General Category > Role Playing Public Radio Podcast
Ideas for quick games to design
clockworkjoe:
Nice! I've done a ton of inspirational research for Ruin and I've talked about it at some length in our GDW episodes. I'm currently working on a playtest setting based on the Night Clerk AP and I should be able to playtest it at Gen Con this year.
Twisting H:
Hahahaha, I love the news. :'(
I saw the following and had two branching ideas.
Straight from CNN: Dean at Boston high school arrested, accused of shooting student in the head
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/boston-dean-student-shooting/index.html
--- Quote ---A dean at a Boston public high school has been fired after he allegedly shot one of his students in the head.
In addition to his work as "dean of academy" at English High School, Shaun Harrison ran a marijuana distribution enterprise, Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney David Bradley said in a news release.
His victim was a 17-year-old student he had allegedly hired to sell marijuana for him, Bradley said at an arraignment hearing Thursday.
....
The 55-year-old had been employed with Boston Public Schools in various roles since 2010.
He had been at English High School since January 5, where as "dean of academy," he "provided services like finding housing for homeless students or social services or disciplinary alternatives to suspension," said Denise Snyder, a representative for Boston Public Schools.
His employment has been "terminated effective immediately," Snyder said. ::)
The Rev. Dr. Gregory Groover is the pastor at Charles Street AME Church, where he said Harrison attended services for 10 years before leaving in 2012. He said the allegations against Harrison aren't consistent with the man he knows.
--- End quote ---
And the police have this on video, allegedly.
So this got me thinking. Let's assume this is a fictional character. Here is a ready made villain easy to insert into Caleb's No Soul Left Behind campaign. A charismatic drug Kingpin-like character who works within the school system to run a criminal enterprise. The fact that the character is a school administrator and reverend are simply check marks on the list for top ballot Hall of Fame bad guy.
Thinking about the cops and robbers aspect a bit further, I was curious why I haven't seen an RPG that focuses on the drama of the legal system.
Specifically, why not design a game that focuses on players in a 1990's Law and Order world focusing on criminal cases. You could have chain of custody questions, tampering (or removing) witnesses all sorts of legal procedures and extra legal shenanigans the players would get up to. Just play this on a loop in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzJm9vTCff8
Now a short aside, when the Drunk and the Ugly were playing Wives of March, (http://drunkandugly.com/tag/wives-of-march/) the discussion touched on how brilliantly a Cosmic Horror scenario is weaved on a very compelling Dirty World foundation; where questions of probate, fraud and other illegalities are very important for players to understand and capitalize on.
Part of what makes Wives of March so very cool and different (there are several) is that very few games present the player with a legal problem and encourage them to solve it using legal tools. It is a breath of fresh air and it excites players I think.
So why not design a game for players as humans or minor powered individuals as lawyers or part of the legal system in a 1990's Law and Order sense in a Better Angels world or the Base Raiders one?
Ross has already touched on questions of property damage by superpowered characters in Base Raiders podcasts, and there is character Peter Cottontail (sp? the steam punk rabbit lawyer). Perhaps the players are paralegals in Cottontail's lawfirm. If the state sues the estate of a dead Superhero for damages (say because the State finds the Estate responsible for releasing deathbots into a subway system) maybe the players have to hire Base Raiders or become Raider themselves to repossess equity.
If the main antagonists are Superpowered beings, I think the design would work best if the players are human or lesser powered individuals in order to emphasize a physical fragility to their character which forces them to turn use the law rather than raw power to resolve situations. This, of course, is one of the premises behind Call of Cthulhu and most horror games.
In a Better Angel's situation, Caleb mentioned that in No Soul Left Behind, technology was about a 1980s or 90s level because so much government funding had (fruitlessly) gone into trying to research infernal devices. So if a "modern day" legal campaign in a Better Angel's world resembled a 90's Law and Order situation, that's just parallel evolution.
Iafhtagn:
I get the sense that Delta Green was written with the intention of games focusing a lot more on the legal system, depending on the approach the investigators take. Unfortunately, sufficient rules and setting info for the average GM to focus on evidence and witness tampering just aren't in there.
Speaking of legal issues, the rabbit lawyer's name is Silvertail.
And while Caleb threw out that bit about 90s era tech, the game then included armed Predator drones and "kids are tacnet" with cellphones, not to mention video games being popular with frat kids (not a thing in the 90s) and Ross's alchemy app for his smartphone (which I'm guessing he wouldn't have thought of if smartphones weren't already a common thing).
Twisting H:
--- Quote from: Iafhtagn on March 07, 2015, 05:44:24 PM ---I get the sense that Delta Green was written with the intention of games focusing a lot more on the legal system, depending on the approach the investigators take. Unfortunately, sufficient rules and setting info for the average GM to focus on evidence and witness tampering just aren't in there.
--- End quote ---
I think Delta Green focuses more on the legal issues of what alphabet soup department (ATF, FIB, CIA, DEA, etc.) has jurisdiction over an investigation and a crime scene, rather than a courtroom drama or preparing for a trial like I was proposing.
DG is more exploitation of chain of custody and probable cause to make evidence/people disappear; rather than serving a shoggoth with a subpoena.
I may totally wrong though. There was a DG convention scenario that Adam Scott Glancy was hosting posted somewhere on RPPR where he mentions at the beginning that one of the reasons DG was developed was to give Keepers a way to start off a Cthulhu adventure other than the repetitive "a relative of yours dies and you need to investigate it;" but I don't recall enough of the episode to know if ASG goes into a specific intention to focus on the legal system.
Revisiting the courtroom drama/investigative type game/system:
I know next to nothing about the American legal system other than spottily watching Law and Order/the Good Wife. But I did learn that in certain cases an Assistant District Attorney would have 3-5 police officers assigned to him to prepare a criminal case.
Naturally, in the back of my mind I'm wondering how this could be turned into a game, because you have management elements and limited resources as both the ADA (limited police to investigate new leads, verify old ones) and as a police (limited time for investigation, various skills that makes some types of investigation more profitable than others) all of which come into play with a very tight deadline of having to bring the case to trial.
I don't know, but I assume that this same arrangement of a managing lawyer and their investigators/paralegals(is it paralegals, what exactly do they do?) occurs in law firms dealing with civil suits.
The more I think about it, the more this mirrors the Mage/grogs set up of Ars Magica.
Going back to a Peter Silvertail's Lawfirm setting, you could play a group of all investigators for a GM lawyer, a group of lawyer/investigators (taking a page from Ars Magica) or even several lawyers and a few investigators in a common pool available to the lawyers where the investigators have to manage multiple conflicting tasks from the lawyers and the player lawyers compete with each other of the investigator player's time.
--- Quote from: Iafhtagn on March 07, 2015, 05:44:24 PM ---Speaking of legal issues, the rabbit lawyer's name is Silvertail.
And while Caleb threw out that bit about 90s era tech, the game then included armed Predator drones and "kids are tacnet" with cellphones, not to mention video games being popular with frat kids (not a thing in the 90s) and Ross's alchemy app for his smartphone (which I'm guessing he wouldn't have thought of if smartphones weren't already a common thing).
--- End quote ---
Oh god. Good catches on all points, sir.
I completely forgot the whole predator drone/beersplosion fiasco. Ross is a monster.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version