My current avatar for the game is female. Much prefer to watch her slay monsters than him, don't you think?

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii over the last week. Still working through the offline game so far. There has been a lot of hype about this game, but it matches up to what I expected, which isn’t the same as what is hyped. I debated with myself if I would get my money’s worth out of it as it appears to be a game that requires a bit of a time commitment (and a bit of “grinding”, something I swore I’d never waste my time doing), but in the end, it was watching How to Train a Dragon for a second time with the kids that changed my mind.

Like what excites me in tabletop gaming, it’s the experience I’m after when I play a computer game, be that pure fun or a thrilling adventure. One of the first games I got for the Wii was Resident Evil 4 (I never played any of the others in the series) and the first few hours of play were great. A lovely creepy, mysterious and thrilling experience. I’m not sure how much I’ve done of it, but it’s gotten to the point that the experience has worn off and I’m just playing a game; managing ammo, expecting the ridiculous and impossible twists, the pointless searching of tunnels and out-of-place puzzles. I think this is because I have the time/attention-span of a casual player but the desires of a hardcore player. I don’t play long enough that the experience carries me most of the way. (Zelda has done the same to me, I can’t believe after getting the armour together I have to go explore yet another nine dungeons or something.)

We've watched it twice, once in 2D and once in 3D. The 3D doesn't add much. Still loved it, loads of gamer references

Watching How to Train a Dragon again, the final battle between the Vikings and the great dragon, just reminded me of the trailers and screenshots of Monster Hunter Tri, and it struck me. MHT has a wonderful simple premise. One that would work just as easily as a quick game or a much larger roleplaying experience. Though I’m not interested in computer gaming roleplaying (this isn’t a slight against WOW players or anything, I’m just not interested in it), it occurred to me that it’d make a great premise for a tabletop roleplaying game.

My big chip about tabletop RPG fantasy games is that they are often highly detailed evolved worlds. Lots of rich source to explore when you play. A lot of people love this I know, but I guess I’m a little different. This, to a degree, puts me off because it presents a learning curve to the world. To make a proper character to roleplay means you should, at the least, have a good idea of the world you’re creating the character for. A detailed fantasy RPG makes me feel I should have a strong knowledge of the world before play and, quite often, you have tons of choice. And when you have too much choice, you have no choice, in a way. I could pick up a Lord of the Rings RPG because I’m a fan of the books, but Exalted wears me down. Riddle of Steel has a great combat mechanic, which makes it stand out, but the setting is detailed and dense, putting me off the setting part.

But that’s why I think MHT is fascinating. It doesn’t offer a fantasy world. It offers a premise. You are a hunter of monsters. You have seven (I think) different types of weapons to specialise in (compared to pages of detailed descriptions of medieval-inspired weapons for example). But by using different materials, buying charms, etc. you can make these weapons quite unique. The game starts you in a village, and gets you to hunt different types of monsters (and doing some grinding too) and you learn about the monsters in play. You don’t start with a big list, you build your knowledge via experience. You don’t have tons of choice, you are a hunter and you have several weapon-types to specialise in, but it does offer quite a range of customisation the more you play. (Which was one of the things that attracted me to the game, being able to create a fairly unique character.)

If you had a decent tabletop RPG mechanic for combat fighting the monsters, you could adopt a similar premise. Start small, add bits to the world (new monsters, towns, NPCs) as the players get better. Having such a simple premise would make it easy to layer on top bigger narratives as the players get more confident and attached to the world, suggesting hints of a possible invasion or conspiracies of a far away empire, etc.

Great old school RPG and I had a great character, a young teenager trying to become a warrior... which he did and became scary good!

My GM has gotten himself an job (good for him) and is now travelling the world, so we haven’t gotten to finish our “The Enemy Within” campaign, set in the Warhammer Fantasy world (1st Edition mind you so “old school”). This campaign worked because all of the players rolled up characters instead of creating them. Our initial choices were made by the dice. It allowed us to create basic characters with not that much pre-existing knowledge of the world. The campaign then set us off with our group direction and carried us around the world to the point we learned the world in play.

Anything that gets in the way of experience, takes from the whole thing. Just as with writing, anything that jars the reader from work is bad. You don’t want your reader to be correcting your grammar or laughing when they shouldn’t be at the way one of your character’s talk, how will they take anything else seriously? The same goes for roleplaying books and playing them. And for me the “burden” of a huge setting that I can’t relate it to or hang it on something is really off-putting. Warhammer fantasy is sort like a European medieval/renaissance alternative history (with Elves and Halflings) and it does it well. There’s my hook. Post-apocalyptic settings are also based on the modern world but imagined after the big bomb. Modern day games, such as urban fantasy concepts (like most of White’ Wolf’s World Of Darkness games), I can grok too.

The same also applies to far future based worlds, where the technology and science are so far advanced, they are incomprehensible as anything other than magic. Though I sometimes feel that there is something more interesting in such settings, because they ask the question, what’s going to happen to humanity? But then you’re playing, not a human, or at least not a modern human, but someone or thing so advanced that they are effectively alien.

And that’s the other thing that bugs me some what about fantasy worlds. They often shoe-horn in modern perspectives in very different worlds. Sometimes this can work when the setting doesn’t take itself too seriously, or it’s close enough to the readers world that its easy to get. But it can sometimes lead to claims or appearance of “cultural misappropriation” or it can be used by players to hide anti-game decisions (“that’s what a follower of X would do!”). So personally I prefer human or close-enough to human type characters. I’m not saying you can’t have a game or play a game where characters are significantly different, but there is a point when a human becomes too alien to play convincingly or to have a good experience with as a player, unless it’s down simply for kicks.

In Lost Heroes I make an explicit ruling on this. I say something like: “you can play a human that can turn into a dragon, but you can’t play a dragon that turns into a human.” The difference is subtle.

Okay, this post has become a lot longer than I intended. Must stop rambling. All really to say I think the premise of MHT would make an interesting tabletop RPG game.

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I only offer one possible explanation (there may be others) but this one certainly applies to me. By trade, I’m a Software Engineer and, as my project leader said “you’re being paid to be pedantic.” This is quite true: I have to be pedantic, because that thing that fucks up shit at some point in the future (i.e. the devil) is in the details. So I dissect, criticize and over-analysis stuff. You wouldn’t want it any other way though (just think about the software that runs in your set-top-box or medical equipment even).  This need to critically analysis stuff spills into everything else I do though.

It’s not bad, it just means we see more “levels” to things. Take a flower, sure we can appreciate it’s beauty and why others find it beautiful, but we also appreciate it’s construction, the clever mechanisms of it’s survival and how it gets insects to carry it’s seeds and so on. Same with the movies we love, and because we love them, we take them apart, argue over what seem like trivia to others, recognise their flaws, etc. It doesn’t diminish our love for such things, but sure as heck pisses everyone else off. (Not that I have a problem appreciating something at a surface level. I love drawing and despite my amateur skills, I enjoy studying the surface and physical level nature of things when I draw).

My wife sometimes cuts me off when I correct our six year old daughter, because not only do I give the basic correction to her simply mistake, I try to address the underlying mistaken assumptions. I try to share with her my love of the details underneath.

It’s why, being a huge fan of Lord of the Rings (I’ve read all the books only three times so I’m not heavyweight) I didn’t like the movies but I accepted and enjoyed them for what they were.

Of course the side-effect is that with experience it makes you cynical. It’s why we hate marketing and “buzz” as it appears to be an attempt to gloss over and even give a different impression of (what we expect to be) the details. And to us, someone who is very enthusiastic about something can sometimes appear to be either a fool who hasn’t looked under the surface or a salesperson.

In conclusion, some of us geeks/nerds are pedants with good reason and hence we can appear to hate the things we love because we appear to be over-critical (but we are simply enjoying it in a different way).

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I rarely consider RPGs based on novels, movies and TV shows at all. I mean, I was a big Star Wars fan and Lord of the Rings fan when I started out in roleplaying (well over 15 years now I’d say) but I wouldn’t touch any RPG based on those settings at the time. Inspired by, certainly. I remember people going on about Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG and telling me it’s fun to be running around with Buffy and other characters from the show – but it failed to get me interested. I didn’t even bother to flick through it.

I guess it might hark back to my computer gamer nerd days when, as a general rule, computer games based on movies sucked. They were created quickly and cheaply to try to profit from the hype of said movie’s release. I believe the traditional mostly continues these days too (with a few exceptions). (I don’t believe this is actually true for RPGs based on movies and novels, but it’s part of my consumer reflexes – “beware the hype”).

Another part of it is that I’d rather a “blank canvas” type of setting, one where the characters are first (or rather foremost) on the scene. There isn’t already an established story-line with well known characters there already (anywhere in the setting). The setting is free to be re-interrupted by the GM and players. Established movie/novel settings provide too much canon that can’t be changed. Players are free to avoid the character/stereotypes of the novel or TV show. Another thing about TV show and novel based RPG settings is that they are “snapshots” of the story-line. A static picture of the setting set aside to turn into an RPG. If the series is popular enough, the setting will change later in the story-line and the RPG, technically, becomes out of date (unless of course you’re using a series that has finished). And a last issue that would worry me is that players may expect very similar story-lines and atmosphere as the original novels or TV shows, but that’s generally that’s not necessarily under the control of the GM or system (it can be a combination of everything). I think the thing is, I get more excited about original or innovative settings for RPGs than already established settings getting ported to RPG land.

There was one TV show I thought about adapting myself, for the fun of it: Relic Hunter. I liked the simple premise of each episode, entertaining archetypes, the completely human characters, and that there was this second layer to the world that got exposed occasionally (the relic hunter community). I thought it might make a fun RPG. But I never pursued it.

(Call of Cthulhu though, that’s sorta an exception. It’s based on a mythos, a setting, rather than an existing story-line like Lord of the Rings.)

Of course, if I don’t know much about the original material, I’d be more open to treating the RPG as a pure blank-canvas type of game and then of course if a game has something that intrigues me I’d probably ignore the original material concessions.

Out of curiosity, does anyone else think the same or am I the only freaky one?

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