There's this show I used to love.
About the crew of a spaceship, travelling around. Making trouble. Trying to be bad guys, and getting stuck with the moral issues thereof.
With nine people on the ship, I've always had difficult thinking of it as an RPG. That's too big of a table for my wants.
Then I started working on this game, Solar Wind & Sail.
Here's a question: Which of those nine are NPCs? Which are PCs? How many are PCs?
Here's the list: Captain Reynolds, Zoey, Wash, Kaylee, Jayne, Shepherd Book, Inara, Simon, River.
I've got my notion, but I want to hear how you break it up.
Friday, December 16, 2016
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Rotating cast. Each session is a discrete episode, and each player decides who will be a main character for this heist. They can't pick the same character twice. Unpicked characters are recovering, or absent, or busy, or in trouble, or providing support
ReplyDeleteZoey is always a PC. Inara, River and Kaylee too.
ReplyDeleteSean Gomes Got a system in mind? Do you envision character ownership by player?
ReplyDeleteMisha B Four PCs, then? Or are some others also PCs?
ReplyDeleteEh, I think the story centered around those 4 would be way more interesting. To me at least.
ReplyDeleteMisha B I thiiink we could do this in the system I've been building. We agree on two PCs, and making sure that River and Inara are PCs is a little difficult the way I've built things.
ReplyDeleteHey, maybe its the All-Women expansion. Wanna write it?
Haha, we'll see.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the replies yet but my first instint is to say that Captain Reynolds, Zoey, Jayne, and Simon are the PCs.
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford At least to me, it is fascinating that you and Misha have an overlap of one.
ReplyDeleteLike omg wtf does that mean. I don't even know.
Misha B Solar Wind & Feminism: a Misha B hack.
ReplyDeleteSimon? Really?
ReplyDeleteI could be wrong but I get the impression that Misha B listed the four which would be PC's in her game, rather that the ones which were PC's in Joss Wheedon's show.
ReplyDeleteTo me the four I list are the ones who most often either create problems or solve problems.
You could argue that River does too but often it's beyond her control.
The others have too much down time to be PCs I think.
Fair enough
ReplyDeleteCould it be four players each with a character to play during ship based events (Wash/Kaylee/Book/Inara) and another to play during dustbowl shootouts (Mal/Jayne/Zoe/Simon)?
ReplyDeleteIf so the question has to be, what are the four pairs
My first instinct was that it'd depend on the player group, which lines up with the people suggesting rotating casts and what not.
ReplyDeleteI'd say it varies episode by episode. Instinctively I'd end up at basically the same place as Sean Gomes.
ReplyDeleteI suspect (without having tested it) that if you go down the list of episodes, you'd be able to pull out 3-5 characters per episode who are clearly the "PCs" of that episode, with the rest providing basic support roles, or being involved in minor subplots. I'd probably also allow doubling-up for when characters don't get a lot of scenes together.
Sometimes you have to make hard choices about who the PCs are, too. Like, "War Stories," Mal and Wash don't really do much, since they spend the whole session tied up. But if you tried to handwave that as a downtime action, "oh, Mal and Wash bond," then that's pretty boring. (My pick for that episode: Mal, Wash, Zoe, Kaylee, if I get four. Mal's player would double River for the scene with Kaylee and River playing on the ship, Wash's player would double Jayne for the "griswold" conversation, and Zoe and Kaylee would double Simon and Inara and Book, who are all in the episode but have very minor roles.)
Similarly:
ReplyDeleteFry, Leela, Bender, Amie, Professor Farnsworth, Hermes Conrad, Zoidberg.
Which are PCs?
Farnsworth is absolutely the GM.
ReplyDeleteHAH!
ReplyDeletethe crew of Firefly is great for illustrating how relationships can hold you in check and create drama. If i had to pick 4...
ReplyDeletemy criteria was characters with agency that gets acted upon. I love Shepard but we never got an episode that developed his character, so its hard to include him in this list. Reynolds is kind of generic and could be replaced with quaint nationalist pride that all the characters have weird feelings towards.
Zoey: the conflict to her devotion to the captain and her husband is great.
Kaylee: "Cause a girl has needs"
Simon: protect his sister
Jayne: get paid big time.
I second the rotating cast idea. But also...
ReplyDeleteMalcom got to PC most adventures.
River has fairly little agency in the episodes -- at least that other players can follow. I think she's an unfolding plot, pulled on by the other pcs -- like the episode where the bounty hunter comes for her and locks everyone else away? That's a session where people are only allowed to play their hooks into River. Kind of Bluebeard's Bride style.
Wash and Zoey are rarely pcs. I think Zoey is played by the same player as Mal, both when they're in scenes together and when they aren't. I don't know about Wash.
Kaylee and Inara, when they appear, are always PCs.
Book is an odd one. I'd need to rewatch and think. Like Wash, I don't think he's a pc, but I don't know who or what plays him.
For some reason, I feel like Simon and Jayne are played by the same guy. They're such opposites, and I can just picture the player picking whichever one he wants to lean on that night.
/no alliance watches over you (aka sub)
ReplyDeleteIt's one of these groups where there are sometimes people missing?
ReplyDeleteSo, Mal is one of the players who's always there.
He takes over Zoey whenever her player has to do overtime. Wash is also a regular. Kaylee and Jayne find babysitters most of the time, but sometimes there's only one of them (and when the little one get's sick, well, none). Jayne still is a regular, but he makes it as often as he doesn't. He can be hurled along by the others, if need be, so.
The others are less regular players or ex-PCs:
Inara is Mal's players partner and sometimes joins the group to do him/her a favor, sometimes only for some minutes at the start or ending of a session.
Simon planned on being there everytime and had this great plan for a storyline, bringing with him the NPC River, but found a new job next state, so cannot make it that often.
Book is somehow alike. Great plans, less for a storyline but for his characters background, but then life interfered so he didn't make it that often - maybe that new other hobby, you know, trending right now...
Don't your groups go like that sometimes? :-)
Michel Kangro I have! And then the game kind of fizzled out.
ReplyDeleteJoss and Mal could make a session for sure, but nobody else could really get there. We all got together for an epic ending. Which was mostly about Simon's plot, but thankfully this interwove into Mal and Zooey's nicely. Kaylee didn't have as much, as most of what she wanted was reactive character drive rather than big plot.
Jayne turned into an asshole.
Book wasn't satisfied that we'd seen everything from his character, so he wrote more backstory. It was pretty great, but a divergence from the main themes.
I hear sometimes Mal and Wash get together to game, and everybody else shiows up occasionally. Except Joss -- Wash is GMing these stories now, while Joss GMs big-time superhero larps.
So, yeah. I absolutely have seen that happen in real life. And I see either the game fall apart, or the -- worse yet -- the friendships disintegrate.
I've found a couple of solutions over the years to some of the main problems of getting people together, but none of them are universal and none are optimal. I'd love to find an optimal solution, but I think it involves teleporters and time machines.
William Nichols Teleporters and Time Machines would solve some of the problems. Trying not to think about the new ones they would pose... ;)
ReplyDeleteDerek Balling Yeah. I'm not a fan of it, I've never really liked the Cortex Plus system. It doesn't put its attention where I want it.
ReplyDeleteLet's just say I've written a few pages of a system, yeah.