If you were within shouting distance of my social circle, you would probably be well aware of the fact that I recently finished the Mass Effect trilogy of video games and was quite blown away by them. Mass Effect 3 came out in 2012, so I’m a little late to the party, but I still fell head over heels in love with everything about them, including the setting. Since I am a roleplayer by love and a GM by stubbornness, one of the first thoughts that went through my head was, “How can I bring this to the table as an RPG?” The second question that came into my head was far more important, though: “Will my players actually buy in to the idea and want to play it?”
The next game is going to be so pretty…
The ‘how’ of bringing a canonical setting that doesn’t already have its own game to the table isn’t actually that hard. If a book, TV show, movie, game, or whatever has even a hint of a fandom following it, there’s likely a wiki out there dedicated to compiling all the information you could possibly need for reference. In addition, if you like it well enough to turn it into a game, there’s a good chance someone else had the same idea and may have shared their work. A quick Google search actually revealed several different Mass Effect RPG hacks.
A couple years ago, I marathoned a bunch of Warehouse 13 episodes and got an itch to run a game based on the show. I ended up running a one-shot at a couple of different conventions using Cubicle 7’s Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. It worked surprisingly well and I got compliments from the players that signed up. Thing is, I couldn’t really interest my regular group into giving it a try. Too few of them had seen the show.
Unfortunately, the same thing happened when I polled the group about Mass Effect. Only one of the guys had played the series and had enough knowledge about the setting to get excited about the idea. A couple others had a general idea of what the video game was about (action RPG, space opera, saving the galaxy, etc.), but didn’t really know any of the specifics. Explaining the Krogan Rebellions would have been an uphill battle.
So, what do you do when you’ve got a specific canonical setting you really want to use in an RPG, but your players aren’t really buying in?
First, keep the gatekeepers out. One reason people will shy away from specific settings they’re not familiar with is to avoid the jerks that lord their knowledge of the source material over everyone else. The arrogance of Comic Book Guy is funny because we’ve all known that guy at one point or another. Gatekeepers are a problem with many levels of nerd and gamer culture, but that doesn’t mean you have to allow it at your table. Don’t run the game if you’re going to get annoyed at every little inconsistency that happens between your game and the property, and gently but firmly shut down anyone at your table doing the same to the other players.
(As a side note, I was actually introduced to Supernatural by playing the RPGÂ well before I saw an episode of the show.)
Figure out what you really want out of the setting. Sometimes the essence of what you’re trying to get out of the setting can be found elsewhere. While I love Supernatural and it’s a perfectly fine version of the original Cortex rules, too many of my players hadn’t seen it enough to be enthused about playing a game in the setting. I then discovered that Monster of the Week would give me the same gritty, ‘keeping the suburbs ignorant and safe’ feel that I wanted out of Supernatural, but without the pressure of it being an established setting. Distilling the essence of what you really want to run can also help you pitch the idea to the players if you’re determined to run that specific property.
Run it as a one-shot at a convention. If you’re pretty sure you can’t get your regular players to buy into the idea, you can still work the idea up into a game you can run at a convention. This will give you a chance to flesh out the ideas needed to bring it to a game table without the pressure of having to try and make it too generic for your players that don’t understand the tropes of the setting. You’re almost guaranteed to draw in a few players that love the property as much as you do and are really enthusiastic about playing. Running at cons is a good experience for GMs and it’ll let you satisfy an itch you may not be able to scratch with your regular group.
Yeah, my Shep romanced the one and only Turian bad boy.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever get around to running anything directly based on Mass Effect, but I’m going to be giving Uncharted Worlds a spin at a convention in April. Hopefully none of my players will be too mad at me if there ends up being a Turian, a Krogan, a Mass Relay, or even a space hamster in the game.
How about you? Have you ever tried to sell your players on a game in a canonical setting they weren’t familiar with?
Go for the eyes Boo! I don’t’ think I ever found that easter egg, but I didn’t have a lot of the DLC.
I think the “Figure out what you really want out of the setting. ” is spot on and key to having a good game. I really like games based off of licensed properties when I’m at conventions, cause I’m okay being constrained by the limits of the setting for a short time.
When I’m playing in, or running, a longer home game, going for a “much-like” but not exact feel is often more fulfilling. Getting into the exact thing for one session is cool, but at a home game everyone wants to be Shepard or starts complaining that space travel would actually work in x way, or that’s not what FF7 airships look like, etc. Everyone has their own vision of what makes the setting the setting, and they want that element to be perfect. It’s more fun to do the serial numbers shaved off version of the setting that allows me to play with the boundaries of what could exist and lessen the pressure of getting it exactly right.
I actually missed that Easter Egg during my playthrough too, but a friend pointed it out to me. It’s too good not to share. I highly recommend the Citadel DLC. It’s basically a love letter to the squad and filled with quite a bit of awesome. If you don’t ever plan on playing a femShep romancing Garrus, go to YouTube and look up ‘Garrus Tango’.
Most of my canon-based RPGs happen at cons too (Star Wars being the exception). It’s just usually easier to find them and have them go off well at cons.
I think expectations not leading up to a players vision is the biggest problem with converting a known setting. I’d love to do it with Skyrim, Fallout and Diablo, and 2 of my 4 players have played all of those games and would be willing to try a tabletop version.
I’d also like to try it with Assassin’s Creed, and none of my group has played any of that series but would also be willing to try.
I’ll probably do AC just so I don’t have any gatekeepers, but I can only do so because my players are willing to try. If they don’t buy into it then it doesn’t matter how badly you want to run it.
Neat article, thanks!
I work very hard to not be a Gatekeeper about things. About the only time I get worked up is when someone does something that’s completely counter to the setting. The only incident I can actually recall was a game at GenCon. It was supposed to be Dragon Age, but the GM had never actually played the game, so didn’t understand why me and another player were upset he had a Dwarf ‘Cleric’ – with spellcasting – in the game.
I’ve never played Assassin’s Creed, but what little I know about it makes it sound like it could be a very cool setting for an RPG. I hope your players have fun with it. 🙂
I think that you’ve got a good solution–if you’re excited about a specific universe, a con is a great place to meet a threshold of people excited by the same thing. It’s rare for a specific group to all be into the same outside thing… unless you make a space for that. For a movies and TV, you can watch a show with your group.
For me, figuing out whether it’s the universe as a whole or the interaction of the characters helps me figure out whether a filed-off serial numbers game is good enough. After all, you get the setting, not the cast when you play in an existing universe.
There are some commonalities to what most groups watch. Star Wars is a pretty safe bet. I’ve found Firefly is also pretty safe. Most have at least a little frame of reference to know Star Trek (though the Gatekeepers there can be brutal). Beyond that, yeah… it can get iffy.
That’s also very true about the setting vs. cast. The Farscape Invitational I play every year at Origins is amazing because everyone has the cast of characters down so well. We know when the player sits down to play Rigel, we get Rigel.
I tried Firefly once but everyone wanted to play either Mal or Jayne. Serenity doesn’t fly with a boat full of Mals and Jaynes lol.
That can be a problem too. I wanted a game set in the Verse, but not set on Serenity. Even when they named their characters something else they were still playing Mal and Jayne. Even there ship Tranquillity was STILL Serenity.
I just needed to be clearer about what I wanted the game to be.
The Firefly game I ran didn’t run into that problem, but did implode from PC conflict. In the end, that was my fault for not being more aware of the type of players I had at the table.
Still, I did love the captain. He was a henpecked husband who won a ship in a poker game, so he got a rakish outfit and ran away to the stars. The player described him to me as ‘Dennis Franz dressed like Han Solo’. The ship was also called the ‘Fortuna’, but if you looked close, you’d realize that it had been the ‘Fortunate Son’, but they’d run out of paint trying to cover it up.
I’ve been talking a lot about canon and games on my blog. I just wrapped a five year game of Battlestar Galactica. The first thing I decided to do was not hold to the reimagined show, but pull a lot of the background. We veered off the show right away, with our characters being the heroes of this cycle of time. By the end, the trappings of the main story were there, but we took a completely different course, and in the end it was quite satisfactory. (It’s not every day you have a player tell you it was the best game they’ve played…)
Prior to that, I’d run a Star Trek campaign that was surprisingly successful. We set it after the Dominion War to have the ability to cut our own path. We had a few ground rules — I was running, so I ignored the really awful stuff, kept the good from the shows. It worked very well, as all the players had buy-in for the limits to canon.
Last century/millennium (it’s cool saying that) I ran a Babylon 5 game that was in canon, but the players were on a side front of the Shadow War, so we could do a lot of what we wanted, but were not overshadowed by the main characters of the show. Similarly, we had a short Stargate SG-1 game where we were one of the other teams. The show events affected us, but we were free to do our own thing.
The main thing that licensed properties provide is a readily-accessable setting (assuming everyone’s seen the show/movie/read the books) that folks can access. Nearly every gamer knows what the bridge of Enterprise looks like, what a TIE Fighter is, what the Stargate does, etc… It provides some relief for the GM, as well, by removing a lot of the world-building and prep time. The limitations of the story arc can be gotten around by exploring another aspect or place or time of the setting, or by simply doing a “reboot.”
When you say last century like that, it makes me feel old, though. I can remember praying and hoping Babylon 5 would get its 5th season, oh-so-long-ago. 🙂
I run in a different manner to most here: I run games exclusively at my LFGS for all-comers.
This means that I have to attract players to *any* game I run because I have no regular “group” (apart from the core of the Delta Green crowd).
This in turn means that floating games (through a Meetup website) is hit and miss. What was hot two months ago is “meh” now.
Also, I get a lot of “Web Excitement” that translates into nothing but no-shows on the day. 90% of the webiverse is All Talk, No Action when the chips are down, so this doesn’t dismay me as much as it might.
When trying to run games “based on” a TV show or video game once you’ve got an audience for it, my take is that you’ll have better luck pleasing everyone if you use a hugely flexible system like FATE or Cortex.
Using those systems, GM fiat can reign supreme without fear of contradiction from a rule book and players can take control of the narrative when they want to.
That said, I’ve never really though much about adapting shows or video games as RPGs. I have thought about using books I’ve read to do that though.
I like to think in terms of settings, using them as a backdrop for the players to bugger around in front of. After reading Ringworld and then being presented shortly after with the new-fangled game from America called “D&D” I messed for a while with doing a Ringworld setting – as every other gamer who has read the book has done I imagine. The scenery is just so darned compelling.
For me, as a player, it’s about the landscape first, and the impractical groups of people cluttering it up second. All too often those people have no coherent reason for being where they are or doing what they do in the framework they inhabit.
Video games and TV shows are after all not about the underpinnings of society, they are about the underpinnings of what you can reach with your ears, eyes and fingers.
Which is why I find it so maddening that the only GURPS GMs I know who read “Discworld” novels refuse to run the Discworld RPG. They say it’s because they aren’t encyclopedic on the canon.
Who cares whether you understand what Rincewind or Granny Weatherwax were like or were doing at such-and-such a point in time? We want to play in Ankh-Morpork, not invite those people to play “twenty questions” trivia for Offler’s sake!