14 July 2013
Busy Busy Busy!
Always with the life getting in the way of the gaming... and the past month has all been about packing and moving house, leaving far too little time to work on my Castles & Crusades game for Sheepcon and also the pulpy 19th century Fate game I wanna get down before I lose track of my notes.
While packing up all my gaming paraphernalia (use small boxes for your gaming books people.. they're heavy!) I found an ancient, dot-matrix printed pamphlet for a game system I wrote-up as a kid. After the initial wave of nostalgia crashed over me I dared flick through the pages to see what 13yr-old-Me was capable of...
Not much really. I think I must have spent longer formatting the experience tables for the character classes than I did working on any backstory for the game. 'Dystopia' was pretty much a terrible Shadowrun ripoff; Post-apocalyptic Earth, genetic mutations and robots gone mad, magic for some reason, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... Mass hysteria! I think the only reason I wrote it up was I couldn't afford an actual copy of Shadowrun. Most likely I flicked through the pages of the actual book at my favourite local gaming store and naturally figured I could just write up my own version.
So the 20 pages or so of faded manuscript were far from inspiring, riddled with bizarro rules, a complete disregard for game-balance and lots of sentences that ended with "...just make it up!". Yet I remember having SO much fun running it with my friends. I think I have better memories running that barely-stapled-together piece of juvenile dross than I do from 8 years of 3rd Ed D&D!
I guess the only reason I brought this up in a blog post was that it got me pondering one of those eternal gaming questions: "How important is the system?". It's a question that seems to get raised a lot with every gaming community I come across and one that's never really solved. Is it too subjective?
If only I had more time to ponder. Unfortunately, these boxes won't pack themselves... especially when I'm constantly stopping in stupors of wistfulness every time I pick up an old, dusty gaming manual!
Happy gaming!
3 comments :
It depends on the table.
If you all have a pretty close idea of the collective experience that you're looking for system doesn't matter too much.
If there's some discrepancies (or worse yet, someone looking to game the system) a good system goes a long way towards reinforcing the experience and keeping everyone on the same page.
I think I err on the side of 'too little is better than too much'.
Sure, plenty of rules-lite games can feel makeshift and even lazy but that encourages a group to mediate a decent house rule, whereas a heavy system (even a good one) can bog down while people chase the right ruling or worse, descend into arguments.
Hey now, who doesn't have nostalgic memories of sitting there staring blankly at their character sheet while some bugger spends half an hour looking up the finer points of horse archery in boggy marshes!
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