Comments on: Timelines in Published Settings

By: James

James — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi my name is James, recently located your weblog and find it very interesting reading. Being a default GM since age 11 (i’m 30) I have had many battles with these different types of approaches to it. I find if a game dictates too much of the timeline I lose interest in running it. In a game such as WW Vampire or one of it’s sister games, I feel railroaded in many cases. My players want to play certain types of characters, and can’t if I don’t include certain events. The other issue with this matierial is it’s “end of the world” approach. They have apparently axed that particular problem, but are falling into the other again as we speak.
Another example is Forgotten Realms, as you mentioned, With multiple Novels covering the timeline. It is hard to go anywhere in Faerun without crashing into a series character. The players feel robbed in two ways. First, they want to see these people and interact with them. Second, when they do, and invariably they find a way, they allways want them to get involved. This second point has two difficulties, it takes the character out of his specified timeline, and robs the PC’s of their glory. I have found over the years that avoiding games with established cannon about NPC’s is best, and that using matierial that allows for GM guided timeline steering is best.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the kind words, James — I’m glad you like TT!

I’ve actually had pretty good luck running FR games with no series character involvement. I think this is partly due to the fact that I usually had only one player who had read the novels (and I’ve only read a couple), so there were no expectations along those lines. Probably not the typical FR experience, as you said.

Have you played any games that have the GM-guided timeline approach you mentioned at the end of your post? If you have, I’d love to hear about them.

(And if I can make one recommendation, include some paragraph breaks in your comments — they make the text much easier to parse.

By: James

James — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry bout that

As far as games I have played that allow for GM
timeline control. Cyberpunk was a good one.

They released the main game which took place
in 2020 and subsequent support modules for that
time.

Then they went about putting out “Tech updates”
for years further down the road. This was to give you source matierial for going forward without restricting.

They also set out supplements that detailed alternate settings and branches in time, but included
ways you could pick jusy certain aspects of them to use in your campain.

Other than that there was RuneQuest.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

(James) Then they went about putting out “Tech updates”
for years further down the road. This was to give you source matierial for going forward without restricting.

I’ve never played or even read any Cyberpunk books, but that sounds like a very clever — and as you said, GM-friendly — approach. I have to imagine that Cyberpunk is pretty tech-driven, though, — I wonder how you would go about using a similar approach in a fantasy setting?