Monday, June 15, 2009
Roleplaying Flashbacks
For me, it was a one-shot dice-and-paper adventure: I never got to play in the rest of the campaign. It's too bad, because the intro adventure was one of the cooler adventures I've ever played. But I was just a visitor, leaving after the summer, and this was a kick-off adventure for some students getting ready to start a new school year at the University of California in Santa Cruz.
We were instructed to generate our Fantasy Hero characters based on a certain number of points, assuming a fairly low-powered heroic campaign. I was pleased to find another gaming group that played my RPG of choice. Without so many points to spend, my character wasn't spectacularly powerful or original, but I had some ideas on how to make him fun to play during the adventure.
When we got there, we were given new instructions. We were to somehow subtract more points than we'd originally been given - to make our characters even weaker than normal adult characters, because we would be playing our younger selves. We were to give the game master our original sheets, because those interesting little backgrounds and directions for future play would be incorporated into this "flashback." We'd all be playing 10-12 year old characters.
The adventure wasn't overly threatening, and the violence was very understated. Our characters were traveling from our village to the big city for a festival - a three-day long trip. But on the second day, an attack by bandits and other accidents left us separated from our adult supervision.
We got into one fight with a guy who we assumed would be a major bad guy in our character's future. But a lot of the adventure was just getting ourselves in the mindset of children - with an eye towards who they would eventually become.
I never even finished the full flashback encounter, because it was continued in another session. But some moments keep coming back to me - like camping the first night and having a discussion between each other about what we were going to do with our lives when we grew up.
Innovations in gaming doesn't have to come from technological advancements in graphics or sound, or even revolutionary game mechanics. Sometimes the most powerful innovations just come from looking at how to present the story or the game in a new way.
Labels: Roleplaying Games
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:18 AM (Permalink)
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Wow... what a great idea. Such a simple thing, and with the setup of knowing what the character will actually be, you ended up with that sense of where your 'life' was going.
Talk about adding depth to your characters.
Talk about adding depth to your characters.
That sounds like a great idea, especially if it's something you're not expecting.
Flashbacks in RPGs can be annoyingly 'standalone'. It would be nice to see more that aren't just seperate set pieces but are actually integrated into the game; to see gameplay in flashbacks that actually affect the main storyline.
The old PS2 time travelling game Shadow of Memories is a good example of using causality like that, even if it's more of a time travelling mechanic than a flashback. It's also a great example of how unique you can make an otherwise bland story.
Flashbacks in RPGs can be annoyingly 'standalone'. It would be nice to see more that aren't just seperate set pieces but are actually integrated into the game; to see gameplay in flashbacks that actually affect the main storyline.
The old PS2 time travelling game Shadow of Memories is a good example of using causality like that, even if it's more of a time travelling mechanic than a flashback. It's also a great example of how unique you can make an otherwise bland story.
The RPG group I was part of in college liked playing a lot of games. We were playing a D&D campaign and wanted to try White Wolf's Wraith game. So, I had everyone create characters loosely based on their D&D adventurers. The setting in Wraith mostly focuses on the afterlife, so it wasn't too much of a stretch to change some aspects to fit the previous world.
It was kind of neat because it did provide a lot of backstory so we didn't have to work on establishing the characters in the game. In the end, though, we didn't find he Wraith setting fit with our gaming group as well as the other World of Darkness settings did.
It was kind of neat because it did provide a lot of backstory so we didn't have to work on establishing the characters in the game. In the end, though, we didn't find he Wraith setting fit with our gaming group as well as the other World of Darkness settings did.
The biggest problem with flashbacks, from personal experience, are the players. I love incorporating them in my game. The problem is, I have a player who CAN NOT separate meta knowledge from knowledge...
So, the first flashback night, he decided he did not need his armor, because, what, he was still alive to this present day, so everything had to go fine during the flashback !
Needless to say, monsters strangely focused on him during the adventure <___<
But, yeah, with the proper group, and the proper GM, flashbacks are nice :)
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So, the first flashback night, he decided he did not need his armor, because, what, he was still alive to this present day, so everything had to go fine during the flashback !
Needless to say, monsters strangely focused on him during the adventure <___<
But, yeah, with the proper group, and the proper GM, flashbacks are nice :)
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