Have you ever run an RPG where you played yourself? Or where your players played themselves?
If so, what was it? How did it turn out?
My group tried that once, people decided each other's class and stats (more or less), ended up being a cleric with all physical stats below average
The very idea of making yourself fit a system as per stats is a high risk, as it can feel insulting if people disagree on what skills/stats one gets...
I tend to 'add a shard' of myself to some characters quite often though, some trait of personality or a skill, maybe a quirk or hobby, perhaps taste in something. I don't tell about it however.
Villains & Vigilantes had that as part of chargen.
Games I've seen it in are... Marvel Superheroes, Boot Hill, and Call of Cthulhu. Also seems to pop up alot in Mythic.
Quote from: Omega;1022057Villains & Vigilantes had that as part of chargen.
Was just coming in to mention this game in particular. So my group played a variation of themselves with superpowers. It was very Marvel-esque as we worked in the same daily-grind issues we were dealing with as teens. So if it happened to us in real life, it happened in-game as well. So I was grounded for a week due to something (can't recall), so the next time we played, I was grounded in-game when a crisis surfaced, so we had to roleplay getting me out of the house without the folks finding out so I could fight crime. We were driving our beater cars in-game. Trying to hide our secret ID from classmates. It was a hoot as it was "early issues of Spider-Man" levels of real-life meets superheroing metagaming.
I have never tried it, but if I ever do it would probably be with the aforementioned variant where the other players decide your stats. I think it would be more fun if you aren't statting yourself.
Never past the planning stages with either our "Red Dawn" scenario in the late 80s, or my more elaborate "you're on your way to Gen Con when a comet passes close by...but ZOMBIES!"
Yes, a number of times. It's an exercise in ego, or ego-bruising for many, because the truth is that real life is random-roll, not point-buy.
Yes. It was good times. I was in good shape back then not the big Chingis Khan fatass I am today. I went very well. Some of my fellow players suffered the Ego-Atomic drop... cognitive dissonance issues came front and center, and those attribute were staring them in the face with ferocity.
We did it with Chill 2nd edition (Mayfair Games version) back in college. We ended up scrapping the game and making PCs when we realized trying to explain away the injuries we were receiving just didn't jive.
Haven't done it. However, in the unlikely even that I ever actually run Continuum, I'd seriously consider having the players play themselves.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1022007Have you ever run an RPG where you played yourself? Or where your players played themselves?
If so, what was it? How did it turn out?
I don't know if SJGames' Killer counts. It was an interesting experiment. Would have rather played in a RL Car Wars game at the time though.
If I'm not DMing, all my characters start as an alt-me but grow into themselves with their experiences. The ability to be something other than myself was never my draw to RPGs.
No, and these kinds of games always turn into drama fests and salt mines because people then can't separate what happens to their PC from themselves, which is the entire point of playing RPs.
Fantasy Flights "End of the World". Its designed for exactly that. Played several scenarios. All a blast.
No. Just no.
Back in the 80s & 90s RPGers in my neck of the woods (Rural Illinois) called such campaigns "Avatar games". It was a thing. Most of them tended to be macho post-apocalyptic wish-fulfillment with either zombie holocausts (Back when that was still a very fringe horror-nerd genre) or Red Dawn-ish WWIII scenarios. The unspoken theme was "You could be more than a virginal geek... if only 95% of other people would die and modern Western civilization would collapse in flames". Some people got really into them.
Honestly, I always found them sort of creepy.
Oh god, no.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1022007Have you ever run an RPG where you played yourself? Or where your players played themselves?
This was the premise of the Immortal RPG (from Precedence Publishing), and several others in the 1990s. I recall hearing about 1e Vampire the Masquerade games where players played themselves turned into vampires, and IIRC that was also one of the character generation options for the unpublished Highlander RPG from Thunder Castle Games in the 2nd half of the '90s too. I don't remember if our old Heaven & Earth diceless RPG had that as an option either---perhaps we considered it but dropped it from the game before publishing it.
Anyway, I associate this concept strongly with gaming in the 1990s, so there must have been something in the air....
Quote from: RPGPundit;1022007If so, what was it? How did it turn out?
It went fine in Immortal. It's interesting to see your own id (and your friends') unleashed in a game where real-world consequences don't matter for what would otherwise be 5-standard-deviation actions outside the norm: IIRC once I realized that I was an Immortal in-game, I faked the murder of my mortal-self Allan in order to assume my true identity, and to give my family/friends some sense of closure since I was clearly leaving them all behind with a "muhahaha!" ;)
Allan.
I ran Vampire the Masquerade many years ago for some friends where they played themselves in the city we were all living in at the time.
However with the VtM background setting.
I played myself as an NPC who was a Ghoul, where I selected all my friends to be vampires, to which reward was I'd be turned into a Vampire clan of my choice.
I also ran it so Gehenna was coming and coming very soon.
A couple of players had a 5 point Dark fate and it was when Cain wakes up (or begins to wake up), the Methuselah dormant inside them (for various reason) would slowly wake up too and they had to carefully monitor their humanity.
When their Humanity hit zero, the Methuselah would wake up.
There was a definite time limit, as I bought this really big candle and every time we played, during the session the candle would be lit and candle would burn down.
When the candle ran out, Cain would wake up and Gehenna would begin.
Oh and if you character died, you'd no longer be able to play the campaign too, so no new characters.
We all had a great laugh and it last for about a year or weekly sessions.
Yes. I've played in such a game, and some of my gaming friends/associates have run such games a few times. I've not run such a game, though sometimes I've suggested players try making themselves in GURPS as an interesting thing to do.
The one I played in was a near-future scenario a friend cooked up. It solved the "how do the players know each other problem" (though the GM asked us all what our future-self-characters had been doing for the past several years and whether we were still friends etc.) and what skills we could have learned in that time. He set himself as having gone away and disappeared, and communication from him was the "plot hook" that got us to get into the adventure situation, which was a clever set-up.
I thought it worked out fine, though we didn't play it for very long. It was a different change of pace. He's a very good and creative GM. Of course it also had us feel a bit vulnerable, since we have few good skills for handling much violence, but we are all smart, so it was an interesting exercise. I'm not sure I'd choose to play that way very often - it would depend on other players offering to GM well-done sessions like that.
If players know GURPS well enough, it's a good system for being able to create yourself or people you know as characters and giving them appropriate qualities. Of course, it's also a gritty/deadly combat system.
Other self-as-PC campaigns that those folk tried that I just heard about but didn't play in involved GURPS with guns, and GURPS Supers (they added some super powers to themselves), which worked fairly well, but the campaigns didn't continue long. They were really deadly games. I think there's also the potential for some extra resentment to kick in between players who have some capacity for resentment in games, since your behavior in-game as yourself suggests how you might behave towards other real-people-as-game-characters, so that's something that might want an adult conversation beforehand, to avoid "you left me to die!!!" or whatever from players who might get emotionally confused by the experience...
Yes. Twice for goofy one-shots.
1. The PCs were supposed to be statted as approximately themselves. Their characters all showed up to where we were playing, only I was late, and then.. zombies! Zombies everywhere! They explained the places in our college town where they would go (Wal-Mart) and then I made a cameo appearance as an demonic presence and source of the zombies. Then they killed me.
2. Again - the PCs were in the apartment where we were actually gaming. Only I 'wasn't there'. This time gunmen showed up and held the PCs hostage because they were looking for me and my roommate (who was part of the gaming group - but was running late - hence the need for the 1 hour one-shot to fill time). They (through broken English) explained that the two of us were basically low-rent superheroes and they'd tracked us down to this apartment. The players had to use what was actually in the apartment to fight them - actually walking around and choosing what to use. (I had artfully placed a knife and a stun gun on my desk - which one player was clever enough to grab when they tricked the terrorists into letting them use the facilities. Plus my roommate & I were both into SCA at the time.)
I would not recommend it for a longer campaign - but for tongue-in-cheek one shots they were fun.
Have thought about it, but then realized that having 18's across the board would be unfair to the other players:)
On a more serious note- no, never had a desire to.
Quote from: Omega;1022057Villains & Vigilantes had that as part of chargen.
Games I've seen it in are... Marvel Superheroes, Boot Hill, and Call of Cthulhu. Also seems to pop up alot in Mythic.
True. So did the Time Lord RPG.
In the Magic Bus campaign I ran in 1991 I put in an NPC that was a version of me when I was younger.
Did not expect the players to rescue him the first two sessions to where he became a recurring NPC.
- Ed C.
Did it. Multiple systems, too. Rarely fun, particularly the post-apocalyptic stuff.
Often stupid ideas of weeding out the weakest links amongst each other bubbled up. Which is stupid because in a real crisis you need all hands on deck, including the "doormat," "wallflower," "place holder," and "sack of potatoes." And if you can't figure out why such "losers" are useful -- hint: action ecomony, division of labor, and ablative armor -- you probably are just too immature taking such Creepy Survivalist Fantasies so seriously. But at least such Creepy Survivalist Fantasies were acted out through Let's Pretend than Moving to a Compound in Idaho, so that's a plus.
Usually under-rated myself in my friends' eyes, but I felt it was closer to the truth vs. humanity's talent pool spectrum. Also found that for all the presumed competence, dumping CHA was still the worst idea. Nothing like wannabe survivalists atomizing into ever smaller groups of crack-alpha-strike legends-in-their-own-minds being picked off easily one by one. The vast majority of animals gather for reasons; if they figured it out why not you, boo-boo?
Couple of zombie apocalypse games. They went OK. It's not ever going to be my preferred mode of rolling those games, but it obviously appeals to some people.
It can get really wonky, whether it's "you stat yourself" or "your friends will stat you"! both are a really bad plan, for different reasons.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1023640It can get really wonky, whether it's "you stat yourself" or "your friends will stat you"! both are a really bad plan, for different reasons.
I think if I were to do the latter, I would get everyone to stat everyone else and then build the stats by comparing the numbers and then making arbitrary selections if there was no discernible pattern. That might mitigate bias a little. A little. With six players, you would only have 36 arrays of six numbers to work with so the math wouldn't take that long.
About thirty years ago a friend of mine came over to visit and told me he was going to run a D and D game where we played ourselves.
Step One: [DM] "Okay. You are sitting here in your room and a demon pops up."
[Me] "I pass out."
[DM] "Stop messing around. He tells you that he needs heroes to save another world and you have ten minutes to get any items you are going to bring with you."
Step Two: Well, I own a sword that looks like the one Arnold used in the Conan movies. I brought that, knives, a stiletto and a change of clothes. Oh, and a gun. (Walther PPK) Note that everything had to actually be present in the house to bring it.
The DMs brother brought his Jeep, which was pretty damned clever, and eight of us then spent the next Saturday statting each other. We were a little generous, maybe, and went with the throw out the best number and the worst number and average the rest. It worked. No drama.
We've since gotten magic items and figured out that we were some kind of astrally projected avatars of ourselves (so we had no burning desire to go home). We last played seven years ago, but I get to see my high school buddies this upcoming weekend, and will get to play myself on Saturday. With the right group of people, it can be a lot of fun.