Quote from: lukeNeat ideas.

Is there a game out there in which you play contemporary police? No magic, no aliens? I'd love to play a game about the thin blue line.

-L

i think The Choirboys RPG would actually tempt me to play a 'pedestrian hero' role-playing game...but i've loved Wambaugh since my Dad introduced me to his writing.

regarding the OP, since i have 0 interest *in* sports, can't think of a thing that doesn't veer off into the fantastic that'd i'd even bother with.  (rollerball, deathrace, the most dangerous game, etc)

i'm inherently confused about people who want to role-play things they can actually do in real life...i mean, i'm as lazy as the next guy, but lets not get to the point where we're writing or playing RPGs about people writing or playing RPGs.  

(who knows though...Gardening: The Pruning and HOSPICE: Death Has a Date might just really intrigue people.)

The thing that strikes me about the commecial viability of professional sports RPGs is that the likely target audience has already found an outlet in the various "fantasy" leagues that are organised every season.

I suspect that, like with most RPG players, the real excitement comes not from the thespy interaction between characters, but from the tactical planning and execution of character abilities.  For all that Pseudoephedrine and I disagree over the heart of D&D, I agree with him that many (most?) players are really into it for the love of organising the battle scene, setting up the pieces, then seeing how it plays out.  Sports fans already get that sort of thing from their fantasy leagues.  They get to play owner and manager, draft their own teams, then analyse and compare stats at the end of every game week.

Where does the roleplaying come in?  If the league is organised through a local sports bar or pub, they meet once or twice a week to compare league stats, maybe trade players.  This is when they manifest the role that they get to play, "Me as a team owner/manager". Now, maybe if you somehow introduced a layer of roleplaying in addition to this you could encourage people to make more of a traditional RPG of it, but I suspect that most players would still ignore this aspect in favor of the tactical planning and post-battle gloating aspect.

I have to be honest and say that I don't see a traditional RPG working out for sports.

!i!

QuoteWhere does the roleplaying come in?

What they do IS roleplaying. What you mean is called "single character assumption".

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaThe thing that strikes me about the commecial viability of professional sports RPGs is that the likely target audience has already found an outlet in the various "fantasy" leagues that are organised every season.

I suspect that, like with most RPG players, the real excitement comes not from the thespy interaction between characters, but from the tactical planning and execution of character abilities.  For all that Pseudoephedrine and I disagree over the heart of D&D, I agree with him that many (most?) players are really into it for the love of organising the battle scene, setting up the pieces, then seeing how it plays out.  Sports fans already get that sort of thing from their fantasy leagues.  They get to play owner and manager, draft their own teams, then analyse and compare stats at the end of every game week.

Where does the roleplaying come in?  If the league is organised through a local sports bar or pub, they meet once or twice a week to compare league stats, maybe trade players.  This is when they manifest the role that they get to play, "Me as a team owner/manager". Now, maybe if you somehow introduced a layer of roleplaying in addition to this you could encourage people to make more of a traditional RPG of it, but I suspect that most players would still ignore this aspect in favor of the tactical planning and post-battle gloating aspect.

I have to be honest and say that I don't see a traditional RPG working out for sports.

!i!

well put.   further, i'm not even real sure it'd work as a miniature game...anyone remember or even play MLB Sports Clix?!  thought not.

Quote from: kregmosierfurther, i'm not even real sure it'd work as a miniature game...anyone remember or even play MLB Sports Clix?!  thought not.

I do, however, remember GW's Blood Bowl fondly.  One summer I set up a league at our local shop and it caught on like wildfire.  We had weekly games and a mid-season draft and everything.  Like I said in my post above, we'd get into our owner/manager/coach roles and praise or taunt each other accordingly, but it was the tactical aspect that tied it all together, not roleplaying.

!i!

Loooong ago, someone pointed me to an RPG called "The Drones", which is based on the novels and short stories of P. G. Wodehouse.  You know, "Jeeves & Wooster"?

It's set in the 20's, and you play a member of The Drones Club, "a London club for generally idle young men."  Here's a sample scenario:

Quote from: The Drones2. The fish steamer

There is to be a village fete in the village where Archie's Aunt Amelia lives. She is known to have invited 2 or 3 attractive and eligible young ladies to stay with her. She has an excellent French chef, Pierre.

In order to meet the ladies and eat the superb food, chaps need to get an invitation from Archie or his Aunt to spend the weekend. It may be possible to meet the ladies if one puts up at the village inn.

One of the ladies is mischievous and gets a gullible chap to steal the fish steamer from the kitchen (probably to keep newts in) as a dare. It is then discovered that a poached salmon is on the menu for dinner that evening.

It is then essential to (a) avoid the discovery of the steamer in anyone's room or anywhere else and (b) get it safely back in the kitchen before Pierre needs it so he won't throw a tantrum and go back to France.

Technical note: a typical fish steamer is made of shiny metal, measures 70 x 25 x 25 cm and contains a loose trivet which rattles plus a loose-fitting, equally rattling lid.

Why, yes, I am copying and pasting from a website.  It's this one right here, where you can get the game yourself!  For free!  In English!

Wow.

Quote from: SettembriniWhat they do IS roleplaying.

It was a rhetorical question, posing a question that I intended to answer myself.  And, yes, it is roleplaying, but it's roleplaying that's already satisfied by the sort of game that they have already organised.

Oh, and holy cats Rotwang!  I love The Drones.  I've had that website bookmarked for years now.

!i!

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!Why, yes, I am copying and pasting from a website.  It's this one right here, where you can get the game yourself!  For free!  In English!

Wow.

As a fan of both Wodehouse and The Drones RPG, I wholeheartedly approve of this message.


TGA

Amazingly, Ian and I agree. Fantasy leagues fill in the niche for sports games involving the entire team.

The idea that sports games where you actually play the game (like, playing Jim the pitcher or something) are needed is a bit odd. Sports _are_ games already. It'd be like having an rpg where you play members of a Scrabble league, instead of just being members of a Scrabble league.

Many moons ago I posted the idea of a game based on the movie "White Men Can't Jump". The point is, the game is actually about hustling not the basketball game.
Basicly any sport could be used. Just seemed to work better for games with "PC Party Size" number of players.
=

Quote from: PseudoephedrineAmazingly, Ian and I agree. Fantasy leagues fill in the niche for sports games involving the entire team.

The idea that sports games where you actually play the game (like, playing Jim the pitcher or something) are needed is a bit odd. Sports _are_ games already. It'd be like having an rpg where you play members of a Scrabble league, instead of just being members of a Scrabble league.

But there are tons of games that are based on other games -- including lots of video games, board games, and card games that are based on sports.  

An RPG about Scrabble players would be silly because it's like Papers & Paychecks -- having a fantasy about something that isn't very exciting.  For the same reason, there aren't RPGs solely about pointless bar-room brawls between ordinary rednecks.  However, sports (especially high-stakes professional sports) can be exciting -- that's why there are films and novels centered around sports.  

I personally don't watch professional sports and only rarely like sports dramas, so it doesn't particularly appeal to me.  But it seems that there are many people who are interested.

I'm only familiar with the video games, but the video games basically try to mimic the feeling of actually playing the game by depicting these events happening in a way that's familiar to the player (basically, by mimicking the way you see games on TV). RPGs can't depict sports like one was watching it on TV or in the stadium - the closest they could probably come is mimicking the sports pages, and fantasy leagues do that already.

Quote from: Ned the Lonely DonkeyYeah, that's what I like about an En Garde model, as the actual playing season is just a few dice rolls (like the wars in EG). Although there's not a great deal of actual role-playing in EG, so....

And let's not forget, D&D is essentially a combat boardgame with lots of set-dressing. A successful Premiership Footbal (tm!) RPG could very easily support the same model. "Mystery" style adventures might be about who's accepting bungs, "intrigue" around arranging bungs and "romance" around spending your bung money to attract a WAG. You could call it "Bung!"

Of course, in D&D the set-dressing usually feeds into the board-game element by providing power-ups or opponents. Not sure how you could make this work with sports but, I'll be honest, sport bores me to fucking tears, so whadda I know?

Ned

Online EG, which is quite vibrant and I'm very into, is all about the rp.

The thing is, you put your orders in and you get your results posted to you, but the orders are only submitted around once a month.  During the interval between orders everyone rps their plots and stratagems, friendships between characters and also rp out the results of their orders.

It works very well, EG games typically last years online, whereas other PBEMs without that core structure are lucky to last more than a few sessions.

Sport is just an example incidentally, I have personally zero interest in a sports rpg, it just struck me because it was plainly the most popular in that rpg.net thread so there is a demand (albeit possibly a small one) and a demand greater than for anything else novel anyone in that particular thread could think of.

I think that's interesting, even if we don't ourselves see quite how it would work it does suggest potentials that we're missing.

And yes, the off pitch drama would be key I would have thought, when I play DnD I don't just play the dungeonbash.  We play our planning, our rivalries, our downtime, then we get back to the killing which is at the core of that game but we spend an awful lot of time doing other stuff.

J Arcane just brought up Transhuman Space in a thread about RPG.Net darlings, wherein he states (and I paraphrase), "Sure, you can play a cyborg cat girl, but what does she DO?"

Thing which made me go, "Huh."

So, y'know, I thought..."Hey, wouldn't these ordinarily-mundane campaign ideas discussed in the 'Alternate RPG ideas' thread be made a little more palatable by setting them in the future of THS?"  

I mean, I don't wanna play a quarterback for the Colts, but...how about a brain-taped "ghost" of Peyton Manning in a genetically-engineered bioshell?  (Especially if he's an llegal ghost.)  An uplifted dog in a cybernetic body, doing rescue missions in the Alps -- or on Mars?  A heavily-modified vice cop in a 2100 update of Miami Vice?

Have I just hit on something...?

About the sports idea: someone doing on would be likely to go a bit in the Contenders (or in TV: Footballer's Wives) direction where a lot of the drama comes from off-the-field hijinx rather than the on-field action. Which is fine and a lot of fun, but I think there's enough of a story going on in *just* the on-field action.

So, myself, I'd love to see a game where the PCs are a few key members of a single side of a pro soccer team, and the "dungeon" of each session is that week's match. You could have a few before & after scenes about the background of the players and the team, but the meat of the game and the drama should come from the game itself, and I think there's enough there. You get tackled hard to the ground; do you get back up? Do you get back at the midfielder who did that to you? Your side is up a goal. Do you play safe, or are your rushing forward to start on your hat trick? And when your fancy moves lead your side to concede one, then what do you do?