thread: 2008-03-31 : Conpulsion 2008 Story 4: Indie Shortcomings
On 2008-04-05, Judd wrote:
Burning Wheel has plenty of long-term potential and plenty of setting. The trick with it is that the setting is all embedded in the traits. It isn't written out as a short story but hidden in the characters. If you just read the traits from beginning to end, it reads suspiciously like setting fiction.
The whole, Indie RPG's have no long term play potential doesn't ring true with me, not at all.
I think PTA would play really well long-term with each season being a definitive chapter. Hell, season by season is how my games tend to roll nowadays anyway. I can mark the chapters of our long-term games as if they were tv seasons.
Dogs would play well for long-term play, as if I need to tell you that. The way characters change would be really nifty and I'm eager to play a game where the players return to a town after they've "fixed" it once. Also, the way PC's change due to fall-out is really satisfying.
How cool would it be to come to a town where one of the retired NPC's has set up shop and get to pass judgement on them?
TSoY has an end-game but it is activated entirely by player choice and can be entirely ignored, not be ignoring the rule but by the player never going for a Grand Master skill that sets off the Ascension mechanic.
I could go on and on about setting and I think I will a little bit.
I want just enough to inspire me and the people I play with, everything else is just not necessary. I like big settings and dense settings.
I recall playing in the Midnight setting and playing most of the campaign about a family raised by the man who had turned to the Sauron-ish Dark God before the world had been conquered. It was a few paragraphs in the book and we latched onto it with our teeth when the PC decided to play the son of the man who was granted immortality for being a traitor to all that was good. Good times.
