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| Player-characters from Adam's Star Trek Adventures campaign |
A shared love of the specific setting (I.P.) is the secret sauce that turns a roleplaying campaign into a potential "forever campaign".
I had this Road to Damascus moment reading two brilliant pieces, just over a year ago, by my dear friend Adam Dickstein - on his
Barking Alien blog - about the success of his on-going, decade-long (
at least)
Star Trek Adventures campaign:
Why Star Trek: Prosperity Works and
Command Crew To The Bridge.
Both articles are a great, inspirational, read, and helped coalesce a variety of random thoughts I've had over recent years about why ideas I've had for games
haven't worked out.
Sharing Adam's attraction to licenced RPGs (
or, at least, RPGs that use established media properties as potential settings), it struck me that the 'secret sauce' to the success of his long-running
Star Trek game was the fact that all his players were not just sci-fi fans but dyed-in-the-wool
Star Trek fans.
They know, and understand, what is expected of their characters to satisfactorily emulate the goings-on of the
Star Trek universe, without the game devolving into a bunch of phaser-armed murderhobos raiding Klingon outposts for whatever loot they could find.
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| The players' Get Out of Jail Free card |
Imagine unleashing a gaming group who weren't into
Doctor Who on the Whoniverse of the
Doctor Who Roleplaying Game... with their own TARDIS.
The chances are anarchy would ensue as they realised they could, at the bare minimum, dodge pretty much any set-up the gamesmaster threw at them (
if they wanted to) because of their access to a magic box capable of travelling anywhere in space and time!
Let alone coming to terms with the "talk first, fight last" attitude of the game system!Or picture a superhero campaign setting with a group of players that doesn't read comics or even, particularly, like the Marvel or DC movies!
Again, it would just become simply a power fantasy as the players would have no understanding of - or, necessarily, respect for - the tropes of the works that the gamesmaster was seeking to draw upon.
There's a good chance the game would soon, unintentionally, replicate
Prime Video's The Boys, but with the players' characters being their world's answer to the villainous Seven.
Such set-ups might work for a few sessions, even a mini-campaign, because such weighty matters may not be of such great importance initially (
except where they impact the specific adventure). But for a game to have legs everyone definitely needs to be on the same page.
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Black Adam rips Terra-Man in half in DC's 52;
not the actions of a good guy! |
Sure, the gamesmaster could write a lengthy introductory booklet to the setting (
I know, I've done it MANY times), but there's no guarantee anyone will actually read it and take on board what you are trying to get across.
You could also have a "session zero" where you try and spell it all out, face-to-face with your players, but again, the chances are this will come across as a dull TED talk and the majority will zone out.
Some - even you, the gamesmaster - may also see this as a waste of precious gaming time, especially when you only have limited "gaming slots" in your calendar (
not all of us have the luxury of biweekly campaign sessions, dotted around assorted other gaming escapades).
Even with the most "straight-forward" RPG setting (
or so you perceive it) there's still an element of risk, a possible "breakdown in communication" between the heavily invested gamesmaster and the "just want to play a game" players.
You always run the risk of the old adage that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" and the players will not grok the atmosphere that the GM is aiming to create, and will instead take his toys and run amok.
Game setting or established IP, the more it veers from normality, everyday life and learned experience, the more the GM will have to explain and the more risk he runs that the players will get the wrong end of the stick or simply not pay attention.
The best way to motivate a player is to place their character in a setting they are already familiar with and invested in.
Which is why so many of us default to games and settings where killing monsters and stealing their treasure is
de rigueur. Because we all get it. As I've said many times before that's why
Dungeons & Dragons-style games (
although not necessarily just D&D) tend to be the
lingua franca of gamers.
Whether you like those games or not, everyone has heard of them, has an opinion on them and knows what is expected in them. Get enough like-minded souls together - and there are more
D&D players than any other setting, style or genre - and you have a game.
But what if you want something else? The easiest, most obvious, route to go is a licensed game or setting, because it has an inbuilt fanbase. And you hope, in the Venn diagram of fandoms, that your players fall into the precious overlap where they want to play
your game in someone else's established setting.
And that is the secret sauce, my friend. It's not a great revelation, but it's my revelation.
No matter how much you - as the gamesmaster - love a setting, if the players don't share your passion, the game isn't going to last.
