stops.
Amusingly enough, a couple of people adapted this as a musical - you go to the musical, watch half of the story, and then the players stop and admit they have no idea what happens next, and the audience gets to vote on the outcome. Which is just about the coolest thing ever.
I was thinking that sounded like a marvelous title for a little roleplaying game. You could either play the roles of the existing cast, and finish the story, or you could come up with a general Dickensian RPG style. I'm not sure how the whole thing would hang together properly, but I just like the idea (and the title - Mr. Dickens could name a book, he could) too much to let it go.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-10-29 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-29 04:59 pm (UTC)In this case, I had done a Star Munchkin RPG game last year at Genghis, which went over really well. So, I've still got this pretty decent starship crew (The Starship Hemmingway) which I can use as characters, so it's less work to put together a game with them. And when I was trying to think of a good silly space adventure, the old filk song came to me. I've actually got an anthology of short stories based on the song upstairs somewhere.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-29 07:59 pm (UTC)Beth, Off to the Races...