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Whenever I have the need to run a one-shot game for a visiting out-of-towner or a group on non-committal players, I have had luck with Gamma World. Given it's 'out-of-the-box' playability and more lighthearted lore, it's great for just cutting loose with some imaginative setting and player characters in a somewhat disposable way. I always start with the basic description of the setting ('saturday-morning-cartoon postapocalyptic quantum-mechanical adventure'), then let people read through the list of origins. Once they latch onto a few that sound appealing (rat-swarm always seems to be popular) we just random up some PCs from the WOTC website, ensuring that no two players have any shared origins. The one twist that I reserve is that I always overlay some kind of gimmick onto the setting, to aid in loosening the atmosphere. While some people enjoy heavy role-playing and melodrama and that's fine for certain games, personally Gamma World works best with a more lighthearted and comedic tone. So I'll run the game with some gimmick. In one game, everybody made 'wild-west' characters, with desperados and sheriffs and cowboy tropes filling the world, in addition to being radioactive mutants with alien technology and reality-warping trans-dimensional powers. Or everyone is a computerized digital sprite, in a virtual net-based world running on some cosmic computer server, with internet pirates and security firewalls overlaying the cast of characters. The most recent game featured character in radioactive mutant high-school, with cheerleaders and jocks and nerds being the stock characters. Employing these kinds of gimmicky setting constraints helps the players use stock character stereotypes to inform their character, augmented by the actual mutant powers they have, and also helps to soften the tone. This works well for one-shots, since simple characters have simpler motivations and everybody gets a good laugh about communally building up exaggerated personas and then seeing them subverted organically as the game goes on. Kinda the Team Fortress 2 or Dota theory of character design where you start with a two-word gimmick (texan engineer, skeleton king) and then make all the character's jokey attributes flow from that.
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Aug 19, 2013 04:19
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:02 |
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