Generic System: Alien

One of the things I love about the Alien RPG is the stress dice system. From the Youtube videos I watched of this being reviewed and played (I know, why aren't I on Youtube?), the game uses a "stress dice" mechanic to ratchet up tension and bad consequences as the game progresses.

A slow build that builds tension for the introduction. At 30 minutes we get our "huge shocking moment!" At the hour mark the PCs begin to learn how screwed they all are and the NPCs start dying. By hour two everyone is completely frantic and panicked as they rush to complete objectives, and the first PCs start to die. By hour three of the game the few players with still living PCs are screaming their character actions as insanity grips the table.

Great stuff, very "experience focused" and I am looking forward to reading this game. With any space monster, not just the iconic xenomorph, this works in any situation and any setting where you are trapped in a place where you slowly start to figure out the place is not the safe castle you thought it to once be. Your home is the monster's lair, and you are just guests. For dinner.

But let's play this game - and a scenario like this - using a generic system, just as a thought experiment.

Captain Maxwell Brave

Well, figuring this mind experiment is designing characters with "any generic system" and I have access to a full range of character design options, let's design our first character. Now, the game could be GURPS, Savage Worlds, FATE, or any system that allows character design choices.

My character, of course, is Captain Maxwell Brave, the captain of our Alien starship and right off, as a player, I buy the fearless and brave advantages. I do not want my space captain to feel the effects of fear, panic, stress, or any other hinderance from some two-bit space monster that happens to get on board HIS ship.

Let's buy levels of charisma and inspiration as well, in order to help protect his crew, give inspiring speeches, and immunize any crew on his ship from panic as well. Just having Captain Maxwell Brave on the starship means confidence! Any crew just knows if he is in the command chair, that nothing bad can happen to them.

He is also a retired professional pistol marksman who won thousands of competitions from around the galaxy, just because we need a quick reason to buy up that pistol skill to insane levels. I mean, the design system ALLOWS me to design any character I want, right? You wouldn't be a bad game master that nobody wants to play with and limit my choices?

Doctor Geldoc Smart

Next character! Due to a hideous lab accident that took away his hair, gave him a good amount of disadvantage points of unattractiveness, and an insane amount of acid resistance, Doctor Geldoc Smart joins the crew as chief scientist. What do we need attractiveness for anyways in an Alien scenario, we are not going to bars and looking for missions? Did I say acid resistance? Yes I did! His skin is highly resistant to acid, just because...no I am not designing characters to cheat the situation! How dare you insinuate that? You must not want me as a friend! This game system said "create any character you want!"

He also has heightened senses, as a result of the accident. Um, why can't he? His exposure to acid affected his sense of touch, but all other senses are now heightened. Why, he bet he could just smell an alien around here somewhere...

So anyways, if we are playing this game as intended, our scientist is super smart, has access to a wide range of super-science devices, and can use science to defeat any alien creature he encounters. Why, his science is so powerful he can make mind-control helmets that he can use to control any alien's mind! Or anti-alien force fields! Or alien control rays! Or anti-acid grenades! Or teleportation wristbands for the crew!

There is no problem he can't solve with science!

Toolman Manny Jackson

Now, Toolman Manny Jackson builds robots. He can build robots for anything. Why, he doesn't need to go anywhere dangerous or do anything dangerous, he just builds a robot and sends the robot to do his job for him. That's right, Toolman is so smart and so resourceful, he could build a robot out of anything, even a kitchen appliance and some unused silverware. He can build robots to do all his fighting for him as well, making deadly weapons out of common household objects, like a deadly razor disc launcher out of a movie-player and stack of movie discs.

Manny can also fix darn well near anything, and work remotely using a robot and his VR glasses. Who needs to send a team down to the engine room to fix the overheating reactor when Manny can whip up a team of robots, arm them with weapons, and send the miniature army of bots down there to do the job for him?

Reactor overloading? Nope, not happening with Manny around. no need to escape to orbit, the reactor is fixed! He will expect a bonus from the company however for saving the facility.

Manny can also fabricate any type of weapon he needs, from plasma guns to flamethrowers, just with a couple common household objects. Did you know a DVD player could be turned into a heavy laser machinegun - just because it has a laser diode inside it to read the disc?

First Officer Sophia Blade

Renown martial artist and blade fighting specialist Sophia Blade joins our crew with the ability to turn anything into a deadly thrown weapon, her special transpera-steel acid-resistant fighting blade, and a dodge skill high enough to avoid any splash of blood (or acid) that comes from her precision strikes. Why? She doesn't like getting dirty! Don't question my character design choices I am not doing this to avoid acid splashes in melee! Are you accusing me of cheating? The rules say "any character you can imagine!"

I just have a great imagination is all.

And she grew up...um...in a gladiatorial arena fighting aliens! Yep, that is her background. No wonder we can buy all these melee skills, she is hunted by every known xenomorph in the galaxy known to humankind because she um, killed so many of them in the arena. Any ship with her on it is bound to have three different xenomorph species on it at one time so many are hunting her, but it is no problem!

So anyways, Sophia Blade's chi powers allow her the remarkable abilities to wall run, survive for short periods in a complete vacuum, disappear like a ninja in a puff of smoke, move through areas undetected, stalk her enemies like a professional assassin, lay down deadly traps for enemies, and deliver killing blows in the first thrust in combat. Her character race is defined as "ninja" and she comes from a planet of ninjas.

Doctor Marcus Healman

Ex Special Forces doctor Marcus Healman joins the crew, with his uncanny ability to bring back the dead, heal any wound, and create any drug he needs with a minimum of materials and effort. Did you know common breakfast cereals contain so many minerals that they can be used as the base for most any generic drug? He can also create cybernetic limbs and bodies, just in case a crewmember gets too chewed up and needs a complete body replacement.

And since Doctor Healman served in the Colony Wars (tm) his combat skills are par excellence, and his skill at shipboard guerrilla warfare is second to none. Why, he could find a patch of mud to cover himself in and hide in in any ship, even the most spotless. He knows how to use most any heavy weapon and arms system produced today. He can fly military spacecraft, drive tanks, work automatic grenade launchers, and crew any weapons system in the galaxy.

Oh and he is hunted by every other faction in the universe, so not only will we have three extra xenomorphs on the ship, there are probably five squads of enemy soldiers hiding on the ship somewhere waiting to take him out. And no, none of them know about the others.

Why combine him with a soldier character? Because the game master wants us to design average working characters, that's why. I know this isn't a military mission! That is why he is "ex" special forces!

You Get the Point

I know you are enjoying these extra-silly writeups, and I will do more in the future since I love doing them. But they highlight a point. Some systems give you so many options players can immunize themselves from almost any problem thrown at them, and they sabotage the genre instead of support it. The Alien game thankfully (to the best of my knowledge) uses rules to support the experience, and while I could design the above characters in the system - they would not have the game breaking rules behind them to make them immune to the challenges the game throws at them.

Yes, I am cheesing generic systems. This isn't to say they are bad, just...there is a tendency to cheese them once the players know what they are getting into. You get into this "players versus the genre" fight that isn't necessarily "players versus game master" - though it could turn into that quickly during play. This is just a natural reaction of humans to survive, use the tools given to them, and optimize their chances of survive given the options presented and allowed to them.

This isn't really the fault of the players or the game master, and it is really more of a game design issue. Yes, you could find a more mature group that avoids the cheesy choices and designs realistic characters that fit into the genre, but you are asking players to make artificial choices at that point and limit themselves in an unnatural way.

Also, some generic games deal with this sort of cheese better than others. Some other games are so full of cheese and broken builds they have holes in the pages. Your mileage may vary, and a lot depends on your players.

The Alien game takes a different angle, from what I know, and puts players on a mostly even field. There aren't game-breaking choices available. The rules are written to enhance the experience, not to sabotage it. I like games written to deliver an experience, and I also like the freedom of generic systems.

But there is a conflict between generic systems and the ability of players to immunize themselves from specific experiences and genres. Given most any generic system, I can build characters that deal with horror scenarios pretty well. I know the rules that will be used against the players (fear, shock, stealth, etc), and I will use the design options available to defend against them, either subtly or overtly like the characters above. The above characters are way over the top I know, but to tell you the truth, every one of them has been played at my table over the last 40 years.

Dragon Age: Inquisition Playthrough

We hadn't got around to playing through the latest Dragon Age game, so DarkgarX and I decided to play through Inquisition to get us up to speed on the latest lore, and more importantly, the feel of the game.

I can feel this was worth it, because one comment DarkgarX had about the pen-and-paper game was that, "I want a game I can care about, that feels real to me and is serious."

Bioware does great work, and we have been playing their games a while and can spot some of the campy and somewhat 'Bioware' things they do in the games, such as the multi-cultural approach, some of the twisted fiction plot-lines, and they have their own unique 'take' on fantasy in general that is say different than, Game of Thrones. If you can imagine a Bioware-made Game of Thrones game you know what we mean, things wouldn't be 'Martin' they would take on a distinctively Bioware feeling and approach. It's not a bad thing, it is just different and sometime a mix of campy and serious.

Tyrion Lannister may be talking about his chest hair in the Bioware version, if you know what I mean. I love the tounge-in-cheek aspects of the Bioware games, and I also feel they have a more balanced approach when it comes to presenting a more-inclusive variety of fantasy that doesn't focus as much on angry white men as history and pop-culture has the past 2,000 years. Don't take that the wrong way, but you know what I mean, and I like things a little different in my entertainment and gaming.

I thought it would be fun to highlight the more campy, Bioware-y, and multi-cultural aspects of the videogame, but he felt otherwise, like he wanted a more serious and dramatic approach. Watch the video and you'll get what I mean. This was an interesting shift in what he wants from a game, and as a good game master, I picked up on that and will be running the game a little differently than I had planned.

We will get back to that later, but there is another facet to this discussion I wanted to bring in. Dungeons and Dragons is a lot like comic books and what I would like to call "tribute fiction." Tribute fiction works like this, if Hollywood comes out with a new Alien movie and it does a blockbuster summer, you can bet three months later comic books will have Alien-like creatures rampaging through them, roleplaying games will have xenomorphs in them, and video games that give you the Alien-like experience will start to appear. It isn't bad, it is just the normal echo of pop-culture through itself over and over again, and it is the reason D&D 4 warlocks were teleporting Nightcrawler-like heroes out of the X-Men. It isn't really original, it is just like a best-of remix of various pieces of pop-culture in fantasy and also cool things people like.

But really, all fiction is a form of tribute fiction, since everything borrows off the consciousness of what came before. Some fiction though, is more tribute than others.

It is like Dragon Age versus D&D. Dragon Age does borrow from pop-culture, and so does D&D, as they are both part of the fantasy pop-culture continuum. Dragon Age is a specific implementation of a fantasy idea, where D&D is more generic. Watch the trailer again, but this time think of it two ways:

1. This is something that makes me want to play Dragon Age.
2. This is something that makes me want to play D&D.

It works as a generic D&D trailer as well, in that you have medieval trappings, magic, dragons, castles, and "things you see in fantasy gaming." It works better as a Dragon Age trailer, because the trailer is tightly tied into the specific implementation of the Dragon Age idea. If Dragon Age is the Southwestern restaurant, D&D is the generic buffet where you can also get Mexican food. It is the reason why D&D pulls in a huge list of inspirations in the 5th Edition DMG, such as Game of Thrones and Middle Earth, and really any other fantasy source material. It is by its nature, more tribute fiction than is either of those specific implementations of the fantasy idea.

If I want to play Dragon Age or have a group of people who love Dragon Age, I will either play the pen-and-paper game or the videogames, because I will get the full experience.

If I have a group of people that want a more generic experience, I will play Pathfinder or D&D, because they do a lot more different and varied things. They are not the best at doing a specific thing, they just do a lot of things well enough that people can hook their idea of 'fantasy gaming' on the D&D train and ride along.

Now, D&D has specific settings in the form of Grayhawk, Faerun, Dark Sun, and other places. To those who read the Faerun novels in the 90's, that place is as much of a Dragon Age as Dragon Age is to people that are fans of that setting. It is unfortunate that D&D has gone under such seismic shifts in rules and setting lore, because there was a real feeling that Faerun and other settings could have broken out from D&D's shadow and 3rd through 5th Edition rules-turmoil and been stronger worlds with a more Middle Earth feeling to the lore than just as 'settings to play D&D in.'

Again, it is an interesting comparison with Dragon Age in focus, presentation, and feeling. With Dragon Age, it feels like the world comes first, and the rules are a secondary concern. With D&D, it feels like the rules come first, and the settings are secondary concerns.

It is a good thing to know as a game master, does my group like the lore of a specific world better, or are they fans of a specific set of rules? This is part of the appeal of Pathfinder admittedly as well. In any case, finding out what players want and focusing on that will get you a better sense of enjoyment and fun, and success for your gaming time.