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What's your RPG system's politics?

  
 
invisible_al
19:23 / 18.11.05
Inspired by a random comment on rpg.net about how D&D was all about how much stuff your character aquired and how an individuals skills were secondary to how much enchanted kit you had, it got me thinking about the assumptions and worldviews behind a lot of games.

For example I'm quite into the idea of normal people being thrust into extra-ordinary situations and being hero's because of that, Unknown Armies or WFRP would be a good example of this style of roleplaying.

This is opposed by say most White Wolf games where the players are 'Special', raised above mortal men into a secret world of special people, where the protagonists treat normal humans like cattle (Vampire) or they are as God's to mortals (Exalted).

As I've been playing in a Vampire game recently it's reminded me of why I don't like the World of Darkness, there's precious little your average joe can do, you have to be special or 'chosen' to make that difference. It's also why I shy away from Exalted where it can be quite easy to use normal people as easily playthings to your whims.

In D&D theres the smash and grab, whoever has the most stuff wins ethos when you boil it down. You really are cannon fodder at lvl1 so it's all about getting ahead and getting more toys. In fact it was satirised for just this in the rpg Violence (now under a creative commons license).

What systems are out there that diverge from this style of RPG? And what's your system of choices biases and philosphy behind it?
 
 
A0S
20:36 / 18.11.05
My RPG of choice is still the first one I ever played and that is Runequest. One of the reasons being is that it almost the antithesis of the super powered hero style.
Everyone can use magic and all characteristics are topped at the maxium roll plus the number of dice rolled so 21 (3d6 max 18 plus 3 for 3 dice) for humans. Since hit points are derived from constitution and are broken down into hit locations one hit can often be fatal or at least disabling, as it can be in real combat, something which rarely happens in D&D after a few levels.
Also because combat uses critical hits which ignore armour this one hit fatality means that an untrained farmer with a spear can always spring a surprise on a well armoured and trained veteran so there are no 'easy' combats because there aren't really any 'mooks' or 'minions'. A better skilled, better equiped combatant will usually beat a less skilled and equiped one but it's not a foregone conclusion particully since Runequest also lacks the magic weapons of D&D.
So for it's balance of character freedom, everyone can fight and everyone can use magic, and it's way of preventing 'invulnerable' characters it's Runequest for me everytime.
 
 
Evil Scientist
21:05 / 18.11.05
With WW's superhuman game Aberrant the Players normally start off with enough power to level a city-block from the get go. So it's not so much about getting power, it's about what you do with the power when you have it. One of the PCs in the group I GM for has truly terrifying social abilities, he could easily gather a religious cult around him. Another one is the student of a "sphinx" (a mega-intelligent superhuman manipulating world events behind the scenes).

This whole power vrs responsibility thing is played out against a background of interweaving conspiracies. Which makes for chucklesome fun.
 
 
w1rebaby
23:46 / 18.11.05
The power imbalance between supers and normals in superhero games always has definite consequences if thought through, particularly in more "normal" campaigns and systems. GURPS Supers is one of the most obvious examples - it's a very realism-orientated system at base, and one of the consequences of being super strong within the rules, for instance, is that if you punch a normal you put your fist through them and kill them. In fact, if you punch or energy blast supers who don't have super defences (say your average psi) they die too.

What is more significant than that, I've found, is the consequence of non-combat powers such as desolidication, invisibility and particularly psychic abilities. If you run anything more than a stereotypical four-colour comic style game you end up with people thinking "well, why *should* I obey the police?" And then as a GM you have to reinterpret the police and wider society in a way that is more realistic for a world where it is known that superpowers exist, which is an immense job, far harder than that of a comics writer because players will actively test what you produce to destruction and, without artificial and unsatisfying limits on player action, you're going to find it hard to stop them.

The idea that individuals can have immense power without having to rely on others, in contrast to the real world where even the strongest or smartest individual is easily defeated without the support of other people, is going to warp politics to breaking point. I simply cannot properly deal with really high-powered characters as a GM because I don't have the time to produce a believable game world where such things are known about; it would radically change society, and if I didn't get it right, players would spot the gaps. In the real world, even the myth of slightly unusual characteristics can cause mass panic (e.g. "fanatic suicide bombers"). Unless the superbeings in question have only just arrived, their existence would have caused societal shifts that I really don't have the time to work through.

In my games, supers are fairly low-powered and those who have potentially seismic powers such as telepathy or teleportation are either actively hunted, can be countered by technology, or face routine opposition by other supers - really, to keep the disruption of the real world to a manageable level so that I can maintain a believable setting. One of the benefits of this is that players can then explore the consequences of their characters' powers in the knowledge that they're not going to suddenly encounter any glaring contradictions, and a realistic world can grow.

A good example of a very poor introduction of super abilities to the real world in games is the old GURPS IST sourcebook, which is astoundingly naive in almost every respect. The background of UN superteams might seem to connect it with Stormwatch, but with every ounce of cynicism and realism replaced in favour of "yay US liberal democracy". The IST universe is full of bad Muslim terrorists, their PLO are neo-Nazis and in the first Gulf War, UN superteams arrested Saddam Hussein and everyone clapped and said "well done, what a nasty man". (The fate of anyone not demonised in the contemporary US was not discussed of course.) It's the gaming fantasy of a propaganda victim. IST was written quite a long time ago - 1991 - but the mere fact that it was published at all is a big icky mark on Steve Jackson Games. If I tried to push that on my players they'd start off by laughing, and would then try their utmost to pervert the entire setting, and I'd be with them all the way.
 
 
Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown
21:03 / 20.11.05
I remember one Aberrant game I ran where one of the characters realized that it would take very little power for him to go nuclear. The man could literally do sufficient damage (upwards of 40L) to a large area, effectivly functioning as an atomic bomb.

It was a game very much about how superhumans interacted with baseline humanity, and what you DID with your superpowers. It also had some nice essays about how being a masked vigilante just doesn't work.

I will, however, always remember the back cover from the first edition of Unknown Armies.

"When this many people are hungry for power YOU had better be the one with the fork"
 
 
Katherine
12:22 / 07.01.06
Personally I do think D&D can diverge from the smash & grab style but then it is the easiest way to play it. And when you are starting out playing when you are a child or teenager that style may very well appeal to you. It’s up to the individual as to whether their playing style changes beyond that.

I know of people (adults) who consider D&D pretty much a smash and grab game where what really matters is you get that +4 sword of doom so you can get more stuff. But then there are others (like me I hope) who actually enjoy the more finding out the ins & outs of whatever world you are playing in or more the role-playing side of the game.

For example being told there are people going missing never to be seen again, and then finding put what’s happened to them or rather rescuing them by interacting with the citizens of that town. Hitting people doesn’t really get results in that kind of situation, unless of course you are hitting a guy with ‘Kidnapper’ around his neck ( ) but then the game wouldn’t be much fun if the GM let things be that easy.

Compared to RuneQuest I find D&D an easier system to play, especially if you consider I have only been role-playing for a year. Because the actual playing is easier to learn it means I’m freer to do more of the role playing and it’s faster to get into. I’m trying to learn the RuneQuest system but it’s slower than the D&D system to sink in, which probably is down to me.

I think personally smash & grab is the dominant style of playing D&D because it is so easy to do and possibly (dare I say it) down to laziness of the players or GM?
 
 
Royal McBee
23:45 / 09.01.06
My RPG system’s politics?

Well, I also dislike Whitewolf’s style of making every starting character a superman. And I understand what a players feels when he starts with a level 1 character and develops it up to the 10th, maybe 15th level. The only problem is that it’s sooo unreal… I mean, no specie in the world would start its life so weak that can die with a slap of a goblin and end up so strong that can take harmlessly a fireball… It doesn’t happen with lizards, it doesn’t happens with whales, it doesn’t happens with humans…

That’s what is so cool about Gurps - it’s very realistic. Even when they give you rules for doing a cinematic-style game, they discuss how much of that could be real, how much couldn’t be real at all.

I think the problem with smash and grab is not only a D&D’s one. Players can also do it with Gurps Supers. Or with WW’s Werewolf. Accumulating as much equipment as possible just to get more of that. It’s much more a question of what t players (and the GM) expect from a game than which system are they using… By the same way, I do believe people can have deep, evolving, interesting sessions with D&D and WW.

I like narratives that start in our normal world and turn to something darker, more mystical, more spiritual, more strange and more dangerous… Since I don’t like WW’s approach, I usually play Carella’s Witchcraft. It’s a good system. Works with the same paradigm of a “World of Darkness” but:

1 – Allows me to have different people with different powers working on the same basis. My current group has one wicce, one telepath, one necromancer, one vampire, one ninja-to-be and two mundanes (normal people). Try to do that with White wolf systems…

2 – Keeps the balance very nicely. They are not stronger than other people just because they’re gifted. The mundane’s sheets are as good as everyone’s else. Like, during our last session, when a NPC showed his gun, one player said “Oh, no, he has a gun”. When I said “Hey, he is also a black magician” she answered “Well, I am much more afraid of bullets than of fireballs”. They are not super humans…

But I like to try new systems as well. We had an In Nomine Campaign, but it didn’t work very well for the same old reason (angels and demons are much stronger than anything else…). We are sketching a Gurps Psionics campaign, and also an Armageddon one. I heard many people talking about this Unknown Armies. Is it that good?
 
 
Opps!!
18:30 / 10.01.06
"...as a GM you have to reinterpret the police and wider society in a way that is more realistic ..."

Just to comment on this statement, although out of its context of superhero rpg's, how do people utalise the police in their games? For years we played Call of Cthulhu and got away with alot of things, and then our GM started to bring in the police.
Things get more interesting when that 'break and enter' gets you 6 months in jail, you have to find other ways to get in and out of countries, etc.
Hint: Try splitting up your players and interogate them one-by-one over that break-in, murder, etc.
 
 
invisible_al
15:51 / 11.01.06
Unknown Armies is 'fantastic' and 'realistic' at the same time. At the street level it's down and dirty with magic, violence, drugs, that sort of thing also this is where your average horror game happens, where the players don't have much or any mojo to save them. Next step up is where the characters are 'players' in the Occult Underground, I always think of Oceans Eleven or The Usual Suspects but with occultists. Then above that you have the 'global' level where the players are aiming for godhood and may have a decent crack at pulling it off.

It's interesting because it's biases are much more in tune with how I'd run supernatural games for 'average people' because the game is all about real normal people getting caught up in weirdness. Even the pro's have to watch out when 'sleepers' are around because if they ever found out then it would be lynching parties all round. And Gun's really really hurt in this game.

In fact if there is one bias in this game that shows up, it's that guns are very powerful. I think it's John Tynes who's a libertarian and is very attached to his 'right to bear arms' and that's reflected in the rules. But the game doesn't fall apart if your players aren't armed, a friend of mine ran a game set in the UK where the players were all TA members, they never had to grab their guns once,they succeeded by monkeywrenching the opposition.

So yeah, Unknown Armies is a game where the average person can win through if they're smart, you don't need to be a superhero or have k3wl powers to be a 'player' in the world.
 
 
grant
19:58 / 11.01.06
I simply cannot properly deal with really high-powered characters as a GM

I wonder if this is why I was so attracted to Call of Cthulhu... because it puts that equation backwards. The grim horror of being the target of things hugely more powerful than you -- the joy of losing your sanity in creative and delightful ways. It rewards you for losing, that game.

I suppose so did Paranoia, of which I was quite fond as well.

Dystopian RPGs.

I sometimes wonder about the online RPGs like Everquest and Runescape and them. Runescape seems to rely on accumulation of friends, who you then scam out of stuff. (but then again, I really only know the game through The Boy, who is 11, so this perception might be a reflection of that time of life as well.) Exploitation of social contracts!
 
 
Digital Hermes
20:22 / 11.01.06
It's an interesting point: do you make the characters 'more than normal,' or do you make them ordinary people in extraordinary positions?

(As a side note: You get the impression in D&D that these character classes are the exception: not everybody is a wizard/fighter/thief/whatever. That said, between gaming and novelisations, it seems like you could fill a very large city with adventurers alone. What would the politics of that city be? Kind of like a medival version of Alan Moore's Top Ten?)

It's the White Wolf tendancy (especially in their more recent editions of the books) to imply the characters are above 'normal people' that turns me off the setting. Secret societies don't bother me, but when every second page, I'm being reminded that 'normal people' have no idea, 'normal people' don't understand the world around them, seems more like empowerment therapy for people who feel that 'nobody understands them,' or something like that. Tailoring the game far too much toward an insecure goth tendancy for my tastes. Not that all goths are insecure. Or White Wolf players.

A game like GURPS, on the other hand, seems to encourage individuality in it's characters, made as they are entirely by player choice. Which makes it harder to pin down as a specific worldview.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
18:13 / 21.01.06
The problem I have with White Wolf isn't that the characters are so powerful, it's that the mythology is so bound to the game that you feel like you have to read the books, add-ons, etc... The RPGs I like are ones where the GM can pretty much tell a story in whatever genre the game is in, but there is room for the characters to reach in ways that are unexpected. With White Wolf, I always feel like I'm playing out fan-fic for a series of novels I haven't read, and the rules seem to push that pretty seriously.
 
 
Digital Hermes
22:01 / 21.01.06
I think I know what you mean. They're so busy name-dropping either clans that are in forthcoming books, or in other games, that you feel lost without that basis.

Me personally, I think the main rule book should give you absolutely everything you need to play. In the case of a setting like most WW stuff, what I'm interested in is how the setting overlays on our own. If there's too much static from the different groups and agendas of the 'secret societies' it loses touch with what makes it cool for me, in that it is hidden, secret, and under the surfaces.
 
 
Tom Paine's Bones
21:48 / 15.03.06
To come back to this, I've been reading a lot of the new edition of Paranoia, Paranoia XP recently. And I think it's an interesting game to look at in this context. Partly because the new edition is heavily playing up the game as satire as opposed to parody (or even worse the wacky pop-culture referencing pile of crap that West End Games tried to turn it into). And partly because the satire as presented in the source material heavily slants towards the libertarian left in my view.

The Computer has now added "terrorists" to it's list of hate figures. The commies are now completely ineffectual. And by concentrating on them The Computer ignores the far greater danger from secret societies like Psion and PURGE. PURGE are interesting now as well. One of the sourcebooks says explictly that one of the main reasons that PURGE are such a dangerous enemy to Alpha Complex is because they have all the same traits that makes the Computer love the Vulture Warriors so much- they are dehumanised to violence, entirely dedicated, quick to follow orders etc. Some of the scenarios published have taken such concepts as Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' or the serving of drinks in a pre-termination centre as their basis. And the whole game is now laced with quotes. From both novels such as Catch 22 and from real life news reports about Iraq and the War on Terror (under the title 'Real Life Paranoia').

Alpha Complex has also introduced a semi-capitalist economy, and there's some very interesting comments on that in the designer's notes:

...yet the economy seems to some longtime fans to undermine a classic joke of PARANOIA: that The Computer, in the cause of fighting Commies, had turned Alpha Complex into a socialist police state. Does introducting capitalism detract from that? Can't a capitalist economy be a soul-crushing totalitarian anthill? Perhaps readers in Beijing or Singapore might comment. Oh wait- they can't.

which has to be one of the most overtly political statements I've seen in a RPG for some time.
 
  
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