The Martian What, Now?
My tabletop RPG group is currently involved in a space opera campaign. This doesn’t always work so well, because, despite being generally geeky—we play Dungeons & Dragons, after all—we as a group aren’t deeply familiar with sci-fi tropes.
I didn’t recognize the disjoint immediately. At first, I just thought I was having a good day, being generally on the ball when I understood before anyone else the nature of the alien generation ship we had stumbled upon. In a later episode, when another player got an expression of dawning understanding and announced that we were dealing with an android, I found myself thinking, “Uh, yeah. Get with the program; we already knew that.” (I was wrong; actually, I already knew that.) Only when Dave (the GM) referred to the Marsport news service as the Martian Chronicle, and I was the only one to emit an appreciative groan, did the penny drop: my gaming friends don’t read science fiction.
In retrospect, this should have been more obvious. Mulling over what I knew of my fellow players’ sci-fi exposure, the list was pretty short. Three of us know sci-fi only through the movies, not through original, more numerous, and generally more science-y books. One of us is intimately familiar with that subset of sci-fi that involves zombies and giant, man-eating beasties, and ignorant otherwise. One of us knows nothing but Star Wars, and kept saying over and over as we discussed the campaign set-up, “As long as it’s like Star Wars, I’m happy,” clutching that sentence like a mantra that would protect her from vector arithmetic, genetic engineering, and whatever heresies Star Trek, which she never watched, might commit against George Lucas’s holy writ.
That’s rough on Dave (our current GM), who has to present the plot elements in a way the group is prepared to deal with. It’s also rough on me; I am familiar with a fair chunk of science fiction, and especially hard science fiction, the kind that looks to science for inspiration rather than for flimsy excuses, the kind that pays as much attention to tidal forces and radioactive half-lives as to death rays and mutant powers.
Dave is taking it with better grace than I (Big surprise, yeah?), although I’m keeping the frustration to myself. Maybe this is because it allows him to cadge from old stories; that’s a lot less work than coming up with something original, and a good GM is grateful for an opportunity to cut corners without spoiling the fun. More likely, it’s because he’s a decent human being, and I’m not, but regardless, it highlights a pitfall of RPGs:
Make sure your players are familiar with the source material, or, if they aren’t, be prepared to simplify things to their level.
I had a bad experience with the same group when I tried to run a film noir game stolen from the classic LucasArts graphic adventure Grim Fandango. I knew my players weren’t that familiar with film noir—heck, I’m not all that familiar with it—but they were willing to watch a few classics, like The Maltese Falcon, to get up to speed. Eager to get the campaign up and running, we made the mistake of starting the game before this essential homework. Too late, we discovered two problems. First, my players all thought they knew more than they did, on the basis of a couple comedy sketches, and designed their characters in ignorance. The characters’ motivations, therefore, broke down in play. Second, it turns out that none of my players liked film noir. Even now, this boggles my mind. You may not like the people film noir depicts; they are a rather dirty lot, protagonists included. But how can you not recognize the essential coolness of the genre? When, all too late, this became clear, I tried going back to more introductory, mood-setting episodes, but the damage was done; we’d blundered too far down too many wrong paths to recover. Hard-edged, cynical people aware of their sins didn’t match my players’ escapist fantasies, and we cancelled the campaign before the halfway point. The only thing you could call complete was the disaster.
Dave’s getting by because he’s leaning on the Firefly television series, which all of us but the Star Wars fan have watched at least a few episodes. I keep hoping for Nivenesque studies in orbital physics and social Darwinism, but I’m resigned to the fact that they are unlikely to materialize. When he’s dealing with players who can hear “The Martian Chronicle,” and know there’s a joke there only because Mike is groaning, a GM can’t afford to take anything for granted.