Have you ever radically changed campaign premise mid-stream?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I have seen a GM with thirty years experience utterly wreck his campaign before it started with that approach.

I generated a character for his "real world, heroic, twenty years in the future campaign" He rejected it, because it didn't fit his model of what characters should be. I generated another, very different. Same problem. He felt he was telling us what was needed, but nobody was reading the same things into his phrasing as seemed obvious to him. We eventually wormed it out of him, but it didn't make any sense in terms of the origins of the characters, so we abandoned it. His evasiveness about the actual subject of the campaign had undermined confidence in his plan. We'd all known him for at least a decade.

I'm curious. Could you please tell about the pitch, the concepts, the rejections (with any bits of a rejection reason, if available at all) etc. in more detail?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I'm curious. Could you please tell about the pitch, the concepts, the rejections (with any bits of a rejection reason, if available at all) etc. in more detail?

The pitch was "real world, about twenty years in the future." The game system was Hero, in heroic rather than superheroic mode.

Some things were a little strange: personally owned automobiles have just about disappeared, after having been replaced by an automated taxi/rideshare scheme throughout the developed world (after we questioned it, he conceded that there must have been considerable protests about this). A robust, unforgeable personal identification scheme is used worldwide, based on analysis of personal physical and mental characteristics: he was never able to be at all convincing about how this would work.

CERN was wanting to recruit people with "diverse skills" for a research project. We were told out of character that we would be trying to help socialise an emergent AI, and hinted that we would go through a portal to a fantasy world. My character concepts were an artist and interior designer, who was intended to turn into an illusionist, and then a doctor who was intended to turn into a magical healer. Both were rejected for lack of "diverse skills". After quite a lot of discussion of that phrase, it emerged that he didn't want characters with dissimilar skill sets, which was what we had thought, but for each character to have highly assorted and unconnected skills, for no reason that he was ever able to explain clearly. I theorise that he was wanting to have almost all the Hero system skills available for a wide variety of challenges and felt that randomness was the right way to achieve this, but I don't know for sure.

At this point I abandoned the project. Bits of it have shown up in his other games, whence it became clear that the emergent AI was a "Magical Girl" deus ex machina, which are concepts I'm not keen on separately, and really dislike in combination.

[vicky_molokh]

Ерфтлію

Originally Posted by johndallman

Some things were a little strange: personally owned automobiles have just about disappeared, after having been replaced by an automated taxi/rideshare scheme throughout the developed world (after we questioned it, he conceded that there must have been considerable protests about this). A robust, unforgeable personal identification scheme is used worldwide, based on analysis of personal physical and mental characteristics: he was never able to be at all convincing about how this would work.

Yeah, this is odd-sounding.

Originally Posted by johndallman

CERN was wanting to recruit people with "diverse skills" for a research project. We were told out of character that we would be trying to help socialise an emergent AI, and hinted that we would go through a portal to a fantasy world. My character concepts were an artist and interior designer, who was intended to turn into an illusionist, and then a doctor who was intended to turn into a magical healer. Both were rejected for lack of "diverse skills". After quite a lot of discussion of that phrase, it emerged that he didn't want characters with dissimilar skill sets, which was what we had thought, but for each character to have highly assorted and unconnected skills, for no reason that he was ever able to explain clearly. I theorise that he was wanting to have almost all the Hero system skills available for a wide variety of challenges and felt that randomness was the right way to achieve this, but I don't know for sure.

Ouch. Lack of a comprehensible explanation is one of those bad moments indeed.

Originally Posted by johndallman

At this point I abandoned the project. Bits of it have shown up in his other games, whence it became clear that the emergent AI was a "Magical Girl" deus ex machina, which are concepts I'm not keen on separately, and really dislike in combination.

Magical Girl AI . . . that sounds weird too. But I'm pretty sure I'm just not acquainted with the precedents.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Murrkon5

I am sensing an amusing, probably superficial, contradiction on this particular topic. I would wager most of the gamers who are coming down against surprises and want their gaming campaigns laid out for them ahead of time would pop a blood vessel if someone failed to use the proper SPOILER etiquette and revealed a movie plot point ahead of time.

I really don't think that's a valid comparison, though. Yes, surprises are good in movies, and we don't want them spoiled. But we normally choose to see movies based on some information, including genre markers, and one of the effects of those genre markers is to prepare us to accept certain kinds of surprises and not others. And if we get the other type of surprise the reaction is not going to be "How clever! I'd have been really torqued if anyone had given that away!" but "What." Imagine, for example, a locked room mystery where we find out that cosmic entities have come in through the fifth dimension to kill the victim, or that they've been killed by a teleporting super. Or for that matter, imagine a classic Warner Brothers cartoon where the steamroller turns the sarcastic rabbit into a smear of blood and fur. That would certainly be surprising in any of those cases, but it wouldn't be the right kind of surprise.

It's like what I've been saying about jokes: In a good joke, the punchline follows logically from the setup, but does so in an unexpected way. It's like the kind of computer programming problem where it's easy to check that a solution is valid, but much harder to derive the solution.

A man says to a hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything." Oh, and the man is a Buddhist.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by whswhs

A man says to a hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything." Oh, and the man is a Buddhist.

He then gives a ten-pound note to the vendor and waits. After a while he asks "Can I get change for that?" And the vendor replies "Change comes only from within."

[Flyndaran]

Desired expectations and allowable twists are a big reason why we even have genre names. So if I feel like a 1920s noir film, I won't get blindsided by the rubber alien horror story it became.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Desired expectations and allowable twists are a big reason why we even have genre names. So if I feel like a 1920s noir film, I won't get blindsided by the rubber alien horror story it became.

Tell me, comrade, what is capitalism?
The exploitation of man by man.
And what is communism?
Orange you glad I didn't say "Banana"?