Genre Police: The Deaths Of The Author

I’m a massive fan of the original Vampire: The Masquerade. I honed my teeth on the World Of Darkness games and they’re a massive part of my RPG understanding – everything I play is measured against the metrics WoD taught me. 

I’m also a massive fan of the game designer John Wick, whom I hold in high esteem – he’s always thinking of new ways to look at existing games. 

Why am I bringing these two things up? Well, I was recently watching a video John made a few years ago on YouTube, and in it he talks about how the game of vampire was supposed to be about the horror feeding on people and what surviving in a society of cut-throat horrors would look like. He suggested that the only important parts of the game are the bits that track your descent into monsterhood and that the parts of the sheet that did ‘vampire super powers’ ruined the game.

And while I get what John was driving at, it made me think about how I run vampire games. Do I run them how the original creators thought about them? I certainly don’t run them the way the latest owners intend them to be run – I’m personally appalled by several pieces of new lore which we won’t go into here – as one of my play groups is made up of character that the new edition sort of views as ‘unplayable bad guys’. 

So, I’m kind of on my own, making Vampire games that probably don’t resemble other people’s games very much. They use the same source material as the original game, but I’m interested in focusing the camera in different directions, examining different ideas. 

When I run Vampire, I want to see whether the things that have decided they are monsters and act like can make good choices or still be worth something. I want to see if loyalty persists under pressure, or if it is sometimes the only thing worth a damn. Want to see if seeking redemption is an ideal or a folly. And the framework within Vampire, especially the revised edition, let’s me tell those stories. So I use it how I see it.

This is the part I kind of want to get to, which is relevant whatever version of what game you play. As I write this article, the beginning of what looks to be an ongoing OGL crisis has died down. There’s a discussion in the space about who owns what content and people are leaving D&D in droves. You’re in my future and only you can tell me what’s going on. But I hope that one thing is happening is that people are playing games any damn way they want. Seriously. The one thing that RPG’s have as an advantage over any other for of media, what makes them special is that the creators of the narrative are also the ones consuming it. This means that you are all making a story tailor-made for the people at the table. They are all you need to honour. So don’t worry about going you own way and doing it your own way. 

As the biggest RPG moves towards homogenising its culture and making us all view the game through the specific lens of whatever appears on their virtual tabletop, we should be looking at the games we play and marking them as our own, celebrating what makes our tables special.

Here’s few ways you might want to think about playing a game you love.

Narrow Lens: A D&D game where everyone plays a wizard in an arcane investigation squad solving arcane mysteries? A Shadowrun game where everyone is a decker, and the majority of the game is played in cyberspace? A Deadlands game focused on a group of blessed characters bringing faith to the West? A Judge Dredd game where everyone just plays citizens of a block? Think about how you can lazer focus you game and change it. See what happens when you break off a aprt of the game and hyper-focus on it. Write down the houserules you have to come up with to keep such a narrow focus interesting. Keep them, because in doing so, you are sort of making a new game.

Kick Apart Continuity: Invent new species and force traditions in your Star Wars game and make that the focus, introduce new Fomorian like monsters that are the bad guys in the One Ring, create new planets and factions in Dune, invent a place that isn’t just horrible in Mörk Borg. Don’t let anyone tell you what the canon is. Take what you liked about that universe and just follow that. Make your own version.

Allow Weird Pitches, Start From A Different Basis: I heard about a Rifts game once where someone just straight up played Batman. Like Bruce Wayne rolling around a post-apocalyptic universe with a Dragon and Robot buddy, righting wrongs. It’s not what that game is really about but it worked fine, apparently. I run a D&D that is set in a world based on 80’s pop culture tropes, rather than attempting to deliver a standard fantasy experience. It feels more like what I think D&D was supposed to be than some other game I’ve run. Way more wacky tables. Imagine a Call Of Cthulhu game that uses Hellraiser as its starting inspiration or one that is based on Sandman. Very different experiences. Very different focuses in very different games.

I’ve long been a proponent of ensuring you have the right game for what you want to do, but I’m also going on record here as a supporter of modding and playing with games any way you want. 

Rules as written are important as a baseline, but the truth is they’re starting point, not an end. Take a moment to see how you can make a game more unique to your table. The truth is that while we might be playing the same game, no two expressions of the game should be the same. If that’s happening, maybe we’ve failed to think big enough. Your imagination is vast. Use it to the utmost.

I hope this has inspired you to think big in your games. Feel free to tell me how you’ve really tweaked something; I’d love to hear. Next time, we will look at a new way of thinking about how we run games.