thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-27, Lisa Padol wrote:
Hm. Lots of stuff going on here. In no particular order:PTA as a good rules set for Firefly: I'm not familiar enough with the show (though now that some of my friends own the DVDs, that may change), and I've only played PTA once (and it was a blast), but my off the cuff thought is that Vincent is right and PTA is the wrong rules set for it. This is a completely separate issue from setting, fan fic, and fetishes.
Okay, fan fic. I read a lot of fan fic in my teens and twenties. I think I'd find much of it painful (in a bad way) now, but I loved it then. Let us assume that my reading fan fiction was a fetish, and let us assume that we're all defining the term "fetish" the same way. Okay. I was reading a lot of junk. I was not in a street gang. I was not taking drugs that wrecked my body. I was not stealing. I was not having unprotected sex. I was not trying to take my own life or anyone else's. You know, there are worse things than reading a lot of possibly bad fiction.
Maybe I stayed up a bit too late reading. Then again, I did that with novels, too, from Barbara Hambly's Darwath trilogy to Gene Wolfe's New Sun tetrology. I kept my grades up, too.
Oh, and I wrote. Fiction, I mean. Okay, I wrote some really bad fan fiction that, if I have not actually managed to lose, I still do not intend to have it see the light of day.
And then, I wrote other things. Some of it was good fan fiction, of which more later. Some of it was analysis/critique of source material and fan fiction. I don't say that everyone who reads fan fic goes on to do this, but, I don't see that that's a problem. They enjoy it. Some people enjoy CCGs. Some enjoy fantasy baseball, which I comprehend as little as the non-fantasy version. Some folks collect postcards or antique cars.
For me, though, fan fic got me writing. And, when I wrote letters to fellow readers analyzing the stuff, it got me thinking. And, when letters flew back and forth, the ideas flew as well. This was no longer passive enjoyment, even presuming that something is wrong with passive enjoyment.
The good fan fic, the stuff I still have saved, was for Fort Weyr, a Pern fanclub. Pern, for any who might not know, is Ann McCaffrey's world of dragons and dragon riders in a wonderful telepathic union fighting a deadly menace. It isn't exactly deathless prose. Indeed, when I reread the first book, I was disgusted by stuff that just didn't bother me the first time. But, I came to the books at exactly the right age, and they spoke to me.
Now, Ann McCaffrey was well aware that Fort Weyr existed and published a fanzine based on her works. She requested that the club refrain from playing with her core cast and locations, beyond the very occasional Guest Appearance. Her request was honored, and I think this is a large part of what made the stories good. So, yes, there's definitely something to be said for not being a slavish/slavering fan girl, and yes, that ties into Vincent's point.
Nevertheless, a) slavish/slavering fan girls are not likely to do much harm, even to themselves and b) the slavish/slavering stage was what led, at least in my case, to producing some halfway decent writing. My Pern stories are not brilliant, but they're competent. Oh, and c) anyone who might have said to me, "But, why write a Pern fan story? Why not write something Original?" was totally missing the point about what made me tic, fandom, fanfic, and writing.
Okay, on to gaming. Some years ago at GenCon, I watched a few minutes of a demo of Eden's Angel RPG. The players were playing the core cast of Angel, and no one had to tell me who was playing whom. It was obvious. And, it hit me that the Buffy and Angel rpgs are very useful as introductory rpgs. People who have never gamed before sometimes wonder if they're doing it right. Give one of these people the Buffy RPG and say, "Okay, you're playing Cordelia as she was in season one," and suddenly, this person knows how to do it. The source material is a guide.
Sure, I would hope that this hypothetical gamer isn't replaying an actual episode. Sure, I would hope the the hypothetical gamer goes on to play other games. But if not, no big deal. For that game, that person understands what we're doing and why we like it, and maybe has a good time for a few hours. That's no bad thing.
I think Primetime Adventures is another good game to offer people who have never played an rpg before. I vacilate between thinking it's a better one to offer than the Buffy or Angel rpgs and thinking that it's a good next step after introducing someone to Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Stargate/other show specific game. But here, too, you have something new gamers can hold on to, something to reassure them that they are doing it right.
I think I agree that a successful Star Trek or Buffy game is successful outside the confines of the show, as Vincent says. I do not think that I agree that it is necessarily successful in defiance of the published material. One doesn't have to push heavy social commentary to have a decent Pendragon or Lord of the Rings game. Indeed, I'd rather play something that took Lord of the Rings at face value than something where the GM and/or the other players felt obligated to hammer in a revisionist view of Middle Earth. But, that's just my tastes.
I'm fairly conservative as a gamer, by Forge standards, I think. My default system is, and may always be, OTE. It works for me. I use things that work from other games, and I'm interested in a lot of what's going on at the cutting and bleeding edge of rpgs—but I like my comfortable little niche, even if it's not considered cool anymore.
Origamist John Montroll talked about the difference between people who only fold models and the people who design new models. I'm solidly in the first group. I have a great deal of respect for the folks in the second. Without them, I could not do what I do. But, I still have no desire to design models one day.
Without the Forge and all that came from it, I would stagnate as a gamer. I need it to exist. I even hope to run a PTA campaign soon, and to play in or run DitV one of these days. But, I doubt I will ever create an rpg of my very own. (I am ignoring the fact that I've worked on larps. That's a different kettle of fish.) I'm an end user.
Setting. Hm. I've recently concluded my second Cthulhupunk campaign (the first having started way before there was a GURPS Cthulhupunk). And, for the two campaigns, I lifted source material from everywhere. CoC. Delta Green and other Pagan Publishing material. NightLife. WoD. A Ravenloft scenario. Various movies and books. And, by collaging all of these ingredients together, I created art. Once I started running, the art got complicated, as I pulled in more elements and modified what I was doing, as the players did cool things that modified the world, and all of the usual stuff that goes on in any decent long running game.
I could not have done this with my own original setting. I have no desire to come up with my own original setting.
I have gotten better over the years at tinkering with other people's published works and tailoring it to the game and its players. I doubt I'm fetishizing any particular setting.
Any themes my games had just sort of happened. I never sat down and decided, "I will run a game with X theme." OTOH, I did decide, when playing with all of my background pieces, to say, "Okay, I'm using CoC, but Lovecraft got it wrong. The Outer Gods are not the be-all and end-all of creation. Sure, their worshippers say they are, but what do you expect?"
I don't think of that as revisionist. It might be, but I think of it as modifying one element so as to make the game as a whole more playable.
I really love Ninja J's three principles and the example illustrating how this technique can be used to flesh out a setting. I must try that.
-Lisa Padol
This makes BL go "Over the Edge!"
