GM as God Part 4: The Land of Miracles, Chapter 1
Haggard morning video blogging! Couldn’t sleep! Here I talk about engaging a setting through its premises instead of rejecting it, using that to invent cool stuff, and how Libertarians in space are irrelevant.
Interesting thoughts (get closer to the mike, speak up). I don’t identify the nitpicking-of-setting as necessarily argumentative, though, so much as responsive. How many times have we heard “I want to do Star Wars, but RIGHT?” The whole of Champions, especially early Champions, was based on the idea that we are going to play a comic book game as if comic books were non-fiction.
These responses to published works are actually quite fruitful. They have resulted in tons of good play over the years. The key is that they bring something to the table, or, by throwing something off the table (“I want religion in my Eclipse Phase!”) they extrapolate to other changes.
When people talk about problems they have with a setting, I always wonder, are they playing in a campaign and they ran into the problem, or are they designing a campaign and they ran into the problem, or are they just reading the book and imagining they are playing in a campaign in which the problem occurs? I suspect more often than not it is the latter, which is very sad. When I imagine my games I imagine them working!
In Scion I didn’t like certain gods or goddesses fooling around. I don’t see Artemis as a dominatrix, Anubis wouldn’t waste his time with casual sex, Hel doesn’t DO that.
It’s not a deal breaker for me though.
I’d still like to GM it sometime but if I did I’d simply change it. In my world Scions don’t have to be ‘flesh and blood’ children of gods. They can be spiritual ones, chosen because they did something to impress the Divine. Artemis may have changed a stag who gave her a good chase into a human. Anubis may have felt this one person could do him a lot of good back in the land of the living. Hel adopted this child because he did something no one has ever done; made her smile.
IMO I think this is cooler than the original premise. I’m okay if people disagree but this way I can play my game and keep my internal metaphysics happy to boot.