2011 Books 19-20

[subplotkudzu]

19) Smallville RPG. This was very interesting. I have a lot of thoughts percolating which will find voice later, but the core idea of designing the game mechanics and sessions to focus on relationship tensions between the leads is inspired. 

20) A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of an American Nation by Catherine Allgore: another of the Christmas audiobooks, this was abridged, but still very interesting. While it had a definite slant in favor of the subject that bordered on hagiography at times it was still nice to read something about Mrs. Madison that wasn't just about decorating the White House (though about 1/7th of the book focused on that in exhaustive detail).   

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering about the Smallville mechanic. On one hand, it looks like a really innovative and clever idea, and I'm always willing to applaud novel mechanics. On the other hand, I've seen some brilliantly clever ideas for game mechanics that proved to be more trouble than they were worth.

What worries me about the Smallville system is that your rolls are all against the strength of a relationship, which means you have to define the people a character has relationships with, and the strength of all those relationships, during character creation. That seems as if you would have a fairly short list of relationships. You get the feel of a drama or a short story with a tight focus on the stars, not of an epic or a big novel with a large cast of characters, where the background is an important "character," and where NPCs routinely emerge from the background to become significant figures for the PCs (something that has happened several times in my recent campaigns). I'm not sure how you would adapt the mechanics to an epic rather than dramatic focus. But choosing a dramatic focus seems as if it might restrict the options for a campaign's evolution over time.

A lesser concern, but one that applies to supers, is that it doesn't seem that you can have a relationship to an abstraction: To the Earth's biosphere, or to scientific truth, or to enlightening all sentient beings, or to truth, justice, and the American way. Relationships are to people. And yet a lot of supers have relationships to abstractions as core motives. (And not just supers! Consider James T. Kirk's relationship to his ship.)

I'm interested but cautious, at this point. . . .

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I think relationships to abstracts are best covered by Values in Smallville. They're not as inclusive as you might like, but they're there. You roll a die for the Value and one for the Relationship.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Lisa beat me too it. It's easy enough to build an Asset for "protect the Earth" as both a die provider on environmentally related rolls and a plot point generator whenever you do something foolishly in character to save the planet. Those plot points are later used to fuel the abilities that let you protect the planet. But those abstractions aren't the point of the game - the focus is on stressing the relationships between the characters to see how those relationships grow and change.

The relationship web isn't all character creation, and even during character creation there are a LOT of Extras and Features (made during character creation Features are the important Extras, essentially the major NPCs, and they have relationships with two or more Leads that function the same way as the relationships between the leads). The relationship web displayed for season 9 in the book is insanely complicated, including strong relationships with dead characters whose influence still lingers.

Once character creation is over you can spend plot points in play to force a relationship with any new Feature or Extra the GM introduces, so the cast can sprawl pretty quickly if the players keep deciding that your NPCs are cool and they want to see more of them. If someone pops out of the background I expect your players will forge relationships pretty quickly.

Plus, the strengths and nature of relationships change during play. I haven't actually run it yet, but based on the book I'd be really surprised if at least one relationship per Lead didn't change strength or nature each session. The game is meant to mirror a soap opera and their ability to go on endlessly with the character relationships constantly changing, and it looks like it would work.