If you produced a supernatural soap opera

J.L. Duncan · July 28, 2017, 11:15:15 PM

With Soap Opera... Characters always have alternative goals/desires, rather than morality or what we know as alignment. A good guy easily becomes the bad guy after enough episodes or his secrets are exposed...

Characters would have a list of secrets, which if discovered would impact their character goals/morality. Characters might be able to regain secrets if those who know a secret are exposed to peril or their own secrets are revealed... That said, I have zero interest in this sort of RPG.

Omega · July 28, 2017, 11:23:47 PM

Quote from: CRKrueger;954939Go back to the seminal work...

Dallas: The RPG

Nah. Go back to the original RPG Soap Opera.

OD&D and TSR.

Omega · July 28, 2017, 11:24:30 PM

Quote from: J.L. Duncan;979176With Soap Opera... Characters always have alternative goals/desires, rather than morality or what we know as alignment. A good guy easily becomes the bad guy after enough episodes or his secrets are exposed...

Thats called change of writers.

Dumarest · July 29, 2017, 03:37:03 PM

Quote from: CRKrueger;954939Go back to the seminal work...

Dallas: The RPG

I own that. Nobody ever wants to play it with me. I think they're afraid to commit to their roles.

Dumarest · July 29, 2017, 03:42:04 PM

Quote from: Voros;955299Monsterhearts and HGMO are both well constructed storygames on this premise. I actually would like to read the Dallas RPG to see how they approached it. Apparently the Smallville RPG also has an interesting approach.

Smallville...someone gave me that because they know I like super heroes. I didn't have the heart to tell her I didn't like whiny emo teen model super heroes, but that's beside the point. Snellville utterly confused me. There seems to be hours of set up making Venn diagrams and stuff about interrelationships between PCs and NPCs and I couldn't really grok the mechanics. It seemed more like an exercise in cooperative storytelling and dice interpretation than an RPG (to me, anyway). Everything about it seemed anti-immersive. It did have nice glossy photos from the TV show (which I saw about 3 episodes of and couldn't grok either).

Anybody wants to buy my copy, let me know. A bargain to be had!

Voros · July 29, 2017, 08:08:43 PM

Yeah I've looked at it only, would be interesting to hear how it actually plays. All new systems seem complex at the beginning the only way to really understand is to play it.

Spinachcat · July 30, 2017, 02:04:32 AM

I'd make killing very difficult and with huge penalties so any murder would be a big deal in the game.

Of course, that would make more sense in a game where the supernatural creatures weren't killing machines like vamps or werewolves. If the PCs were Fae, I could see it working far better. AKA, if we're all over civilized Elves and dramatic conflicts are dealt with by non-lethal duels, tournaments or contests.

Just Another Snake Cult · July 30, 2017, 12:17:25 PM

I was at a small local con last weekend and we got into a big discussion about how Dark Shadows was a massive influence on 70's nerd culture.

Do people under 45 even watch traditional daytime soaps anymore? Genuinely curious.

It's still fascinating to me that Dallas was the first licensed RPG and not Barsoom, Middle Earth, Conan, or Star Wars. A real quirk of that era.

Black Vulmea · July 30, 2017, 08:04:33 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;954352If you were producing such a setting, how would you go about it?

First I would shoot myself in the face with a box of hammers.

In my experience, if you want player and non-player characters to develop interesting, involved relationships, then you need non-player characters who are interesting to the players, connections between the characters which come into play, and continuing feedback as the player characters interact with them. This doesn't require rules more elaborate than a reaction table - it does, however, require a referee and players who are not fucking social maladroits.