"Feature Creep" in games

[Finarvyn]

This is an interesting issue, and one that I thought deserved its own thread.

greentongue said:

coffee said:

I don't know beans about the Empire of the Petal Throne, but I also didn't know beans about Traveller. I got the second edition of the boxed set, which came out in 80 but still didn't mention the Third Imperium. So my game was sufficiently different from everybody else's that people didn't like it. They brought too much baggage to the game.

[/i][/quote]This is certainly a problem with OEPT. A lot of the people that have an initial interest in playing are seeped in the vast information provided in later versions. This makes it hard for people new to the setting to fit in and feel comfortable.

It is a form of "Feature Creep" experienced by older games, especially this one. In my opionion it alienates potential new players and helps to prevent a resurgence of OEPT.[/quote]
OD&D tends not to have this problem as much as other RPGs since it's not setting-specific, but I notice this effect in many other games, books, and movies.

Take for example Star Wars. One person has seen all six movies and read every novel written over the past 30 years, while another has seen one of the movies and is thinking "Star Wars is kind of neat". Those two gamers simply won't have the same perspective. Even worse, if the single-movie guy wants to run a Star Wars RPG, he looks at the body of film and literature and realizes that it might take years to "catch up".

In games it's more subtle, but often just as nasty. If you got onto the OD&D craze as I did in the 1970's, there were only the three brown books and maybe a couple supplements. Over time articles were written in the Dragon and the body of information grew and grew (not to mention third-party groups also putting out newsletters and supplements). For the player who wants to enter the OD&D hobby today there could be thirty years worth of catching up to do, but furtunately (for that person) the game fragmented into BD&D and AD&D so the game quit growing early on. The more recent 3E craze is better in that there are fewer years to catch up on, but worse in that there are far more products out there. Every new sourcebook included additional feats and a gamer who wanted to have a complete collection has to buy pretty much everything out there in order to get it all.

Sometimes the sheer quantity of source material can be intimidating. I see commercials on TV for the Stargate series and think it would be neat because I liked the movie, but then I realize there are seven seasons plus a spin-off series and I could never really catch up. Star Trek can be like that because there are five series (classic, next gen, voyager, ds9, enterprise) composing a total of someting like 28 seasons of episodes (not to mention an infinite number of novels and gaming products out there). I wanted to run a Babylon 5 campaign once until I realized that there are five seasons plus a couple movies or mini-series that I would have to watch in order to be up-to-speed on the B5 universe.

Okay, so this is a tad rambly, but I think my main point is that the game industry (along with movie and book industries) sell products in order to keep the current croud interested, but at the same time they may alienate the newcomer with the sheer bulk of material on the market.

I don't have a solution here; only an observation.

[serendipity]

To beat the system, you have to get in on the ground floor when there's a new series. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to tell what's going to be good (or at least popular). You'd probably end up reading voraciously and watching tv in an endless daze and still something would get past.

To avoid the problem entirely, you could choose to never play or run a game based on someone else's world. The catch? Pretty soon even your gaming world has enough history that a newcomer to the game would be intimidated! Unless each game is independent of everything before it, you can't escape the trap.

[Deleted]

I don't think there will ever be a solution to this. I too am intimidated by the sheer volume of material out there in genres/subjects of interest. The only thing I can really say to respond to greentongue, coffee, & yourself Fin, is just take what you like from whatever you're wanting to do & just apply it. I'll use Star Wars as an example as well. I personally own all the d20 manuals for the game (every one), but now there is a NEW edition that recently came out this past summer. The core rules of the d20 game have changed enough now that there will be new sourcebooks as well, & it really isn't compatible with the "old" d20 edition. I myself am sticking with what I have. The reasons for this are two-fold: (a) We really don't have the cash to drop $30.00 every time a new book comes out, & (b) I've looked at the "new" edition & don't find it appealing. This is coming from a lifelong Star Wars fan who has seen (& owns) every movie, & read just about every novel available (some are pretty good, but a lot of them really blow, but that's not really up for discussion on this forum). I'm so full of obscure SW trivia my head is about to explode. So IMC, I just limit it to what I want to do.
When it comes to D & D, the problem is even worse. As a relative newcomer to OD&D, I was a little daunted by all the old Dragon articles & Judges Guild material out there, both of which I know I'll never see. So I comprimised, & bought or scavenged on the net anything I could find & just rolled with it. Since my campaign is a mish-mash of Rules Cyclopedia edition & OD&D, I try to make what I have at my disposal unique. For your quandry Fin (re: B5, which I admit I have NO clue about), is there a certain era or event that you are very familiar with? You might just want to focus on that for a burgeoning campaign. I can certainly sympathize with the "too much baggage" thing coffee & greentongue discussed as well. When someone joins a game & has vast knowledge that outweighs the DM's (or GM or whoever) available material, it can be quite nerve-wracking. The only suggestion I can offer is to explain to the player that you are the DM; this is my gameplan & I will execute said plan as I see fit. If the player doesn't care for it & can't accept that fact, well, then that's really just to bad (sorry if that sounds harsh, but tact has never been a close companion of mine). The bottom line to all this is money. As long as people are willing to plunk down money for accessories & manuals (even really cheesy ones), companies will continue to produce. The only solution is for everyone to collectively boycott the industry.

And we all know that will never happen!

[badger2305]

It's interesting that you brought this up. I was thinking something very similar when we were talking elsewhere on the board about fighter sub-classes. I went back through and noticed that in my last D&D campaign (3e, FWIW) I had assembled a fairly lengthy list of potential classes for players to pick from, and I now saw them in a completely different light. I found I had about three broad "sets" of classes:

• One set consisted of classes that I had no idea if they would fit in my campaign, but sounded interesting. These were often "prestige" classes, and included classes such as Lightbringer, Sensate, Justiciar, etc. It was pretty clear upon reflection that they were simply not going to make it in my next OD&D campaign.
  
• Another set consisted of classes and sub-classes that were essentially occupations, rather than real distinct classes: Merchant, Mariner, Noble, etc. And they didn't make that much sense as classes or sub-classes - it seemed like I was parsing real classes into fiddly sub-categories, or including things that were "jobs" and not anything more heroic than that. Again, probably not in my next campaign.
  
• ...which left me with a much shorter list of classes, and a decidedly different take on the entire idea of classes than when I last really thought about it.
  

Much of this I blame on the accretion of material over the past three decades that players and refs shovel into their games without thinking about it. And the 3.14159e "splatbooks" only make it worse (probably like the class extension books for 2e, but I sat 2e out).

There's another set of comments about too much world background material, too, but that can wait for now...

[Finarvyn]

oltekos said:

I read just about every novel available (some are pretty good, but a lot of them really blow, but that's not really up for discussion on this forum).

[derail]I used to try to buy all of the Star Wars books. Now I pretty much stick to Timothy Zahn books only. I really like his style but have been burned too often by other SW authors. [/derail]

Sometimes my solution is to just go back to the basics. "Okay, folks, it's brown-book OD&D time." Of course the first thing some of my players want to do is add some extras.....

[James Maliszewski]

admin said:

Okay, so this is a tad rambly, but I think my main point is that the game industry (along with movie and book industries) sell products in order to keep the current croud interested, but at the same time they may alienate the newcomer with the sheer bulk of material on the market.

This is almost certainly the case and it's an almost inevitable consequence of turning a hobby activity into an industry. On my more cynical days, I sometimes think that the best thing that could happen to roleplaying as a hobby would be the collapse of most RPG companies with more than a handful of employees. I've even been known to say -- again, cynicism speaking -- that I miss the days of gaming when even the professionals were amateurs. By that, I don't just mean "amateur" in the sense of clueless fanboy cranking out mimeographed dungeons in his parents' basement. I mean it in its etymological sense -- out of love for the hobby and not just to make money or keep "the industry" afloat.

No, there's probably no real solution to this problem except perhaps the one I've adopted: get off the treadmill. I'm taking a quite possibly permanent "leave of absence" from contemporary RPGs. I'm not buying or reading anything published in the last decade (or more) and I'm trying hard to think much about where the hobby is going or whether decision X by company Y will have effect Z. No thank you! I'm just going to do my thing with my friends and have fun doing it.

[korgoth]

Actually there was only one Star Trek series and four movies, but I can see how someone might be confused on that issue.

What you mention is a problem, though. When you brought up B5 my first thought was "That's easy! B5 is pretty simple." But then, well, I watched all five seasons on TV (rare for me) and that represents a fair amount of time invested. And while the series is good overall, the episodes can be hit or miss so that would be a lot to propose that somebody wade through just to see if they like it.

I have both run and played in Call of Cthulhu. I recall a friend, who ran the game from time to time, having an idiosyncratic interpretation of the themes presented therein. At some point, he revealed that he had never actually read any of the stories by Lovecraft or his circle. I was astounded! That would be like running a Star Wars game without ever having seen any of the movies, I told him. Not that Lovecraft is as cool as Star Wars, or as visual, but it was a reasonable objection. He did then go on to read some of the stories.

Maybe the trick is to limit the scope of what you plan on doing. Like, running a Stargate game based only on the movie, or running a B5 game set prior to the series (thus limiting the amount of 'history' that has to be digested, etc.). You could run a Cthulhu game based only on Lovecraft, or even based only on one or more of the stories or novellas (such a game based only on At the Mountains of Madness would be very different from one based only on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or The Shadow Over Innsmouth, for example).

I think that when you limit the scope in that fashion, you not only make the background research load lighter on yourself, you also add a unique element of yourself to the project artistically: you are the one who chooses the scope, so even though the world is someone else's, you are the one who defined the limits. So you do get to add in your personality after all.

If there is an established timeline to the world, you can even allow yourself to diverge from it and take the whole thing off in another direction entirely. If you are familiar with the universe of "Star Fleet Battles", that's a perfect example. TFG's license was for certain elements of the Original Series (and I think the cartoon show) only, so they just took off and developed their own world from it.

For example, you could run a Star Wars game based only on the original movie and the Holiday Special. YES. That is what you should do.

[badger2305]

korgoth said:

Maybe the trick is to limit the scope of what you plan on doing. Like, running a Stargate game based only on the movie, or running a B5 game set prior to the series (thus limiting the amount of 'history' that has to be digested, etc.). (snip)

I think that when you limit the scope in that fashion, you not only make the background research load lighter on yourself, you also add a unique element of yourself to the project artistically: you are the one who chooses the scope, so even though the world is someone else's, you are the one who defined the limits. So you do get to add in your personality after all.

If there is an established timeline to the world, you can even allow yourself to diverge from it and take the whole thing off in another direction entirely. If you are familiar with the universe of "Star Fleet Battles", that's a perfect example. TFG's license was for certain elements of the Original Series (and I think the cartoon show) only, so they just took off and developed their own world from it.

For example, you could run a Star Wars game based only on the original movie and the Holiday Special. YES. That is what you should do.

This is almost precisely what I decided to do when I set up a Star Trek campaign. I wanted something that would start in-between The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock. I had my own ideas on how things would develop in the ST universe after that, and they did not necessarily match what Berman, Brannon and Braga had in mind.

Unfortunately, my players at the time thought Star Trek was really The Next Generation, and thought The Original Series setting was too corny and campy (a distinction that was lost on me, from what I could see of the later series ;D). So I still have that campaign in the development queue, waiting for a decent opportunity to run it with a like-minded set of players.

[dwayanu]

Concerning EPT, I think the volume of detail in the S&G Sourcebook can indeed be overwhelming. Someone on another board pointed out that there has not been much added since that, and that with the state of Barker's health not much more is likely to be added.

Still, my own experience when I was subscribing to the Tekumel groups was that I often encountered references to unfamiliar things.

A big factor to me is the accumulation of setting history. I would rather "rewind" to the situation in EPT than try to catch up with what's happened in Barker's campaign.

If one is going to keep publishing material about a setting, I think it best to synchronize it all to a "snapshot" moment. Any "future" history should be left to developments in players' campaigns.

Glorantha has not only grown but changed in Greg Stafford's vision. After lamenting the shortage of new material in the Avalon Hill years, we now have a lot from Issaries' Hero Quest line (which may not be consistent with the Mongoose RQ line).

Balazar, my longtime RQ setting, was a "blank land" in the AH presentation of Glorantha -- a region explicitly not to be "officially" detailed.*

A GM might designate such areas in his own campaign, in the sense that players are forewarned not to base their expectations on published "canon."

In "Classic" Traveller, it was in my experience pretty common for GMs to set up their own backgrounds and borrow piecemeal from Third Imperium material. Often, this was simply because the GM did not own supplement "X."

I've never got much into Greyhawk canon beyond what's in the "folio" edition. Indeed, although I have the books from a later boxed edition I'm not sure what (if anything) was added or changed.

*(I was already using Chaosium's "Griffin Mountain" book.)

[makofan]

In Traveller I always rolled up my own galaxy - not to say I wouldn't steal things from the Spinward Marches, but the freedom of making the game exactly how I want, and then letting the players understand how liberated they are, really makes the game.

[Finarvyn]

I don't have as big an issue with Traveller since I usually play "Classic" Traveller, which is setting-free. If I played a later edition I'm sure I would have to try to track down everything and catch up on their history.

EPT is still a bit overwhelming for me, mostly because I haven't been able to take the time to really swim in the source material. There is so much over 30 years that I often can't decide where to begin, even though I know that the obvious starting point would be the basic boxed set. Since there is a whole world to explore, and a detailed one at that, I just get overwhelmed when I try to get started.

As was mentioned before, I think the best thing is not to attempt to master everything but instead to pick and choose selected parts to absorb a bit at a time. Easy to say, harder to do....

[coffee]

admin said:

As was mentioned before, I think the best thing is not to attempt to master everything but instead to pick and choose selected parts to absorb a bit at a time. Easy to say, harder to do....

Oddly enough, that's exactly what I decided to do with OD&D!

Every time I thought about running the game (and I bought the white box in the mid-080s, so over 20 years now) I just naturally assumed it'd be 3LB + Greyhawk.

It never ever dawned on me until I found this forum that I could just run the 3LB.

Now, I'll certainly be stealing from Greyhawk, Blackmoor, etc. But the players don't have to know that.

(I know it's not old school, but the one that really set me off on 'setting creep' and 'feature creep' both was Shadowrun. A cool game, but give a player access to a game store and you have a real monster on your hands!)

[badger2305]

It's interesting to follow the discussion on this thread. I've ended up thinking a lot about the sort of game I want to run. After some thinking, I've drawn a line at Dragon #10 or so - I want to make use of stuff up until then, and probably not much after that.

Why Dragon #10? Well, that would have been about the end of 1977, which would be when AD&D started to appear, with the Monster Manual. In a way, I'm interested in running a more "tricked-out" OD&D, rather than just the first three Little Brown Books. There were a lot of campaigns that made use of all sorts of stuff - from all sorts of sources - at that time, and uniformity wasn't a strong suit.

I suspect that part of the appeal of AD&D 1st ed. was that it seemed to provide some uniformity while retain all that ramped-up goodness. Not too many people realized that came at a price of losing some creative freedom....

[ffilz]

I'm starting to be convinced that these mega-settings are not wise to use. I think I could still pull of Glorantha/RuneQuest, but that's partly because I've had a decent amount of play history before things got too wild (though my longest running campaign had all the Avalon Hill stuff available, the reality is we really used little of it).

Tekumel also has the problem that I don't feel like any of the systems published for it really are well suited for it (at least the "official" ones). It demands a system that allows good system support for political play.

A big problem with these detailed worlds is that too much of the play potential is already out on the table. My long running (about a year) RQ campaign went well partly because we allowed ourselves to create and didn't toe the line. My more recent RQ campaign in part had issues because we were always trying to check out the material and not stray too far.

Frank

[crimhthanthegreat]

IMO the solution is what many of the oldschoolers have done by default and that is stay with or return to the original game version that was setting-free or at least somewhat setting-lite and homebrew it from there. At that point if becomes the ref responsibility to not add everything under the sun. You really only need to decide what things you are adding beyond the original version of the game and at least in my case I stick pretty close to that. I have a few house rules and I try new things from time to time but usually revert back to my foundation game before I try something else. This keeps the game fresh but doesn't etch things in stone.

We advise,however,that a campaign be begun slowly,following the steps outlined herein,so as to avoid becoming too
bogged down with unfamiliar details at first.That way your campaign will build naturally,at the pace best suited to the referee and players,smoothing the way for all concerned.New details can be added and old "laws"altered so as to provide continually new and different situations.In addition,the players themselves will interact in such a way as to make the campaign variable and unique,and this
is quite desirable.

and

If your referee has made changes in the rules and/or tables,simply note them in pencil (for who knows when some flux
of the cosmos will make things shift once again!),and keep the rules nearby as you play. A quick check of some rule or table may bring hidden treasure or save your game "life".

As an aside, please note that the original official rules encouraged metagaming by the players.

In OD&D you don't have to worry about keeping up with all the new stuff. If it was still in print and there had been 10's of thousands of things published that could be used with the original game, guess what you don't have to buy or use any of it. That to me is part of the essence of old school. You don't have to keep up with the all the current stuff. Just use what you need and not a bit more.

[wulfgar]

One cool counter example where it's easy for a latecomer to get up to speed is Firefly/Serenity. I missed the show when it was on tv but heard good things about it so finally picked up the dvds from the library a month or so ago. One season of TV shows and one movie- and voila I'm up to speed.

I guess this is one of the silver linings when a franchise of whatever kind (TV,movie,rpg,etc) dies an early death.

[Finarvyn]

A good point but also remember that Firefly doesn't try to be overly complex, either. (Of course, what little continuing plotline was destroyed by Fox when they aired shows out of order. How dumb is that?)

[grodog]

admin said:

Sometimes the sheer quantity of source material can be intimidating. [snip] I wanted to run a Babylon 5 campaign once until I realized that there are five seasons plus a couple movies or mini-series that I would have to watch in order to be up-to-speed on the B5 universe.

IME, I see this as the bigger issue with detailed campaign settings (whether homebrew or published) attracting new players, and that could account for the "need" to continuously support new settings and/or to reset existing ones---to allow players new to the game a good "in" opportunity to check out the setting. Greyhawk did this a few times, but perhaps best (after 1985) with Roger Moore's Greyhawk: The Adventure Begins supplement. One book summarizes the history, provides expansion and adventure ideas, and gives you a lot of meat to hang your own version of Greyhawk on. For $10.

Babylon 5 did this as well: each season had at least one if not two episodes that were good lead-ins for folks who had never seen the series before: they provided a capsule experience of what the story to date was like (similar to the introduction to Jackson's LOTR, which set the scene of the One Ring's significance against the backdrop of the forging of the ring, the Last Alliance, etc.).

Aside: Fin, you should definitely pick up B5. It's well-worth the time to invest in and see it. You'll learn so much about DMing from the way Straczynski builds out the narrative threads of the series.

Aside 2: my wife and I have watched "24" in the same way, because my sister gets the DVD box sets for Christmas each year, so we watch the previous season then. (Otherwise we don't watch TV at all). When you're watching sans commercials, you actually end up saving about 20 minutes per hour episode, so you're able to watch in a more-concentrated, richer-experiential format, too. (How that would translate into gaming, I'm not sure, other than the all-nighter old standby ).

[crimhthanthegreat]

It has not really been that much of an issue for us, but we seem to be rather unique, since our players have either been around from the beginning or have grown up with it as children so it was never intimidating to them. The players outside of that dynamic have just dived in, since the other players fill them in between game sessions when the history comes into play.

[irdaranger]

I find this is more of a "setting" problem than a "game system" problem. That's why many "new school" gamers have given up on The Forgotten Realms - too much dross has built up since the Gray Box.

I think the real advantage of O/AD&D is that it's loosely based on the books in Appendix N but not a slave to the canon of any of them. That plus all the different themes in the monsters available means that the DM and players can call upon the common heritage of fantasy/pulp narratives without being beholden to any of them or needing to know a certain fact of canon. Once basic rules are learned there's no intimidation factor, since we've all sort of absorbed the general themes of fantasy from movies, books, and pop culture generally.

However, as a warning, the more D&D becomes "about D&D" (with copyrighted monsters and exclusive worlds) rather than the common heritage of fantasy the more it closes itself off this great strength. That's why I think Wizards of the Coast's "protection" of its IP will ultimately kill the golden goose. D&D cannot thrive without a free flow (in both directions) of cultural understanding.

[apeloverage]

I never played any of their games, but I've been told that White Wolf had lots of 'canon' in their many books, but deliberately made the canon in one book contradict that in another.

[apeloverage]

Dec 17, 2007 7:07:03 GMT -6 wulfgar said:

One cool counter example where it's easy for a latecomer to get up to speed is Firefly/Serenity. I missed the show when it was on tv but heard good things about it so finally picked up the dvds from the library a month or so ago. One season of TV shows and one movie- and voila I'm up to speed.

I guess this is one of the silver linings when a franchise of whatever kind (TV,movie,rpg,etc) dies an early death.

You mean you don't use the comic books as canon?

Another thing with Firefly is that you can carry over a lot of the familiarity that you might have with Westerns.

[thorswulf]

*Sigh* So many books, not enough cannon! 3E turned me off to new D&D, don't even try and persuade me to try it or 4E, my pocketbook is NOT infinite.... My biggest problem with rpgs since 1995 is the sheer volume of crap they have generated. Some may be excellent writing, and some awesome art has graced the pages of many a book, but most of it just turned me off after the 10th book or spinoff came out.

I love Runequest, 2nd edition. Third edition played like any Avalon Hill wargame, and read like one too! HeroQuest is just not my cup of tea either, but it does have some very cool concepts for archetypes of heroes ala Joseph Campbell. Thank God somebody is republishing all the old Chaosium stuff!

Traveller grew into an ugly monster too, but the guys I gamed with played it the way they wanted to, not the official setting at all. Personal flamethrowers and laser smg's anyone?

The industry has spawned thousands of creative people trying to fulfill their vision of the ultimate cool game. The problem with that is that everybody has their own likes and dislikes, so No system is ever going to please anyone. That's why we keep doing our own thing, which keeps feeding the monster and keeping our grass roots origins very much alive. How many old school products for D&D, Traveller, T&T, Runequest, and other gamesystems are on the web, many free of charge? More than I can count. How many zines, and supplements are available because of print on demand companies? If anything, the internet has preserved the way gaming started, and allows it to grow. I guess I could pretty much ignore WOTC, White Wolf, and Mongoose, and still enjoy playing a game. Its what you want out of it that matters.

[chronoplasm]

Sept 6, 2009 22:40:37 GMT -6 thorswulf said:

don't even try and persuade me to try it or 4E, my pocketbook is NOT infinite....

If your pocketbook is the issue here, then would you try it if it were free?