What's in the Box?

 The San Diego RPG Meetup group has recently been doing monthly GM Meetups as well as the monthly general Meetups. And a couple of interesting topics emerged.

One of the roundtable questions that every GM was asked was "What is your white whale? What is the game or campaign that you've always wanted to run but never thought you could get the players or other resources together for?"

I somewhat misspoke when I answered "Star Trek." I did run a roughly 5 month campaign of GURPS Prime Directive when I was a member of the Fantasy Gamer's Guild at Humboldt State (now Humboldt Polytechnic). Perhaps the reason that it had slipped my mind is that it was from a period where I didn't have the confidence to create my own adventures, so I leaned on published scenarios. So while I did run a Star Trek campaign, I have yet to create my own Star Trek adventures. I still want to/hope to.

Though I did also have a backup answer: A 20-year OSR campaign.

I'm sure I've posted here about my perspective on running such a long term campaign. Rather than focusing in taking the players through a single, large story arc like a (It's hard to believe that this is) traditional "Adventure Path"-style campaign. For something intended to be that long-running, the goal is actually to be much less plot-oriented. The GM's task becomes, in large part, managing and presenting the setting rather than writing ever-expanding scripts. And that's what a lot of the tools in the early D&D game were there to facilitate.

But the big thing that I took away from that session was during the freeform discussion near the end. Someone was talking about making house rules and how they don't like to be "trapped in the box" of an overly restrictive rule system. I commented that I actually liked the various "boxes" of limitations that games create.

 This clearly surprised him, especially as he knew I was an OSR guy and one of the mantras that goes around there is "rulings, not rules."

But my own take on the OSR is that it's very much a "storygame," just like something more modern and "indie."

To demonstrate my point about the joys of restrictions, I picked an example of a game that everyone at the table was familiar with: Monsterhearts. It's a game of supernatural drama, somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood. One of the premises of the game is that the characters are all in high school, so logically, the GM should be able to make a story about a math test, or a history report or other sort of school assignment. But the rules of the game don't include anything about how good the characters are in their schoolwork. There's no "Intelligence" stat on the character sheet, or anything remotely close. (For the record, the character stats in Monsterhearts are: hot, cold, volatile, and dark)

It's perfectly possible to house rule something to represent a characters' studiousness, but if we just let ourselves spend time in that box that is Monsterhearts, another solution presents itself. There are no rules for getting good grades, but there are lots of rules for manipulating and controlling others. So the way to run a "big math test" scenario for Monsterhearts would be to focus on what the game already does. It becomes a question of finding the right study buddy, getting leverage on the teacher to let you pass regardless of the quality of your work, or perhaps engaging in skullduggery to get the answer key to the test. All of these require no extra design work on the part of the GM and leave everything focused exactly where the game wants us to be focused.

Likewise, running a dungeon-focused OSR game allows the game to focus on what it's good at instead of trying to force it into a broadly useful generic game engine. I actually prefer the retroclones that give the fiddly stat adjustments, like % chance to Bend Bars/Lift Gates rather than the more broadly applicable Strength Modifier because I think that specificity and the "box" it creates is more interesting.