Sunday, January 28, 2007

Low Impact High Weirdness

You know what I like? Games that make it easy to get into but then go deep over the long haul. I've mentioned in the past how both Eberron and S. John Ross' Uresia both make it super-easy for D&D people to hop on board. You can create a bog standard surly dwarf or axe-wielding viking for either campaign and then let the GM spoonfeed you the deeper weirdness of the two settings. Similarly, you can play Traveller without knowing much about sci fi other than what you can get out of watching Star Wars, yet there is so much more under the surface.

Low Impact High Weirdness is my new catchphrase for these kinds of games. The big thing about these games is that you don't need a PhD in the setting to whip up a PC, or for the player to know what to do with that PC. There are a lot of rich, wondrous games out there I simply will never play because I don't want to spend umpteen hours conveying the setting to the players so they can make appropriate characters. Most versions of Tékumel, for instance. Or Fading Suns. At its most basic, I don't want to tell players why the setting is cool, I want get them into the game and then show them.

Example: at my Eberron game this last Tuesday the PCs met up with Ms. Johnson in an abandoned tower. Since the party is composed of despicable sky pirates, she brought some back-up. When I described the kobold mercenaries perched on the tower, wearing ewok-style hang-gliders, one of the players nearly jumped out of his seat. This was something new and weird for him. He was startled with the idea of hang-gliding kobolds, pulling quasi-legit merc work in a human city. I loved that reaction.

The player was Jon, who does the same thing to me all the time in his awesome World of Alidor campaign. You can make a regular D&D character for that campaign, and go on regular adventures. Someone with no knowledge of the setting can show up and play cold, but the campaign is chock full of awesome memorable stuff. Hell, after the first session I wrote up a list of things I wanted to do in his campaign, just 'cause it was so loaded with coolness. (Hmm, I've only got three items crossed off that list. Looks like I need to get to work.)

Many games set in the modern world do a good job of being Low Impact High Weirdness. With its easy premise ('occult investigation in the Roaring 20s'), D&D style stats, and percentage skills, Call of Cthulhu is extremely newbie friendly. At least when you don't make the mistake of fetishizing the source material. Most other horror, spy, or action movie games work that way as well. Feng Shui has a boatload of wacky setting info, but actually works better if you only dole it out to the players in bitesized morsels. You start out in a stock action movie and only later see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Most White Wolf games don't work for me precisely because I need to grok too much at the beginning of a campaign. If the Storyteller has to explain the difference between a Tremere and a Brujah before I can make my PC, then I just don't really want to play. Is that fair, considering that back in the day I had to learn the difference between an elf and a dwarf? Not really. But nowadays I just don't have the time to absorb vast amounts of setting info prior to starting a game. Put me in the game now, and freak me out later.

4 comments:

  1. I find it interesting that you picked Vampire as a negative example, since I've always found it really easy to explain in very, very short order to new folks -- and the character creation process is pretty newbie-friendly: "You have three dots to spend on powers. This one makes you stronger, this one lets you turn invisible."

    I wouldn't want to try and set new people loose on Shadowrun character creation, on the other hand. Or GURPS.

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  2. GURPS is an even better example. Last time I played Shadowrun I was able to pick a template and roll out. Is that no longer possible in more recent editions? The setting was explained to me as "Seattle with cyberpunks and orcs". That seemed sufficient.

    Alexander, I'd be interested to hear how you answer for players the question "What do you do in a Vampire game?" I've never heard a exciting and short response to that question.

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  3. Shadowrun did do a good thing by including the templates. They generally suck and aren't even closed to optimized, but armed with a template and "cyberpunk with orcs," you are, indeed, good to go.

    Vampire explanations I've used tend to rely on known media. Back in the day, it was something like "Sort of like those Anne Rice books, but with more fighting and less drama."

    For my Sabbat game, it was "violent vampires in The Crow's version of Detroit, trying to keep the Anne Rice vampires from taking over."

    For my Setite game -- "You're the bad guys from Blade, trying to get your vampire God to rise."

    Most people I know have seen a lot of Vampire movies -- of different types -- so anything with vampires in it can be easily pitched off a known item.

    The only bad part in Vampire is that if you go through character creation in order (per the book), you pick skills and such before you hit Disciplines and realize they rely on certain skills. The one player aid I made was a cheatsheet describing which skills powered which Disciplines -- then had people pick Disciplines first. After all, isn't it a bigger issue to decided whether or not your vampire can turn invisible rather than how good a driver they are?

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  4. Fading Suns: the Dark Ages in space, replete with nobles, priests, serfs, and trade guilds. Space travel through jumpgates made by extinct aliens. Flavor of Dune, 40k, Star Wars, and Classic Traveller all sorta mixed in together. And wookies with six limbs.

    See? It's not really that hard.

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