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'

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

      Delete
    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.

      Delete