Headspace

So some more thoughts on roleplaying and gamingstyles. For a long time now, I’ve had a one favourite in all the rpg’s available in our home and that is Fading Suns. FS depicts a world in the end of the fifth millenium, living a new, feudal dark age, when the science is mainly forgotten, democracy is something thats long gone in the history. To make matters more intresting the world is in the grips of a religious hysteria as the suns are slowly fading out and the omnipresent church once again preaches of true sin and man’s need to atone for it.

It is a hell of a good game. The designers have given out information on the Royal houses, lesser noble houses, interstellar guilds, every imaginable church faction, barbarian factions and aliens and nothing is defined so that an individual gamemaster couldn’t make rathe unique interpretations on them. My favourite of all the factions is the apparent nasties of House Decados, and for them I’ve during the courses of our games developed stuff that is unique to our games.

I think this is one of the main points of the game. I mean it adapts to anything you want to do, form low-fantasy, to spaceopera, from horror to heroic high-fantasy, from court intrigue to gutter-running, absolutely anything. And for all this there’s plenty of room for the gamemaster to develop more, invent something truly new and give in to that fascination of creation, that at least for me is the best part of gming. The rulesystem is light and supports the gameworld, it is not something generic thats developed for something completely different, but a thing that has value spesifically in this world. It takes into account such things as the characters’ faith, their approaches to the church and spirituality their drive in the life.

Did I mention this is a very light rulesystem? It has skills where one skill can have several uses, making them comprehensive and deep, skills can be natural (Everyone knows them to a degree) or learned. It has Blessings and Curses that represent character’s internal quirks, it has benefices and afflictions that define some aspects of the character in relation to their surrounding world. There is only one dice, where you always throw characteristic+skill and you get levels of success out of it.

But there is a catch. This is not a gamingworld and a rulesystem for everyone, no. The world given out like this requires the gamemaster to really flesh it out. The gamemaster needs to make judgement calls on issues, otherwise the players have a snowball’s chanses in hell to get any impressions of the world. The other thing is the rulesystem. It works for me, it works beautifully, but this is because I’m a narrativist in approach and will ignore any rule that stands in the way of my story. This approach is written out in the rules as Andrew’s Maxim. These maxims are meta-rules, opinions of Andrew Greenberg written out to highlight on how the game should in his opinion to be managed and for the most time I can agree with him. (For those who don’t know this guy’s other successes were in the 1. edition of the Vampire: the Masquerade)

So why I am ranting about this… Because, this game has a fanbase as diverse as the lifeforms in my office coffeecup, that I think should now after forgetting it on my desk for a month to be washed again. The unenglightened brethren on the game’s official forums. keep demanding that the rules should be changed into something much more complex either to satisfy their simulationist or gamist needs. Or they keep demanding that stuff they’ve written as fanproduction, stuff that in thin, one eyed, overly comprehensive approach describes everything about the gameworld, be canonised and published by the HDI. I am tired, why is the game that I love so well attacked this fiercely by people who claim to love it? At this point when majority of the gamematerial has been out for years they should know that the level of spesification in this game is what it is, They shouldn’t demand for more, or demand it to be changed, or…!

Well, needed to unload this, feeling better now… and yes there are very smart and good and proper gamers on those forums as well. This was a rant. I get to rant in my blog… even and especially on trivial things that have no significanse in the real world, especially on them. So there.