subplotkudzu | The Third Prospectus

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campaign prospectus

The Third Prospectus

So now we have the third prospectus, which produced a major failure of a game - burned out after 2 sessions -, and shifted us away from my doing a Prospectus for a while and going with a new GM directed fantasy setting, described below in 'The Bard Debate'. So the question is, what went wrong?

Ghostbusters: Hartford of Darkness for Ghostbusters(A3, S2, K2, B2 = 9)
“The franchise rights alone will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” With the number of CHI (Chargeable Haunting Incidents) in Connecticut rising, now is the perfect time for entrepreneurs and researchers to buy into GBI and take the Nutmeg State by storm! It won't be easy, what with prying reporters, wary politicos and competition from the Warner Exorcist Group. Oh, and ghosts, whose frequency rates are disturbingly high...and rising. Anyone want a Twinkie?

I don't often put out game ideas that are pure humor, but this is one. I'll be using the Ghostbusters RPG, which is simple and captures the feel of the movie nicely. Yes, movie: Ghostbusters II never happened. This will be semi-episodic, with an ongoing thread of making the business viable. Don't worry – no spreadsheets required.

The Psi-Men for Marvel Super Heroes(A3, S2, K3, B3 = 11)
The year: 2004. The place: Earth. The power: Unlimited! 20 years ago the first psychic powers manifested. For fifteen years Psis were dismissed. In 1999 a new generation appeared: kinetics rather than ‘paths, their ability to change the world could not be denied, and in the post 9/11 world, the fear took root. Now a Psionic band must make their way in the world, building a place of safety and defending a world that hates and fears them from the renegades of the growing Psi community.

Yes, it's the X-men. Specifically, it's the X-men from the movies in both tone and style. Everyone gets one Psionic power, with the younger psis being more powerful, the older ones more experienced. Right now, this is my demo case for GURPS 4E, but that may change [it did, to the MSH engine]. One thread will be building a place of safety, but I leave the methods to you.

Northern Knights for Pendragon (A1, S1, K1, B3 = 6)
The call of the round table carries even into the wilds beyond the Hadrian's Wall! Follow the saga of northern clan finding its way between Christian and Pagan, Civilized and Wild, Riches and Ruin, Clan and Self. Explore the Celtic lands as knights and warriors in the days of glory, where sorcerers and fell beasts contrast against beauty and pageantry. Live in a time when passion ruled, honor was assumed and glory was the benchmark against which all a man's accomplishments were measured.

The game mechanic is Pendragon, and it will be episodic – each session will cover one year's worth of adventure, with chances for you to improve your clan and your standing during the ‘winter phase' between sessions. On the softer side, romance and marriage are integral parts, even if they don't always go together like a horse and carriage....

Blood Red Soil for Castle Falkenstein (A1, S2, K3, B2 = 8)
“Wanted: Hard Working Settlers. The town of Cairo, Syria Planum, Mars, is looking to grow. We offer land grants and repayment of passage to any bodies after one year of profitable residency. Slackers, connivers and wastrels need not apply.” Naturally, there are problems: Martian wildlife, opposing colonial powers, established land barons, the iron soil barring faerie, and the Martian Pyramids on the horizon. But with the American west nigh unto full, the Mars' red soil might be last frontier.

Yup, it's a Martian Western. It's Castle Falkenstein (with its benefit of my wife possibly joining us) mixed with Space 1889 and barring some of the more outre concepts. You are all Terran (where on Terra I leave to you...) settlers in Cairo, either an established family, meeting on the Aetherflight/Train, or some combination of the two, trying to make a go of it for a year.

Firestorm Effect 2000 for Silver Age Sentinels(A3, S3, K3, B1 = 10)
"Firestorm: The aftermath of a nuclear explosion." "Firestorm Effect (FE): a person, place or thing placed outside physical laws by through encounter with a Firestorm or similar mutanegen." 50 years since FE's appeared and the world is a strange, scary place. Fortunately, some use their inhuman power to serve humanity, protecting us from cosmic forces, alien invasions, criminal cartels and FEs who have succumbed to power's corrupting nature. The world needs saving, and it's up to you.

If the Psi-Men are the X-Men movies, FE2000 is the Justice League or Avengers. The PCs are the greatest heroes of the world that housed the Trilateral Headquarters on Energy Management and the Ossuary in the 1950s. I'll be doing this in Tri-Stat, and really letting my inner comic book geek go nuts in terms of major threats and versatile powers.

The Russia Campaign Book 2: Descent (A4, S3, K3, B1 = 11)
Maksyn's worst winter in a generation is finally ending. Months of practice and strange new companions make opening the door in the seashell tower a possibility. The Reptoids have fled below, into the depths that drove the old Boyar mad and inspired the images on the Apocalypse Tapestry. Dare you follow? Dare you not? What waits below is known only to God and the Kindly Old Woman of the Forest, and neither reveals much.

This is continuing the D&D Russia game, with the added hitch of Arkadj going to Constantinople while the rest of you plunge into the caverns below the mines below the church below the Mad Boyar's basement. There are threats, but you have stout hearts, strong limbs, nimble fingers and unshakeable faith. What's the worst

Of the above games, four of the six specifically mention building things, maintain families and the other things that are common to play directed games. The 5th was likely going to be built league style, and the players would have a ton of control over the world and setting. Only the 6th was clearly GM directed and a return to something we'd done recently. For reference, D&D was not the only flashback:

netcurmudgeon and

ashacat had both played in the original Firestorm Effect game;

kriz1818 had been in a later session of that and was a player in an older game which was a C Falk Martian Western.

With that in mind, let's look at the scores. First observation: the high scores were lower this time around. The players were by the numbers less enthused with the choices. Part of that was replacing Jason, who just liked everything, with Karen (listed as B), who didn't want to step into an ongoing game: anything that was ongoing she rated a 1. That 1 in The Russian Campaign was what put Psi Men ahead in the numerical tie - otherwise we would have gone back to the familiar GM directed campaign.

Second observation: The returning players went for the familiar, and building things was not a draw. Excluding Karen the Russia Campaign scored a 10, FE2k a 9 and

kriz1818 gave Blood Red Soil its only enthusiastic score. Northern Knights got hammered, while Hartford of Darkness got a respectable middle finish:

netcurmudgeon was afraid we wouldn't be able to maintain humor), but

ashacat wanted to carry around an unlicensed particle accelerator.

This left Psi Men. Like the Mage game in the first prospectus, I suspect that Psi-Men was rated as well as it did because of the popular movie analogy. Unlike the Mage game, I wasn't smart enough to avoid that.... As has been mentioned in the second prospectus thread the game was not limited to a single flaw, but part of the problem was the players not deciding on a direction. Or if they did, they weren't passing it to me.

The failure of the players to absorb genre conventions and the disconnect between the players perception of game reality, the GMs perception of same and the game mechanics not matching either didn't help, and I think we were best served by pulling the plug when we did rather than wrestle with it for another 4 sessions of communication disconnect.

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Do you think the Psi game would have worked if perhaps one of the challenging elements was removed? As in, would it pbe possible for you to salvage the concept?

For the record, I probably would have sided with netcurmudgeon on the Ghostbusters game, mostly because I am doomed to the role of straight man in my life, but I would have been all over BRS.

It might be possible to salvage it, but only in a new form. After the first two sessions it was never going to turn into a X-Men style supers game, it might have turned into something else interesting. We'd need to go back, hack off the ending of the last session, have a mission statement talk and swap out the engine based on that mission statement. That's one of the reasons I'm egging this discussion on now.

I really enjoyed the Mars game - right up to the point where I got **totally** confused, that is. It's not every game that the characters survive crashing a zeppelin and have to trek across the Martian desert and all ...

Well, that confusion might have stemmed from the fact that 10 years ago I hadn't learned how to trim back my natural tendency towards subplot kudzu, and that I was just making it up as I went. That failed campaign is one reason why I want to return to the setting and try to do something better.

It looks from the scores on this and the previous games as if you are letting players rate campaigns with from 1 to 4 points, independent of each other, because if I'm adding right the players have totals of from 12 to 15 points assigned. Some players tend to rate everything high, and some to rate everything low. This may decrease the information you get from their ratings.

You might like to think about giving each player a flat 12 points, to bid on the various campaigns as they choose. If they bid 0 points, they are vetoing that campaign (assuming you won't leave a player to sit a campaign out). They're free to bid the whole 12 points on one campaign, if they really like it. You might see the clearer emergence of favorites that way. Or maybe not.

We can zero things, we just don't do it often.

I'm not sure I'd be happy, if I gave something a low rating and somebody else gave it a twelve, and it won. Though Bri probably wouldn't *tell* us that, I suspect.

It depends on your method of analyzing the votes. When I do this, I don't simply total up votes to give each campaign a score. Rather, I look for campaigns that everyone rates at 3 or higher, or, failing that, that nearly everyone rates at 3 or higher, with maybe one player who gives them a 2. It's almost always possible to find such options.

If you're absolutely not willing to play something, the simple answer is just to give it a 0.

Kris, something to realize about whswhs' system is he has a larger pool of players and some of them could opt out of the cycle. If someone put 12 points on Game A and 0 on B C D E and F, game B could have the most players giving it high scores. That means game B is chosen because it produces the highest proportion of happy players. The '12 points to A' player doesn't play for 6 months (or 2 years, or whatever) because they stated they didn't want to play in anything that wasn't A and the GM is heeding their wishes. This system does require that the GM not let people game it with such tactics, since letting someone play something they said they had no interest in defeats the purpose of the highest number of happy players.

Given that we have a different format of a repeating small group, I modified it to our current 0=blackballed counting total.

In practice, though, I've never had to exclude a player for that reason. My players don't play silly buggers with the voting system; if they give a campaign 0 points it's because they really don't want to play in it. The most extreme vote pattern I've ever seen was one player who gave 0 points to five campaigns and 4 points to the other five—and I ended up running one of the five she liked. Normally players only rate a couple of campaigns at 0, at most.

If you've already decided that everyone in your group is going to play, and that you're only going to run one campaign, then a 0 does have to be treated as a blackball. But if the only campaign that no one gave a 0 to came out with, say, 1 2 1 2 as its votes, I'd take it as a sign that I hadn't come up with anything sufficiently popular, throw the whole list out, and offer a new list.

I'm afraid that as a player I would be ambivelant at best for any high-concept RPG setting. And the problem of 'building things' and 'maintaining families' is that they imply a campaign a little longer than just a couple of sessions, otherwise all that prep work is chucked out)

Even voting and ranking among multiple choices for a game means there runs the risk of chosing the lesser of evils (meaning no one is particuarly happy).

Why not have your players themselves come up with five ideas of what they want to do, look for commonalities among their choices, and then try and kit-bash together a few loose framework options and then simply take it from there? Heck you could even have them vote on what you come up with ("Bog standard D&D"; "Call of Cthulhu updated to the 1960s", etc.).

Come up with several convention style scenarios based on the above, and based on which one 'clicks', take that one to run your campaign.

Or put out something that *you* would have wanted to play (but can't because you're the GM). Come up with some sketchy idas, and allow it to grow organically from your players actions in order to hook them in.

::B::

Well, Doc, all of these are games I'd want to play, and they do usually start sketchy. I'd love to do some more organic growth, but that requires enough player-direction for the growth to occur. That has not been forthcoming in the campaigns of late, for several reasons.

I understand where you're going, but we've haven't run into a lesser of evils situation: outside of Psi-Men and the communication problems, everyone's been happy with the games even when they weren't the ones everyone rated a 4. No game anyone ever rated a 1 (1: Well, it's not high on my list, but I'll give it a shot if it's what everyone else wants) has been selected, so there's always been some enthusiasm and buy in.

As for asking everyone to come up with 5 options each, I suspect either nothing is going to match at all, or what does match will be either the most common elements or returns to things we've done. One of the reasons I adopted the prospectus idea is to provide a really broad range of possible games that I would like to run and to showcase how strange and varied such settings can be. No offense to my players, but I've found if someone can come up with 5 cool campaign ideas that they know they'd enjoy, they're likely already be running something or are ready to do so. Plus one of the worst experiences as a player-creator is watching the GM take your idea of what you wanted and mangle it because that's not how it was in your head. I have encountered this in acceding to "run a game using X" requests from players and I don't want to go back to it.

Now, a communal 'series pitch' for the campaign might work - something akin to Prime Time Adventures - but that still leaves the question of mechanics, and getting those mechanics to mesh with the setting.

I tend to agree with both of you on this. The campaign(s) pitch worked for our group and led to the Tudor Talents campaign, but it's mutated considerably from the first ideas I had and the direction has been a lot more superheroics (or at least bashing and thumping bad guys; the Four from Whitehall aren't what Id think of as heroes, exactly) and a lot less spies and conspiracies.

Despite my strong indie-rpg leanings and all that narrative stuff I like, I also believe that many gaming groups are more comfortable and more functional with a GM-led setting, at least initially. As characters grow the players discover their own goals and can increase their input into the campaign direction and in-session narration. Our old Amber Diceless game started off fairly narrowly defined by me as the GM with a quest format, but soon developed in many directions I'd never of planned by myself.

I rather like the communal 'series pitch' idea myself, and think that Primetime Adventures or Universalis might be great campaign/series generators as well as being story games in their own right.

"one of the worst experiences as a player-creator is watching the GM take your idea of what you wanted and mangle it because that's not how it was in your head."

This works both ways of course, with many GMs grimacing as their lovely world and all the setting design they've crafted gets ignored or mangled by the PCs riding roughshod all over the GM's creation. Shared creativity is hard work and needs both buy-in and compromise. It's tough.

"This works both ways of course, with many GMs grimacing as their lovely world and all the setting design they've crafted gets ignored or mangled by the PCs riding roughshod all over the GM's creation. Shared creativity is hard work and needs both buy-in and compromise. It's tough."

Well, as a GM I walk into this knowing that the players are going to do things with the setting I hadn't anticipated. The whole point of the design is to see how someone else changes it. As a playing saying "I want to play in this", I suspect it more like a producer turning to a screenwriter and asking them to write you a film based on X premise, getting it and saying "this isn't what I asked for at all!" In my experience the person with the initial idea should be the one building the framework for the other players to build on (unless it is something designed as a communal series pitch).

As for Tudor Talents being more bashing and thumping, well, you can blame the ease of bashing and thumping plots and the mental drain of dealing with DD. What did you tell me last month? "Hack and slay all the way" now that the child is around?

Okay, if there's a sense of ownership of the initial idea, I totally agree that that individual should be the one building the framework, but I don't really see the GM as much different to any other player in the sense that he or she expects to see their idea changed in the process of play, and to grow from the inputs of the other players. I don't think that a player can reasonably pitch an idea for which they then expect another person to be the GM and then think that said idea will remain true to the image in their head. In such a case it would be essential to insure that the creator and the developer were really on the same page.

It's this potential for disconnect between idea and implementation that sinks a lot of campaigns, I feel, and that's only really addressable by talking through expectations and desires before the game begins. While I have a lot of time for the GM-led campaign design I know from bitter experience it's all to easy to build a world or campaign idea up with lots of preparations that doesn't really grab the players' imaginations when it comes to the table.

'Hack and slay all the way'? Well if it ain't broke...

I hope your DD is thriving, by the way.

Despite my strong indie-rpg leanings and all that narrative stuff I like, I also believe that many gaming groups are more comfortable and more functional with a GM-led setting, at least initially. As characters grow the players discover their own goals and can increase their input into the campaign direction and in-session narration. Our old Amber Diceless game started off fairly narrowly defined by me as the GM with a quest format, but soon developed in many directions I'd never of planned by myself.

By and large, I take an approach to gaming that I like to call "auteurist," borrowing a term from film criticism. I feel that what I'm offering my players that makes my games more appealing than other people's is my personal creative vision, embodied in a campaign premise, a setting, and/or a style of handling the premise and setting in actual play. If a democratic consensus could achieve creative inspiration, they wouldn't need me—but it can't. On the other hand, in actual play, I tailor scenarios to fit the abilities, motives, and agendas of PCs and the interests of players; and a "scenario" is a situation that will be interesting and/or challenging to players, with no preplanned conclusion—it's always "let's throw this at them and see what they do with it."

On the third hand, one of my current campaigns, Manse, started out with my asking each of the four players to make up an entire aristocratic household of mages, with its own magical style, cultural traditions, rules of marriage and succession, and family tree, and to make up characters from that household; then I took what they individually had created and wove it all into a larger pattern. This wasn't group consensus creativity; it was four people's individual creativity being tapped, with all the clashes being sources of plot and theme. This may be what you actually mean by "shared creativity," but an essential ingredient in this case, I believe, was my individual creative contribution of managing the sharing.

an entire aristocratic household of mages, with its own magical style, cultural traditions, rules of marriage and succession, and family tree

Ooo! *That's* what's going on in the background of that story I've been poking at off and on! Thank you, Mr. Serendipity! ;-)

Or if they did, they weren't passing it to me.

Well, as I commented here (http://brianrogers.livejournal.com/7109.html?thread=17605#t17605) that didn't seem to be an option at the time.

Something that might be useful to talk about is the ground rules for either a player or the GM calling a "time out" in game, so that we can all step out of character and talk about what's going on. Yeah, it's a complete break of dramatic tension, but IMO, it would be a Good Thing for everyone to know that this can be done if someone thinks they need it.

Absolutely. We have done it before - Ashacat's complaint about the Mongol invasion for example, which led to the game going on a break and the rehashing of that scenario.

But something less drastic would have helped Psi-men a lot. I'd rather have these things thrashed out in advance than find them in play, but once they're found we need a good way to disarm them.

Agreed.

Well, I think that a GM statement that if a player is feeling that things are off course, or they simply need state-check, they can ask for a 'time out' would be a good place to start. That empowers the players to speak up before they find themselves down a path that seems wrong. Given that it's an act of collective storytelling, you can think of it as calling for a meeting of the writers and the senior editor! :-)

I feel at a disadvantage in all of this. I've only been involved for 18 months and played in 13 sessions (as per BR)and we are on the 4th(?)story. I still feel new at all of this and I am quite ignorant of all the discussion that could go on regarding role-playing and the theory behind it. And for the most part I'm not sure I want to get that deep in to it.

I hadn't realized I voted already in progress games down completely. I was just going with what my feelings on what was written.

I think there is a flaw in the voting system or maybe the way I understood the voting system is flawed.

If everyone else ranked some game really high and I'm the only one who didn't, I think a discussion amongst us all could take place. I don't really care what I play as long as I get to spend time with you all. For the most part I've enjoyed everything.

(Didn't I start a character for the Russia game? what happened to that? I don't remember or is that what I shoot down?)

Does the voting have to be the end decision?

And for the most part I'm not sure I want to get that deep in to it.

Well, you don't have to - I do think about it that deeply, for the same reason that you think deeply about puppet design. It's what I do for fun. That doesn't mean you have to go with anything other than your gut instinct on things, but if I want to make the most enjoyable game possible, I have to put in a little more work!

I hadn't realized I voted already in progress games down completely. I was just going with what my feelings on what was written.

Which was exactly what you were supposed to do. I wanted your unbiased input on what I presented to you. It was a fluke that you voted against the Firestorm Effect 2000 game as a continuing game because there was nothing in the description that mentioned that the other players had dabbled with it. But as you commented before, you did vote against the ongoing games because you didn't want to be left in the dark. That's a perfectly fair statement, and one that needs to be considered. One of the challenges of the ongoing game scenario is how to bring in new players, and it's not surprising that new players opt for games in which they will have an equal creative stake.

In the case of the Psi-Men game, there were a multitude of errors that made the game not work - but it was still the one voted in by consensus. If I had gotten my act together more as a GM I doubt we would be having this discussion now - I don't want you to think that your opinion is somehow less valued because the voting you engaged in led to that game being favored - everyone else gave it a high rating too.

As for voting being the end of the discussion, I think it does, otherwise there's much more room for politicking and going along to get along rather than a real consensus. But an increased amount of discussion before the voting occurs is probably in order.

(Didn't I start a character for the Russia game? what happened to that? I don't remember or is that what I shoot down?)

No, you didn't shoot that down - I constructed a PC for you in case of a pick up game for that, or if we ended up going back to that right after the first Capt. Fasaad story. Instead we went with 1001 NYN. I need to discuss character concepts with you if we do end up going back to Russia soon.

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The Third Prospectus

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