Master of the Game

[Chipperz]

I'll be following this with great interest over the coming weeks. I've been roleplaying for about 6 years or so, and wargaming for nearly 15, and the only time I've ever really been on the GM side of things was running games of Inquisitor [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitor_(game)] which is an interesting half-way house. Its not a skirmish level game per se, more a heroic, narrative-driven wargame. Creating campaigns and stories for that is interesting but also fundementally limited; the vast majority of what goes on in a story revolves around the battlefield. Given that most of the players are wargamers, what they're interested is the table-top conflict side of things. In comparison to a 'regular' RPG the whole thing is basically a dungeon crawl with shiny figures.

See, I thought like this for a while, but I'm going to start an Inquisitor game in a few weeks, and it hit me recently - Facebook. 90% of humanity (and most of their dogs...) are on Facebook at the moment, so why not make a Facebook group for the campaign that counts as a "Conclave" between the fights? Say it's heavily guarded by a senior Inquisitor and his private army so there's no fighting there, and then prepare tabletop missions based on what happens in that (and what messages players send me ).

If everything goes to plan, I shouldn't even have to engineer fights after a few weeks

 

[Rolling Thunder]

I personally think that while I agree with the general ideal of this system, I would differ on certain minor points. Now, I usually run RP's through either voice or text-based IM systems (my girlfriend got me into RP'ing in general), usually Skype. To save on time, the players do the to hit rolls (and have to be trusted not to cheat), but the GM does the hit allocation and damage rolls. So if a player is consistently lucky, he can wind up receiving a karmic backlash for cheating in the form of implausibly low damage rolls.

We also use a realistic combat/ranged system for the RP's, which we've adapted for a variety of weapons (including modern assault rifles, billhooks, swords and plasma cannons).

But the main thing is that the players are not always in control. If the players determine the entirity of the story, it gets boring. So occasionally, something gets thrown in. They get arrested. Gangsters start shooting up a cafe the players are in. One of the characters has their sexual orientation switched.