Monday, July 24, 2006
RPG brainstorming: Part four
One of the more interested RPG experiments (albeit a short-lived one) I participated in was a Vampire: The Dark Ages game that The Law ran a few years back. I only played in the first two sessions, and the chronicle itself died out after about five sessions. The point of the experiment was to put the onus of the system and statistics entirely on the GM.
When we were asked to make characters, we were told to generate a character's history ... and that was it. Lawrence was going to take care of all character statistics. In fact, while our histories could specify that we knew certain skills and were good/bad/whatever in them, we wouldn't actually know our stats. We couldn't compare stats to each other. We could just talk in general about being good with a sword or an expert navigator or whatnot.
I'd really like to try something like this again -- either from a player perspective or from a GM perspective. Part of the reason I liked the V:tDA experiment was because I despise min-maxing with a passion. I hate seeing my players build a perfect character out of points. I hate seeing characters with no flaws. I hate seeing characters that aren't built to need improvement. It just drives me nuts.
Now, there's nothing wrong with people who like to "game the system," so to speak, but it's just not something I enjoy. I have a feeling this is partially what drove me away from D&D and d20 -- too many optimal characters builds and too much focus on statistics and min-maxing. The most interesting characters are those that have major flaws and have to strive to improve. And I think Lawrence's experiment helped to nix any chance of the powergamer and min-maxer behaviour amongst the players involved in the V:tDA chronicle.
I'd like to try something like that again.
When we were asked to make characters, we were told to generate a character's history ... and that was it. Lawrence was going to take care of all character statistics. In fact, while our histories could specify that we knew certain skills and were good/bad/whatever in them, we wouldn't actually know our stats. We couldn't compare stats to each other. We could just talk in general about being good with a sword or an expert navigator or whatnot.
I'd really like to try something like this again -- either from a player perspective or from a GM perspective. Part of the reason I liked the V:tDA experiment was because I despise min-maxing with a passion. I hate seeing my players build a perfect character out of points. I hate seeing characters with no flaws. I hate seeing characters that aren't built to need improvement. It just drives me nuts.
Now, there's nothing wrong with people who like to "game the system," so to speak, but it's just not something I enjoy. I have a feeling this is partially what drove me away from D&D and d20 -- too many optimal characters builds and too much focus on statistics and min-maxing. The most interesting characters are those that have major flaws and have to strive to improve. And I think Lawrence's experiment helped to nix any chance of the powergamer and min-maxer behaviour amongst the players involved in the V:tDA chronicle.
I'd like to try something like that again.
// posted by Chris @ 2:39 PM 
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