2008-01-04 : Conan in a Wicked Age
I just had a genius idea. It's so genius that I told it to J, then Storygames, and now I'm telling it to you:
You know how in some rpgs there's one player who, for the whole duration of the game, is the GM? Like, Sorcerer and Shadowrun and The Mountain Witch are examples; there are many, many more.
If I were to play Conan In a Wicked Age, what I'd do is, I'd have one player whose job it is to play Conan in every session. Everybody else would do the full-on In a Wicked Age thing, with the oracles and the owe list and some characters being recurring and some not being recurring and everyone can GM some sessions if they want to - but this one player would be set apart to play Conan in every session.
This sounds so fun to me that I can hardly blink.
Conan would have very serious character continuity, even if you jump around chronologically like In a Wicked Age lets you - that'd be this player's job. And sometimes by chance Conan would be the true protagonist of the session, and sometimes someone else would be, with Conan there to add Conanosity; but at the end you'd look back and it'd be, damn, Conan.
Know who else this'd work for like crazy? Batman.
1. On 2008-01-05, Remi said:
Man, you could do almost any lone-wolf character from episodic fiction in this fashion. It, like, solves all these problems with having a lone-wolf character, remove strict continuity!
Genius.
2. On 2008-01-05, Tom said:
Since I do the pre-order dance and haven't read IWA, I am curious to know how this differs from the GM who always plays the Uber NPC in his game. Aside from, y'know, not sucking. Because the underlying assumption is that Conan always comes out...on-topish. Sometimes he just gets away by the skin of his teeth, but he usually exits with horse, a little ready cash and a very ready woman. And later on, he wins an empire and stuff.
3. On 2008-01-05, Kip Manley said:
See, now I'm imagining Batman in Alaca H??y??k, and that's a bit of my brain dribbling out of my ears.
4. On 2008-01-05, Kip Manley said:
Hey! The diacriticals previewed correctly. Alaca Höyük, then. Let's see if Unicode does the trick—
5. On 2008-01-05, Ben Lehman said:
But ... then the game's emergent Conan phenomena wouldn't kick in!
6. On 2008-01-05, Vincent said:
That's true.
But I'm talking about Conan, not some emergent protagonist who's Conan-like. Like, on your character sheet, it says literally "Conan of Cimmeria" (or literally "Batman, aka Bruce Wayne").
If you're doing anything other than playing Conan HIMSELF, play the game straight, like Ben says - your Conan equivalent character will emerge.
7. On 2008-01-06, Ben Lehman said:
How does the "we owe" list work with Conan?
yrs—
—Ben
8. On 2008-01-06, Vincent said:
Conan's in every chapter so he can't go on the owe list. NPCs still can't either of course, only the non-Conan PCs.
The significance of "Conan can't go on the owe list" is large! Conan gets only the advantage dice he earns, he can't cash in his future for his present.
One thing - the "when your character recurs" rules might be excessive for Conan. Maybe he gets to use them every other session or something.
Tom, I think the main difference would be that Conan's player can't be the GM.
Mm, I just thought of a potential problem. Must consider.
9. On 2008-01-07, Matt Wilson said:
What if you're like, "I totally kill you in the ear with a needle, Conan," and I'm all, "what? Conan doesn't ever die, ever."
10. On 2008-01-07, Vincent said:
Best ever! Conan can totally get killed right in the ear. You have to shut up and suck it up, cause that's what you signed on for.
But he's back next session.
11. On 2008-01-08, TomR said:
> But he's back next session.
I'm not sure what's cooler:
1.) He just shows up, no explanation.
2.) He's all Baron M??nchhausen and has some crazy explanation.
3.) ZOMBIE CONAN!
Scratch that, ZOMBIE CONAN is obviously the coolest!
"Yeah, yeah, the stories can be chronologically disjoint...don't spoil my ZOMBIE CONAN dreams..."
Tom
12. On 2008-06-10, jessecoombs said:
Ok, so I'm working on The Batman Hack. I hope that's ok...?
13. On 2008-06-11, Z-Dog said:
Actually, having him get killed in the ear and then be back is awesome. Vincent, you were mentioning something like this with your Poison'd game, something about: I blow his brains out. But then the dice hit the table and that's not what happened. So I see the Killed in the Ear Conan in the same way I'm watching the cliffhanger ending of a Battlestar: remember when Starbuck stands there with a gun on Roslin and you're saying, "Oh man, she's gonna blow the Prez away!" and then next week it's, "Oh...she's just gonna confront her. Those tricksy writers!"
So what I'm saying is this would be great fun. Bang. You're. Dead. Wait. No. You're not.
At least, that's more fun to me than rolling for initiative and acting surprised.
14. On 2009-09-14, Chuck Henebry said:
What's cool about this, from a literary perspective, is that Robert E Howard wrote the Conan stories out of chronological order.
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