Subject:
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Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.gaming
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Date:
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Fri, 17 May 2002 08:39:32 GMT
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Viewed:
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19 times
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In lugnet.fun.gaming, Bruce Schlickbernd writes:
> I just don't see what it adds to the gaming experience.
This is probably the single most important consideration, since there have
been plenty of Lego-RPGs that have come and gone over the last couple of
years that failed because they were just standard RPGs with Lego elements
tacked on in a shoddy and haphazard manner (I'm sure Frank knows this even
better than I do, since he's a lot better at maintaining his Lego-gaming
lists than I am at maintaining mine). Whatever areas of gameplay you decide
to Lego-ize, make sure it makes a significant improvement to the game rather
than just adding Lego for the sake of adding Lego.
Trying to make Lego character sheets (just as a random example) seems to me
to be a step in the wrong direction, since it makes things unnecessarily
complicated and doesn't particularly add anything. You could use stacks of
1x1's to keep track of values that change a lot, like hit points or mana
points. You'd have to design the system so that those attributes topped out
at no more than a dozen 1x1's or so, because at a certain point it's a pain
to deal with really tall stacks of 1x1's and it would be easier just to have
stuck with paper in the first place.
If you're worried about making the rules too complex to attract players,
design the game so that the GM has to take responsibility for keeping track
of all the rules in the background, so that the players can remain totally
ignorant of any complexity and still play just fine.
Before I got caught up in the whole BrikWars thing I used to try and do RPGs
in Lego (and before that, with basic wooden blocks, if you can believe it -
I was like six or seven), with varying degrees of success, here's some
things to consider.
First of all, it's really cool to build all the environments out of Lego.
There are two basic problems. First, there will always be a couple of
mission-specific locations you'll have to build in great detail. No matter
how disciplined yuo are as a GM, if your players don't want to go to the
specific locations you have built, you will bend yourself into a pretzel in
order to force them to go there, because you don't want your excellent work
to go to waste.
Second, there will often be a lot of 'generic' locations (houses, forest,
deserts, etc.) These are good for something like a wargame but for a
full-fledged RPG they get really lame really fast, especially if you have to
reuse them more than once or twice.
Fortunately it's easy to design scenarios that limit players' movement, or
at least limit the action to areas where all the scenery is pre-built. I
remember relying heavily on 'escape the haunted mansion' adventures, and on
adventures that took place entirely within the confines of a
carefully-designed space station.
One thing I've always wanted to do is design some kind of Lego-specific
scenario, not involving races like "humans" or "elves" or "klingons" but
specifically the race of "minifigs" (and technicfigs, and duplofigs, etc.)
I figure, given their proportions and their affinity for fast-food joints
and leisure activities, they must be somewhat akin to halflings. It'd be
fun to really try and work out the exact history, details, and abilities of
each of Lego's major themes, especially if you tried to get the history of
the game-world to match up with the real-world chronological order in which
themes and sets were introduced. Sort of like Erik Wilson's Space History:
http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~erikred/brick/lgalaxy/lgalaxy.html
Obviously a major ability for RPG minifigs would have to be some kind of
construction skill. I'm picturing adventures running like the lego-maniac
comics in the Lego magazine. (If you could find a way to run an adventure
like that without having it end up hopelessly lame I'll be real impressed.)
Maybe not too helpful, but those are my two bits for today.
- Mike.
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
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| (...) Almost forgot - the other thing we used to do is build a whole bunch of dungeon 'modules' on the old green 10x20 bricks. We'd hide them under the table and asseble them together like dominoes as the players traveled further and further into (...) (23 years ago, 17-May-02, to lugnet.gaming)
| | | Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
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| (...) I'm coming to the conclusion "LEGOizing" a game system won't be worthwhile. (...) I'm not thinking of stacks, but two dimensional arrays laid out on a plate. I have been trending to using arrays of mark off boxes on character sheets with the (...) (23 years ago, 17-May-02, to lugnet.gaming)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
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| (...) I can't comment really on Traveller because my only experience is with the original dreadful system (fun to roll up characters, and that was it). RuneQuest experience was all about mini-maxing. I hated it almost as much as I hated the endless (...) (23 years ago, 16-May-02, to lugnet.gaming)
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