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May 26, 2004
Slam Dunk?
I've been thinking about Japanese sports manga lately. I think that they might, in fact, offer a mode ideal for roleplaying games.
In my experience, games thrive on two things. First, they need conflict, to push the characters into motion and give direction to the game. Second, they need continuity. Conflicts are at their most memorable when the antagonists are richly developed and have a strong history with the protagonists. They get even richer when the relationships between the protagonists and the antagonists are not one-dimensional. (That's why femme fatale characters are powerful; the mixture of attraction and repulsion the protagonist feels helps creates genuine uncertainty in the audience about what his or her reponse will be.)
This is why the traditional action-adventure settings in rpgs are problematic. The antagonists usually die at the end. That's a waste of a perfectly good continuing character. Worse still, when death is the stake, coming up with convincing reasons for conflicted relationships between the characters is very difficult. This is why superheros don't kill (who can imagine Batman without the Joker?), but this choice has its own degrading effect on the narrative.
Enter the sports manga. Observe that it neatly solves all those problems in one fell swoop. You have sports competition to structure the narrative, but normally the other team won't get killed: which means that we can have recurring antagonists. Furthermore, while sports are important, they don't have to totally dominate someone's life: the PCs can talk and interact with the antagonists off the court, and can date or be related to their opponents, and do fun soap-opera things without the sorts of baroque contrivances that adventure stories require.
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» Monday Mashup #41: Hoosiers from Population: One
In the spirit of Neel Krishnaswami's recent post on sports games, today's mashup is Hoosiers. It could be any sports... [Read More]
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Comments
That's a wicked idea, Neel! I think it'd be an interesting step toward the "mainstreaming" of RPGs whilst keeping the format generally intact.
You know, I wonder whether the idea itself couldn't be applied to everyone's favourite RPGs or genres anyway? I can think of two RPGs off the top of my head that feature exotic sports as part of the text on the world - Cyberpunk 2020 with the McCartney Stadium in Night City and its combat football, and Heavy Gear with its professional Gear dueling (where no-one dies!). Heck, Dream Pod 9’s even published at least two Heavy Gear supplements based around the idea. I'm not sure whether XCrawl counts; from what little I've seen it seems more like legitimised dungeon crawling, with the enemies still dying.
It might be a tough sell on existing players, though. A couple of years ago, I tried selling the idea of an underground dueling campaign to some players I know, and it got a lukewarm response. When I brought up the Black Talon idea as an alternative, most of them were all over it. In all fairness, there was no other team-based middle ground, like a pro dueling campaign, but still, I think what sells a lot of gamers on RPGs is the idea of the action-adventure, compared to which even high-profile sports can seem mundane. In my not-so-humble opinion.
Posted by: IMAGinES at May 26, 2004 10:40:51 PM
I have always thought Amber thrives because it's a soap opera, which operates along the same principles.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at May 26, 2004 10:54:12 PM
Just as a FYI datapoint, my last CiaB column [1] in Pyramid was sports-themed, with a little Calvinball/Fluxx/Nomic jazz for flavor.
It's the worst-rated *and* lowest turnout of voters of all of my CiaBs.
[1] Subscribers can see "LudiCROUS: the Sport of the Future" here:
http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/login/article.html?id=4674
CU
Posted by: Chad Underkoffler at May 26, 2004 11:43:28 PM
For what it's worth, Chad, it was the Calvinball/Fluxx/Nomic side of that piece that turned me off -- the "teammates in athletic competition" premise worked fine.
Posted by: Jadasc at May 27, 2004 9:00:35 AM
What is Calvinball/Fluxx/Nomic? It sounds like some strange moon language.
*peer*
Posted by: Emily K. Dresner-Thornber at May 27, 2004 9:08:57 AM
Neel,
I've had a similiar thought. My idea would be that there was the actual sport which would actually be this board game or miniatures game where people can move around and actually play the game. And then after the game is over, there's all the Role-Playing stuff. A bit like Blood Bowl, but with more "down-time".
I was going to use soccer or some made-up sport, but really it could be anything. The trick is getting the drama right for the off-field stuff. This is very much a game about not having super-powers and that may be a hard sell for most gamers. On the other hand, the chance to roleplay an obnoxious jock who beats up on those "D&D nerds" might be the most cathartic thing in the universe.
Tom
Posted by: Tom at May 27, 2004 9:53:21 AM
A few years ago I pitched "Blood in the Ring" - a game where the characters were over the top pro-wrestlers and the in-ring personas & soap operas were real and carried along off-stage as well - to a small publisher. They laughed at me. Now we see X-Crawl and the forthcoming Know Your Role. Who's laughing now, eh???!?!?!?! well, um, I guess not me, because I didn't get to write the game after all. But I still think it would be fun!
Posted by: Chris at May 27, 2004 10:14:01 AM
Em: The C/F/N thing is a reference to the idea that the rules and premises of the game can change from session to session or moment to moment. I really hate that sort of thing. (Yes, whimsical rules mechanics shoved me into a locker and stole my lunch money in grade school. Still hold a grudge. Anyway.)
Posted by: Jadasc at May 27, 2004 10:23:33 AM
I believe this was discussed on the Forge at one point. Of course, people started lasersharking the idea, considering sports in the "rollerball" or "cybersports" vein...
Posted by: Loki at May 27, 2004 10:54:59 AM
Be sure to check out Kayfabe by Matt Gwinn.
Posted by: Vincent at May 27, 2004 11:44:59 AM
Good observations about conflict and killing antagonists, but I'm not loving it.
One of the reasons people play RPGs is to explore things that seem important in a harmless way - serious conflicts you wouldn't want to be in in real life. Sports... just doesn't do it for me - if I'm going to devote my time to a sports RPG, I should get off my gamer butt and go play some sports, there's no benefit to having it at one level removed by making it a game.
I'm all for soap opera antics in games though, and antagonists who you don't kill so the GM can reuse them.
-andy
Posted by: ashultz at May 27, 2004 12:05:24 PM
Vincent beat me to it. I would love for somebody more wrestling savvy than I **coughBRYANTcough** to run a couple of sessions of Kayfabe for our group.
Posted by: Rob MacDougall at May 27, 2004 12:06:07 PM
Oh, really? Well, I do own a copy, so OK.
Posted by: Bryant at May 27, 2004 1:46:50 PM
I have long tinkered with a game design (and made little progress, alas, especially now that I've back-burnered it for a while) based, essentially, on Unreal Tournament. I've called it Arena Stars, to date.
Players portray champions or teams of blood-sport combatants sponsored by corporations, galactic governments, etc. They would be clones, androids, bots, etc. In each game, the participants do, in fact, die (or get destroyed). But, they get cloned, fixed, etc. So long as they have that financial, polticial, and/or popular backing, they're revived.
Outside the "ring" game play continues. But there, it's more about social acumen, marketing, money, etc. Get killed outside the ring and you're dead for good. Insurers won't revive you! So be careful.
Anyway, yeah, one of the joys was that it let you compete repeatedly against rival teams violently. Best of both worlds, perhaps!
Posted by: Matt Snyder at May 27, 2004 3:40:56 PM
I like the idea -- I could see running a mini-series based around this sort of thing. I think I'd do as others mentioned, and base it around some sort Roller-ball, near-future sports game.
However, while it's piqued my interest, I don't know if it would fly with your average gamer. In my experience with my group, and with geeks in general, is that they don't much like sports. Oh there are a usually a few members of the group who are interested in sports -- a baseball fan here, two football fans there -- but for the most part they are either apathetic about sports, or aggressively dismissive of them. I have a hard time envisioning people who will spend 15 minutes ranting about how much they dislike sports suddenly playing an RPG based on sports ... even something radically twisted by magic or technology.
Posted by: Ken Newquist at May 27, 2004 6:16:52 PM
I've gotten so many good responses I feel intimidated. Anyway, here are some thoughts.
I think the reason people go "a sports rpg?" and then start immediately lasersharking the idea (what an awesome phrase!) is that they instinctively recognize that a sports competition has no intrinsic narrative force to it. So they do the first thing that comes to mind -- add magic, superpowers, and violence to raise the stakes of the contest until it does have punch. But there's another solution, which is to contextualize the competition, so that the contest represents the resolution of a conflict. In Slam Dunk, the manga begins when a girl asks the main character whether he likes basketball. Desperate to impress her, he blurts out that he loves it so much he's going to try out for the school team -- despite the fact he knows nothing about it. Then he spends the next three weeks before the tryouts desperately practicing and learning so as not be caught out in a lie.
This isn't a setup with superpowers, but it's not remotely "realistic": the characters are extreme and stylized. If I were to work up a Slam Dunk rpg, the way I'd go is make it part of a high school rpg, in which the PCs face challenges like dating, schoolwork, friendship and rivalries, and use the basketball games as capstones to the conflict. Damn it. Now I want to build and run this game. My Nobilis game will wrap up in a couple of months, and I've been thinking that I need to run something that's in a non-fantastic genre. I've had very little experience with that, either as player or GM, and want to stretch my muscles a bit. I had been thinking of doing a crime game (either as police or crooks), but the more I think about this, the more attractive a high school game is.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at May 27, 2004 8:49:08 PM
Nonfantastic can be hard - you run up against the fact that in the Real World people go to the police to solve problems, or deploy the lawyers.
But nonfantasic high-school soap opera keeps the problems at a lower level, though they seem much more important to the kids involved. Sounds like a plan.
Though your players may balk at having to go through high school again. ;)
Posted by: ashultz at May 28, 2004 12:30:56 PM
It sounds like you've run campaigns like this before. Any more advice? Everyone else is encouraged to pipe up, too.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at May 28, 2004 7:23:00 PM
Dynasties & Demagogues and Hijinx turned into individual combat mechanics into debate and performance rules. I'll bet you could turn a detailed mass combat system into sports rules, complete with morale, risk-taking by leaders, and so on.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at May 29, 2004 11:24:10 AM
I'm not familiar with Hijinx, but I wasn't that thrilled with Dyn&Dem's debate rules. It did, however, did have an idea which I am going to steal shamelessly: the personality feat rules. These work by the player taking a trait, and then when they do something that lets the other players interact with that trait, then everyone gets an XP bonus. What I find cool about this, compared with most other such mechanics, is that they strongly encourage players to play off of each other rather than delivering monologues in isolation. That's very clever.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at May 31, 2004 8:15:44 PM
Neel writes:
"I've had very little experience with that, either as player or GM, and want to stretch my muscles a bit. I had been thinking of doing a crime game (either as police or crooks), but the more I think about this, the more attractive a high school game is."
Life's too short for multiple RPG genre's. You've got to cram in as much as you can.
So a crime game and a high school sports game? Looks like we're goin' to Juvie. The students are all troubled teens in a Juvenille corrections facility. The big game will be against the top dogs of the joint or perhaps even against the jailers themselves. Sans the actual sporting event, there's so much drama brewing in this it should practically run itself.
Tom
Posted by: Tom at Jun 1, 2004 3:47:52 PM
