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amnesiack“The Great Experiment in Form v. Function” (hereafter TGE) is an idea I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while; I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll ever get buy-in from every member of my regular play group to actually put it into action (though, I’ve also never asked…), so I thought I’d jot it down here for posterity.
TGE focuses on exploring, in a very practical sense, the idea that “system matters” and that playing the same game in different systems dramatically affects how a game works. The idea is to decide on a genre, theme, characters, and all the rest of the normal things one does when starting a new roleplaying game, but do it all independently of a specific system. Then, when all the previous pieces are lined up, pick whatever game you want to use for the mechanics. Make your characters, finish up your details, and then begin the game.
At some predetermined time (3 months, end of the first story arc, 10 sessions, whatever), a new system is chosen. The same characters (plus any changes/growth/experience that has occurred during the first span of play) are re-made using the new system. Play then continues, starting up where it left off before, just as you would if the system hadn’t changed. Rinse and repeat.
Obviously, there are a lot of ups and downs associated with this, depending on your perspective.
For people who like system exploration (as I do) and who get bored playing the same system for too long (that’s me again), it’s a great boon; you get the stability and fun of a long-running game without the mechanical bits becoming monotonous. You also might end up being extremely surprised about which systems work best for the genre/style of game that you’ve chosen. In fact, these two reasons seem to me to be the entire point behind doing TGE.
A downside for some would be the investments of time and money necessary to acquire and learn a new system every few months (though, considering the fact that I currently buy and read 1-6 new game books a month as it is, the impact on me wouldn’t be particularly large). You’d also have to trust the people you’re playing with to keep things reasonable with their characters, because systems can vary widely in what things are represented mechanically and what are hand-waved, and once you start translating from system to system, you would often have to throw general character creation guidelines out the window in order to let everyone accurately reproduce their existing characters.
One limitation in TGE would be the number of systems that you could find to match a particular type of game without having to modify the system too heavily (some tweaking is virtually inevitable, even in a standard game). I think this would tend to be a minor concern, though, since the average campaign these days doesn’t last more than 1-2 years, which would probably mean needing 4-8 systems in total. If you tried with fewer than 4, I think you wouldn’t really be getting the intended experience of TGE.
As always, your comments are welcomed and encouraged.
TGE focuses on exploring, in a very practical sense, the idea that “system matters” and that playing the same game in different systems dramatically affects how a game works. The idea is to decide on a genre, theme, characters, and all the rest of the normal things one does when starting a new roleplaying game, but do it all independently of a specific system. Then, when all the previous pieces are lined up, pick whatever game you want to use for the mechanics. Make your characters, finish up your details, and then begin the game.
At some predetermined time (3 months, end of the first story arc, 10 sessions, whatever), a new system is chosen. The same characters (plus any changes/growth/experience that has occurred during the first span of play) are re-made using the new system. Play then continues, starting up where it left off before, just as you would if the system hadn’t changed. Rinse and repeat.
Obviously, there are a lot of ups and downs associated with this, depending on your perspective.
For people who like system exploration (as I do) and who get bored playing the same system for too long (that’s me again), it’s a great boon; you get the stability and fun of a long-running game without the mechanical bits becoming monotonous. You also might end up being extremely surprised about which systems work best for the genre/style of game that you’ve chosen. In fact, these two reasons seem to me to be the entire point behind doing TGE.
A downside for some would be the investments of time and money necessary to acquire and learn a new system every few months (though, considering the fact that I currently buy and read 1-6 new game books a month as it is, the impact on me wouldn’t be particularly large). You’d also have to trust the people you’re playing with to keep things reasonable with their characters, because systems can vary widely in what things are represented mechanically and what are hand-waved, and once you start translating from system to system, you would often have to throw general character creation guidelines out the window in order to let everyone accurately reproduce their existing characters.
One limitation in TGE would be the number of systems that you could find to match a particular type of game without having to modify the system too heavily (some tweaking is virtually inevitable, even in a standard game). I think this would tend to be a minor concern, though, since the average campaign these days doesn’t last more than 1-2 years, which would probably mean needing 4-8 systems in total. If you tried with fewer than 4, I think you wouldn’t really be getting the intended experience of TGE.
As always, your comments are welcomed and encouraged.
