r-
This is going to double as an open thread about r- for current and future players. Anything you want to say about the game so far in a threaded format, please do comment.
In the time I’ve been not-blogging, I’ve been running a postapocalyptic tabletop game called r-, after the theory of r/K selection. An r-selective environment is a deeply unstable one – a sea that’s irregularly ripped up by powerful storms, a desert where food is extremely rare, but abundant when found. It’s not an environment humans are meant to survive in.
It’s set in the same world as my book Big Town, but has no recurring characters. Some of the people those characters are based on are players in this game, and it would just be deeply, powerfully weird to have them meet fictional versions of themselves, roleplayed by fucking me.
Blog deserves a load of stuff relating to this. What it’s all about, thoughts on the process so far, logs of the game so far, but for now, as we reach the end of the first “season” of the game (marked by a change of city and of system, from the loose and untested Savage Worlds to the brilliantly easy to resolve, but rigorously playtested and carefully concieved World of Darkness core book) I want to describe, mostly for the benefit of players, some of what’s going to be different next season.
Most notably, in the first season, the party lacked a base of operations. They moved from place to place. Proper wasteland wanderers. In the second season there will be a base of operations right from the start, which allows for a lot more flexibility, ultimately. When the team has a place they can always go back to, they can take their time, decide what’s important to them, and generally have more power over the course the game takes. I found that giving my party no place to call home made the game awkwardly linear, especially since my goal from the start was to let the characters’ motives be the primary source of plot.
They won’t be limited to this base, they won’t be required to return to it, and they’ll have the option of taking new bases as the game goes on. The result is more consistent characters. In the first season the game had a The Road-like tendency toward transiency: my guys pass through the lives of others, rarely encountering those people again after they’d moved on. It’s a pretty interesting approach to a story, but makes a tabletop game frustrating on some level, I suspect.
In WoD there will be community, there’ll be identifiable parties and it’ll be up to my party to figure out who they want to make antagonists of and who they want as allies. There’ll be enough depth to the city, hopefully, that they’ll always have a broad choice of things to do, and I won’t always be able to anticipate what, exactly, the hell they want to have a shot at next. I really, truly want the shape of this game to be in the hands of the players.
Another difference comes from the change of system. WoD is just better defined in every possible way. You don’t have to take your skills based on vague impressions provided by the Savage Worlds book only to have it turn out that my interpretation of the rule was different, and I wanted a different roll for whatever you’re trying to do. Chargen is more involved, but makes loads more sense. Some of the numbers look vaguely arbitrary, but it’s rather the opposite. Instead of lazily slapping multiples of five or ten around on character sheets, they’ve playtested all this stuff carefully, and derived the chargen process from that playtesting.
And speaking of WoD, one of the players has played a *lot* of WoD. Which means I’ll always have someone there to keep me in check. I don’t think anyone knows the miserable Savage Worlds book better than I, so when I make a mistake, sometimes it goes unnoticed. Maybe I catch it weeks later, reading the book or going through the logs, but sometimes, presumably, it’s never caught at all. Meg’s expertise will mean what’s in the rules is what’s in the gottdamn game.
There’re characters I had no idea it’d take so long to introduce. I’d never run a game before, so had no clue about how it would be paced. Pacing will, I hope, be a lot nicer.
There’s other stuff, but I think this is enough to chew on for the mo’. Further posts in the next few days, assuming I don’t wander off again.
Players: what are your thoughts? Other people who’ve run games, whether you’re in this one or not: advice?
