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. . . .