Maybe I am the only one, but some settings that make for great books and movies don't seem to translate well into RPGs.
Here are three broad categories that trend that way.
A great book setting that is relatively dark and hopeless makes it hard to role-play in for long stretches. Even Call of Cthulhu modified the rules after the 2nd Ed. to include sanity increase rules and recovery. Something like Westeros where successful, noble characters end up betrayed or dead or both (and then come back as hideous undead critters) has some significant challenges too. You either have to tone down the dark atmosphere (modifying the feeling of the setting) or risk depressing or driving away players. Try the Red Wedding on a couple of PCs and post about how that worked out for you. ;-)
Books where a singular hero or heroine is wildly more powerful that his or her peers is a tough setting to game in. Everyone wants to play the (fill in the blank), and if you have a whole herd f these special chosen characters then you're breaking canon. So, you end up modifying the setting for playability.
There are some games that make great one-shots that are hard to sustain through a campaign. There just isn't enough depth to keep things going. Bunnies & Burros comes to mind, especially if you're using the breeding and energy rules. Jolly Blackburn lampooned this in his Spoof game Dawg where characters had to roll to avoid doing things dogs would do like chase cars or sniff at things.
What is the collective wisdom?
In service,
Rich
Www.drgames.org
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Good call on the Red Wedding and other such grimdark overdose settings. It works fine for some groups, but man you really need to be sure the group is down with that.
Some other settings, the mechanics need to give a bit in order to support.
Good luck making maps for House of Leaves for example
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I am not sure I can agree with you. There has to be areason, CoC is one of the more succesful RPG lines, and last time I checked (around last friday) I had plenty of fun there, as I had with my Buffy the Vampire Slayer group that is about to start the 'second season' next month.
Both the settings you describe don't work well with the 'typical' Pathfinder style of roleplaying, but at the same time a long time Vampire/CoC player might find that style not to his liking.
Oh and not good for long campaigns =/= difficult to translate into roleplaying. As I said there are different kinds/slyles of roleplaying games, Pathfinder/D&D isn't the only one.
Personaly I am always skeptical of most setting from books and movies being translated to a RPG. Mostly because most authors only develope what they have to in order to tell their story. So most of these settings are designed to tell ONE story or maybe a group of related stories. And that story has all ready been told.
So you it often comes down to the people who do the translating because they usualy have to add content to make it work. If they don't do a good job the RPG suffers worst than if it was a orginal idea.
Also once you base something off something you will drive away people who don't like it. For instance I never enjoyed Lovecraft's work so I would never touch CoC if you paid me.
A RPG that draws inspiration for multiple souces (like D&D/Pathfinder) you will draw a larger audience because people can make it what they want and noty feel limited by the ONE story.
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Even though, I have met as many players who dislike the superheroesque hodgepodge as which they see Pathfinder/D&D (largely D&D, Pathfinder isn't quite a household name in Germany) preferring games that seem to be more limited in scope and inspiration, like CoC, Harnmaster or Vampire. But you are right, I suppose, as D&D/Pathfinder is the most succesful RPG by a wide measure.
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I second John. Books & Movies directly used in a game just aren't good. If you have a setting and use an existing system either new sub-rules are used or existing rules a shoe horned into the setting. Even when a complete system is built around a setting there is a tendency to see the only game in town is the one described in the books. Usually this is overcome by having differing time period (c.f. Star Wars Old Republic). I specifically mean books with a 'hero' type character. Lovecraf's works differ by them being short stories involving non-related characters so you can avoid the "Ed Stark would never do that" situations in game.
So in short, I find settings based on movies/books set in the time of the movies/books restrictive due to the reluctant to destroy canon by altering events.
I prefer settings written as settings as the players themselves become the main heroes of the land and don't live in the shadows of others - well unless you are playing Forgotten Realms...
S.
Even though, I have met as many players who dislike the superheroesque hodgepodge as which they see Pathfinder/D&D (largely D&D, Pathfinder isn't quite a household name in Germany) preferring games that seem to be more limited in scope and inspiration, like CoC, Harnmaster or Vampire. But you are right, I suppose, as D&D/Pathfinder is the most succesful RPG by a wide measure.
It all depends on how you play D&D/Pathfinder...I don't feel superheroeque at all in that game. Though it can be...which is why it is successful because it can be many things.
Though I did not mean to imply that D&D/Pathfinder is the only way to go. I mean the White Wolf settings was designed to be a setting in it's own right...while limited in scope it is much more fexible than say a RPG based on the book Dracula.
Another game Legend of the Five Rings is limited in scope...but again the thought behind the setting was created a world. While a movie or a novel takes the track of what do we need to do for the story.
I did not mean only D&D/Pathfinder does it right.
I prefer settings written as settings as the players themselves become the main heroes of the land and don't live in the shadows of others - well unless you are playing Forgotten Realms...
S.
Ah...the FR were not that bad till they made the novel's cannon....which kind just proves my point even more.
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Ah...the FR were not that bad till they made the novel's cannon....which kind just proves my point even more.I prefer settings written as settings as the players themselves become the main heroes of the land and don't live in the shadows of others - well unless you are playing Forgotten Realms...
S.
Too true. The first boxed set of FR was awesome & I didn't mind the HC 2e book version - but then the splats came and define The Symbol et al and I struggled to find something the players were needed for that the Harpers couldn't handle. Then when the gods came down to fight, shudder.
My favourite setting was Dark Suns (1st edition version where you could play a Templar).
It can even happen with story driven game design. I loved the original Dragon Lance series of modules (which were magnificently adapted into the first novel trilogy) but the setting never seemed to support ongoing gaming beyond that.
Let's see, RPGs that have a history of not working:
I've been a long-term fan of Doctor Who, but I have to say I've never seen a Doctor Who RPG that actually worked. Sure, its fun for a session or two with other fans of the series, but it just falls apart quickly.
Another genre I've seen attempted many times but to date but never succeed is any game based off anime or manga. For some reason, they just can never seem to capture the fun of the source material.
Same thing happens with real-world espionage/military RPGs. Spycraft was briefly popular, but quickly disappeared. There was a James Bond RPG that really tried to make a splash but failed. I don't know anybody who played Palladium's Ninjas & Superspies (without some other palladium setting). I remember a company that tried to put out a WWII RPG that nobody liked either. I think real-life RPGs in general are just too dull.
And strangely enough: Star Trek. You would think this would be easy to do but for some reason, they never seem to stay in print. Star Wars doesn't have this problem, so I never figured out why Star Trek did.
I would also like to add mystery/detective/police RPGs, unless they are some kind of LARP. I think its the real-life problem that the epsionage/military RPGs have.
Book series, no matter how old or popular never seem doomed to fail: Narnia, Dune, Amber, Middle Earth, and others all failed. I personally liked Amber and it seemed to have a cult following briefly but it went away. Middle Earth RPGs never seem to last long either (how many different versions have there been again?). Dresden Files RPG looked cool but I haven't seen any new material out for it after the first two books.
I would have loved seeing an RPG based on the Death Gate cycle. It would have had some seriously difficult problems to deal with, but the worst one is something it shares with many other works of fantasy: The world has a serious issue that needs to be solved, which happens in the books. Where to now, heroes?
And strangely enough: Star Trek. You would think this would be easy to do but for some reason, they never seem to stay in print. Star Wars doesn't have this problem, so I never figured out why Star Trek did.I would also like to add mystery/detective/police RPGs, unless they are some kind of LARP. I think its the real-life problem that the epsionage/military RPGs have.
Book series, no matter how old or popular never seem doomed to fail: Narnia, Dune, Amber, Middle Earth, and others all failed. I personally liked Amber and it seemed to have a cult following briefly but it went away. Middle Earth RPGs never seem to last long either (how many different versions have there been again?). Dresden Files RPG looked cool but I haven't seen any new material out for it after the first two books.
Part of the problem with many of these can be summed up in one word: licensing.
Paramount was reputed to be tough to work with for Star Trek games and Tolkien Enterprises isn't easy either. MERP by I.C.E (in print in some form for about 13-15 years) had to stay away from the times of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Decipher, when it got the license through New Line, was able to incorporate art from the movies as well as incorporate the main characters directly but had to go through a long approval process that meant supplements dragged long after the movies had debuted and couldn't benefit as much from the media tie in.
I've been a long-term fan of Doctor Who, but I have to say I've never seen a Doctor Who RPG that actually worked. Sure, its fun for a session or two with other fans of the series, but it just falls apart quickly.
My players and I had tremendous fun playing a Doctor Who campaign, which lasted six adventures - about as long as any of my campaigns did during that period of my life. And one of the players knew nothing about Doctor Who when we started.
(I will confess that the only Doctor Who RPG available at that time, the one made by FASA, was awful, but I feel that was because of the SYSTEM, not the setting. That's why for the aforementioned Doctor Who campaign, I didn't use the FASA game, but instead used my favorite gaming engine at that time, MEGS.)
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Personaly I am always skeptical of most setting from books and movies being translated to a RPG. Mostly because most authors only develope what they have to in order to tell their story. So most of these settings are designed to tell ONE story or maybe a group of related stories. And that story has all ready been told.
Picking a nit: though I don't know how general this is, my understanding from talking to authors is that they've generally at least thought about a whole lot of stuff that doesn't make it onto the pages directly, but shapes the book's events from offscreen. Granted, JRRT is probably the most extreme example, but anyone who's written more than one independent book in a setting probably has a lot of information about the setting that the readers will never see. Now, whether that information makes it to the RPG is another question.
I am sure many will disagree, but as much as I like The One Ring by Cubicle 7 and Lord of the Rings Online, I feel that Middle Earth isn't the best setting to translate over to an RPG. Middle Earth is full of "big darn heroes" (BDH) that shape the course of the entire setting, including its history, so much so that PCs have little in the way to shine without being creative with the story line. Compare this to generic D&D/fantasy, where the PCs have the potential to be those BDH. Further, the GM can feel shoe-horned with a world that is largely scripted out with its history. It is hard to find room to be creative and generate adventures. This is how I felt as a GM.
Star Wars can run into this, but the galaxy in Star Wars is so vast that PCs can be big heroes in their region without ever running into Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, etc. Plus Star Wars has several eras of play where either no canon or fiction has been written or the setting has been generated but has lots of room for awesome adventures to happen (ex. The Old Republic). Middle Earth has had almost all of its history penned somewhere; it's hard to find a "sweet spot" in history where the GM has a lot of creative freedom.
I have played many Star Trek games, and they are quite fun. It translates very well into an RPG, as again the galaxy is a big place, and there is lots going on. I will concur with other posters that the main reason Star Trek, Star Wars, and other settings go out of print is the cost of the license. Without new, profitable products being constantly generated, the cost of the license outstrips the financial gain to be made by renewing the licence. Even WotC felt that way with Star Wars.
Anyway, just my two cents as a GM.
Picking a nit: though I don't know how general this is, my understanding from talking to authors is that they've generally at least thought about a whole lot of stuff that doesn't make it onto the pages directly, but shapes the book's events from offscreen. Granted, JRRT is probably the most extreme example, but anyone who's written more than one independent book in a setting probably has a lot of information about the setting that the readers will never see. Now, whether that information makes it to the RPG is another question.Personaly I am always skeptical of most setting from books and movies being translated to a RPG. Mostly because most authors only develope what they have to in order to tell their story. So most of these settings are designed to tell ONE story or maybe a group of related stories. And that story has all ready been told.
That is true. There bits and pieces of fantasy worlds as readers we don't get to see. Though I think most authors try to keep such infomation under wraps as they don't know if they will need it again.
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OTOH, there's a vast history and landscape full of interesting events and places. Often with scant detail and big gaps in time.It's not a place where you can easily fit in huge world-changing events. Your players aren't going to bring down Sauron early or anything so drastic, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of things they could do on a smaller scale.
As an example, I've had a game in mind for years, that'll I'll probably never run, set in Eriador not long after the fall of Arnor and Angmar. Still lots of baddies around who scattered when the Witch King fled. The Dunedain are in the process of becoming Rangers rather than rulers. Probably eventually lead up to one of the Nazgul stirring up trouble. You get to drive him off, save the whole region, help the Rangers get established. Sure, it's all sort of a footnote in history, but that's ok. It wouldn't have been if you hadn't intervened.
I could also see running a high-power level game in Beleriand during the First Age.
A common thread I see is how much control of their fates the players have. Case 1 is actually the most flexible of the 3 -- while the player characters are doomed, it is not preordained when or how they will fall or how long it will take. Case 2 is the classic railroad plot -- certain things have to happen, and the only way the player characters can have any control over their fates is to be well out of the way of the fixed action. Case 3 is simply the instinct factor -- is it strong enough that the players are just die rollers, or can they make meaningful decisions?
I find that major catastrophic events such as the Red Wedding or King Arthur's final Battle of Camlann are great starting points for a campaign. The player characters somehow survived or arrived late to the catastrophic event, and now their lives have been turned upside down. They need only go in a different direction from the few major characters that the literary source follows to have adventures in a world that is vaguely familiar but not too preordained in terms of what can happen to them.