Monday, 8 January 2018

Long-term (superhero) campaign advice

15 points based on 150 sessions of a superhero game. Featuring two systems, pitch resets, genre conventions, vanishing plot threads, and Doom Squid.

I recognise some of these lessons from The Watch House, like point 3 about personal screentime and group numbers - it very much depended on how entertaining the rest of the group found the shenanigans, and fortunately the group generally had a lot of time for it.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for that. An interesting read. It was 'differences of verisimilitude' that sunk the last supers RPG I ran - as not everyone at the table had the same level of investment, or understanding of genre conventions.

    I was reminded of the time at university - on our scriptwriting course - and we were kicking around ideas of what to write our dissertations on. At the time I was the course's Star Wars guy (this was pre-Prequels, early days of the Internet etc, and there was a lot less to remember!) and one of my peers very sagely talked me out of doing my dissertation about Star Wars because he knew I would end up hating having to dissect something I loved so unquestioningly.

    This moment came back to me when I was running our V&V game: I was way too invested in emulating a genre that the others didn't care so much about.

    There was also the issue with the concept of Blue Booking as the author brought up: everyone else had real life demands on their time and simply weren't that bothered about 'gaming-between-games'

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    1. Yeah, it's always "fun" being the only one who really cares.

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    2. And, yet, because of this, we shifted back to fantasy RPGs and ended up with our epic, three-year campaign which turned out to be the best thing our group has created to date.

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