rene@umcp-cs.UUCP (09/22/83)
One problem I've encountered in frp is that the character is very different from me. For instance, a character may have an 18 intellegence, but I can't remember all the details of a situation or figure out a solution that someone smarter might be able to. I find this especially true in traveler, where you have to remember rumors and people and complicated sequences of events (histories) in order to know what to do, or at least to do the intelligent thing. There is no way to roll dice to see if you figure it out. It can be fustrating to say the least. I think it's easier to be dumber than you are than smarter. Star Frontiers has a partial solution - each race has some specialty (sociology, for instance) and you can use e.p. to raise the chance you have (in percentiles) of knowing something you ought to know. For instance, if my character should know something about sociology, and I can't figure out what a certain thing in a culture means, I can roll the dice and have, say, a 17% chance of my character figuring it out. Is anyone else bothered with this problem? It seems that all the other players I play with are really clever and can figure anything out. - rene
ech@pyuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath) (09/26/83)
Yes, it can be tough playing a character of high intelligence (or wisdom,
or "street-wise" from Traveler, or...). A convention which our group
generally, if not universally, applies (we rotate the GM-ship) is to
roll against the players characteristic and, if they "make", give him/her
a "hint" ("you notice that..." or "you recall that..."). A good example
of where this is almost always the case is the Bard trying to "legend
lore" an object or monster; there is simply no way to characterize the
knowledge gained by attending those Druidical collegia in detail; thus
a Bard may "recognize" a monster (s)he has never seen. Similarly,
a mage may recognize an object (s)he has heard tales of.
Perhaps that broaches the whole subject lan-l!bb invited, namely what is
your group like? We tend to put a LOT of emphasis on role-playing, and
this requires the GM to help out with the kind of problem you describe.
That is a key idea, and tends to make us avoid the tournament-style
modules you generally find in the stores: they seem to almost require an
"adversary" GM. Perhaps my favorite to date (over 4 years or so) is
a long campaign which has had 2 ~four-month installments and is about to
have a third (one of the group members is into pre-Columbian civilizations
and has had us running around the Mayan empire about the time the Aztecs
were gaining strength). Literally everyone in the party has a character
(s)he has really come to know well, the monsters are mostly human and from
a civilization very different from the medieval Europe D&D seems based
(loosely) on but which is historically based. Makes for LOTS of fun, lots
of consistency (the GM has lots of obscure sources to draw from), and a
lot of character development.
'nuff of that for now...
=Ned=rld@pyuxnn.UUCP (09/26/83)
I agree with rene's comments about SF frps.
I tried to run a Traveller game about a year ago, but it died out.
Now I also work at ajob, and maybe I'm not imaginative enough to be a GM,
but I rely on published materiels to provide 90% of the details of an adventure
and embellish with 10% of my own. I found the Traveller materiel insufficient
to create an injteresting world from. ["Shadows" was sufficient, "Kinunir" was
wholly insuffucient, others seemed to be repetition of the
wander-around-the-inside-of-an-abandoned-spaceship theme.]
And the lack of an experience-system in Traveller dissapointed me; I always
viewed self-improvement as the primary motivation. AS for getting rich,
I could'nt see justification for leaving treasure chests of gold lying around
a space station.
This year I am running a Star Frontiers game. I find it much more satisfying.
I can "get into" the scenarios and imagine motivations for the characters
and events much more easily. The adventures provide more detailed
events/monsters and stimulate me to embellish more. The rules seem to be less
detailed-for-detail's-sake. (I wouldn't ever claim they were perfect;
it has been pointed out to me that the scales are sometimes unREAListic.)
I would like to see more discussion and comparison on the net, hopefully from
people more experienced/productive than I.
[I dont play D&D.]
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