Justin Achilli wrote a great post last week about something I keep meaning to get around to: Licensed games. Go and read that post and the discussion that follows it. My desire to talk about this may explain my rather lengthy reply:
On the one hand, I think you’re on to something, because for me, the appeal of Star Wars, Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings IS the setting — I like the aesthetic and the archetypal adventures offered there. Still, I am just as likely to play in a knockoff of one of those settings than with their actual licensed games (because the knockoff is somehow less likely to be mocked by people like… you). LOTRO’s appeal to me — and I still dig it after more than a year of play and two dozen articles or something — is getting to spend time in its charming world. (There’s an upcoming article about that, too.) I can accept that the medium imposes certain choices onto the material, like slaying boars or delivering pies.
(LOTRO is sort of brilliant in how it winks at the lore — all those delivery quests are allusions to the fact that Frodo’s basically just on a delivery quest for two and a half books.)
Middle-earth, especially, is a setting full of half-told tales and forgotten spaces potentially full of adventure. Star Trek is likewise wide open, because TV-scale licenses often work better for RPG-style play, anyway.
On the other hand, your slippery definition of “cool” makes point #2 sort of useless for me. What does cool mean? My experience is that it means “big” wrt to licensed adventure things. No, you probably won’t blow up a Death Star or spit in Sauron’s eye, but scale isn’t everything. Make the stories personal.
I can’t recall your position on the Rings movies, but they did plenty of things that the books didn’t for the sake of their medium. Elrond, for example, appears to participate in shitty 1980s-style music videos, which got in the way of my enjoyment for a moment, but so what? The medium adds at the same time it changes, if done well. None of it’s a replacement and if it were a perfect replication it would just be the same thing over again.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I find “WTB [The One Ring] 4g PST” *hilarious,* but I can separate that from the brief bursts of immersion or escapism I get from popping into Bag End or discovering Rivendell for the first time. I’d rather have both than neither.
This brings me back to what I asked back when you posted your Dragon Age interview: I always want to know why a licenced property will make me feel like I am experiencing that licence.
But I think that even a faithful licence can go beyond its original IP. Take for example the Battlestar Galactica boardgame. In that game there’s most excellent paranoia as to who might be a traitor, side-flipping mid-game, and the constant press of scarcity of resources. These are three major factors that make the show compelling.
What would a LotR-licence game need to be more faithful to its core product? Some sense that what you are doing is epic/mythic, a magic that doesn’t fill the “middle-key” much (that is to say only low-key or epic), a balance between despair and courage, and a true sense of camaraderie. You don’t even need the Middle-Earth setting, so long as you carry those burdens.
I think virtually every generation of RPGer has tried to play something LotR-ish with D&D, only to (usually) fail. That is because D&D doesn’t hit any of those points, mechanically, so unless your GM is amazing at drifting a game into something else, you’re just at the wrong table. Similarly with every “official” LotR tabletop RPG.
Yet at the same time, Mouse Guard the RPG is great, because Crane actually focused on what the comics were about: survival and camaraderie against overwhelming odds. (I like to think that it was also good because my name is in the playtest credits along with some great gamers and friends of mine, but that might be graspin).
Well, as a designer who has worked on (arguably) more than his fair share of licensed games – I think that Adam’s point is particularly valid: does this game / supplement feel like the original license, or is it a play for cash?
Seeing as I’m working on Dragon Age with Pramas, but obviously can’t go into to many details, I’d say it does emulate the feel of the world as depicted in Dragon Age: Origins, though the interface is not the same as the video game. Time will tell though.
By the by, I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with a play for cash. In the case of Dark Heresy, even if we didn’t emulate the 40K feel, we still expanded the setting which a considerable number of fans love as a means to an end, regardless of their opinions on RPGs.
You’re sure right, for example, that D&D and Lord of the Rings are about different things, even though they seem to be about so many of the same things. I won’t sit here and argue about specific LotR RPGs now, but it’s an interesting question all the same.
For sure, licensed games need to tap into part of what made their parent property work, but like with Dark Heresy, I think expansion is often good. The Force Unleashed, for example, feels so much like Star Wars in its design and aesthetics that I have no problem granting it the conceits of his game mechanic — that the Force is an order of magnitude more powerful than it was in the films.
It’s a slippery target, though. Add a dose of extra magic to Lord of the Rings and you ruin it for some people while making it accessible to others. The question becomes, “is it still Lord of the Rings, then?” Of course not — only the books are the books. But different people have different tolerances for the stress put on a favorite property.
Read this great post by Matt Colville, and consider how many different ways there are to interpret a favorite property. To like it, you and a friend just have to agree that it’s good. To play in that world, you all have to agree either to a certain amount of deviation… or on just what the property is.
I mean, the road to Mordor was clearly not a bunch of squares on a map, but we make concessions for the sake of play.
Ultimately, each game has duties to its ludological purpose in addition to its license, and that means sometimes choosing to do things a little out of character for the sake of being worth playing, right?
An excellent post by Matt. Serendipitously, while I was reading it, I noticed his link to his previous post “Not Mass Effect” which ended up being spiritually appropriate considering Dragon Ages’ ties to Mass Effect.
We are all playing make-believe in RPG land. When we play within someone else’s licensed reality, especially one that we and our compatriots may already have preconceived notions about, the spectre of playing make-believe “incorrectly” is raised. You’re right Will that some things must be given a bit of leeway – but we’re always dealing with the RPG equivalent of the Suspension of Disbelief. What should we call it “License Flexibility”? Just how far can you go and still be true to a setting, that slippery target you mentioned? Made more so for it being nearly undefinable, as it changes from fan to fan, property to property…
I find myself calling it “tolerance,” TS, though I think that maybe implies things I don’t want. It’s the right word, though, specifically wrt to its common second definition: “an allowable amount of variation of a specified quantity, esp. in the dimensions of a machine or part” In this case, the specified quantity is the license, and the variation is the every new character, new quest, new magic item and monster, plus whatever actions are undertaken in play.
Over there is a guy who says that Aragorn can’t do anything he didn’t do in the books, because they define his whole persona; this is “He never did that!” guy. Over here is a guy who says that Aragorn should act true to his character, but that his humanity means he may be moody or unpredictable now and again, so he can fidget in place a bit as long as he remains somehow Aragorn-like; this is “He’d never do that, but okay,” guy. Beyond him is “Whatever, let’s just play” guy. They all have different tolerances.
The thing, to my mind, is that people need to understand that they can choose to be bothered or not without surrendering their appreciation of the original. The implicit issue otherwise is that being bothered indicates a lower tolerance and, therefore, and wrongly, a higher fidelity to the source material.
It’s not a marriage. You can let others mess around with alternative Gandalfs without being cheating on Tolkien, right?
Ultimately, each game has duties to its ludological purpose in addition to its license, and that means sometimes choosing to do things a little out of character for the sake of being worth playing, right?
Amen to this.
What pushes my buttons is when the licensed game (or whatever, I guess) bends to marketplace needs (or, “needs”) rather than its ludological purposes. When, for example, the resolution of combat has to be a certain way because that’s what the fans of RPGs in general expect, rather than because that’s what we observe in the license, or that’s what the game has to have in order to be playable as a game.
In those cases, to hell with the marketplace expectation, I say.
“When, for example, the resolution of combat has to be a certain way because that’s what the fans of RPGs in general expect, rather than because that’s what we observe in the license, or that’s what the game has to have in order to be playable as a game.”
Hear hear!
There’s some alluding going on here, isn’t there?
I don’t have a particular game in mind, in all honesty, but I have the sense that the more I investigate this particular sore spot, the less good it will do my mood.
Touché.
While I think that Justin’s term “cool” might be a little loose, I absolutely agreed with the following comment, “I don’t want to play in a game world where I feel like I play second fiddle to some other story.”
This doesn’t merely apply to licensed products either. While many were disappointed in the massive number of changes to the Forgotten Realms setting that WotC made as a part of the transition to 4th edition, I almost jumped for joy. One of the major dilemmas for me as a GM, with regard to the FR, was to make my player’s feel like “meaningful actors” in the setting. There were so many powerful heroic NPCs, all highlighted by the fiction that some of my players were intimately familiar with, that I really struggled with the logic of designing narrative based adventures.
Why wouldn’t Elminster, or Khelben, or Drizz’t, or the Harpers, or the Knights of Myth Drannor, or the scores of other heroes take care of problem x? Yes, I was able to come up with answers, but it was a question that needed to be asked and answered during adventure design. And I was never satisfied with, “because event x is too unimportant for them.” If the event was too unimportant for Elminster, it is too unimportant for anyone. Yes, I could have said, “we’re playing in a different time period of the Realms,” but that alienated some of the underlying reasons for the players having interest in the setting in the first place.
The new revision of the setting did me the courtesy of keeping some of the characters, the players can still meet Elminster for advice, and a plausible reason for the players to be the new heroes of the FR. Certainly, I could have come up with some epic reason myself given time, but as someone who works 40 hours a week, is working on his Ph.D., has twin daughters, does a podcast and blog, and reads all the drafts of his wife’s screenplays, I don’t really have the time to devote to re-writing epic settings. I use established settings to save work, not to make work.
Licensed settings, like professional settings, can provide a wonderful GM assist, but they have to provide room for player heroics. SUPERNATURAL, at least pre the most recent season, is a natural for that, same Call of Cthulhu, Serenity, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, or Warhammer. It’s much harder to feel important in post-New Hope Star Wars. Though it’s easier in Old Republic or Interregnum Post-Clone Wars to feel the hero. There’s something pretty desperate about being Jedi on the run from Vader and crew knowing that your only goal is to survive, and aid those in need while merely surviving. We may not get to kill the Emperor, but maybe — just maybe — we are the ones who start the Rebellion in earnest.
The answer I always used to the “why doesn’t the big good guy solve the problem” in Forgotten Realms, or the DC Universe, or whatever, is just to not ask the question since it is a silly question that goes against everything about the genre. In Green Lantern comic books, nobody says “well, why doesn’t Superman come and stop the invading aliens”, they get in there and start shooting the invading aliens with space rays. I often came up with a ridiculous and sarcastic answer to the question of “Why doesn’t Elminster solve this?”, which I called “Double Fuck You, Elminster Whiners”, or 2FYEW. I don’t like him that much and I never used him, but it always baffled me why for some people this was a difficult decision to make. I had several tell me, while screaming at the computer screen and crying, no doubt, that I wasn’t playing the Forgotten Realms if I didn’t have Elminster show up in every adventure and solve things.
It’s a silly question, for sure, Jason, but it’s not one whose answer is immediately obvious to everyone, especially people of critical mindset, who’re always telling their televisions, “That would never happen!”
I know exactly when I personally learned this lesson, playing the James Bond roleplaying game in middle school with an older buddy who had a better sense of the world.
My spy had been sent on some mission or another that immediately—true to the license—went sideways, the situation not being anything like the briefing. Naturally, I extracted myself from the shitstorm and phoned MI6 to ask for further instructions. Their response, in nearly so many words, was “Solve the problem, jackass!”
“Oh, yeah,” I thought privately. “I guess that would be more fun, wouldn’t it?”