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Old 08-05-2018, 03:30 PM   #1
GreatWyrmGold
 
Join Date: Oct 2011
Default Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

I and another in my gaming group have been talking about an idea to introduce GURPS to the rest of the group. The idea would be to have the characters dragged through different time periods, sort of like Quantum Leap or Sliders, possibly with somebody ahead of them as a recurring antagonist who drags the PCs behind him (a la Elfangor's Secret, except with the PCs having no idea what's going on). The version in my head has some more wrinkles, like introducing magic, psi, and other subsystems in specific worlds (and letting the PCs keep the spellbooks, psi powers, etc from one world to the next) once they're comfortable with the rules they have.

I'm having some problems fleshing the idea out. The overarching structure is sorted out; the characters are dragged from one world to the next, do an adventure, and get dragged to the next with some rewards (character points, maybe some items dragged along in a hammerspace pocket, occasionally special stuff to learn new systems). I also have some ideas for the individual adventures. However, I'm struggling on the mid-level details.
The big one is motivation: Why do the PCs want to confront the villain and do the adventure? Obviously, the players will want to have a game to play, but even if I could count on the players doing that and not following character motivations (I can't), I wouldn't want to do that. But I can't figure out how to tie things together. I can ask the players to give their characters reasons to want to go back to whence they came from, but I can't figure out how to connect that to "Chase the villain through world after world" without clunky exposition and explaining everything to the PCs at the start. I'd also like if there was some way for PCs to know that the adventure hooks I give them will point to the villain without either having them conveniently recognize the villain in an appropriate position for the hook or giving them a MacGuffin which would make that effortless.
I'm also fuzzy on maintaining the characters' long-term interest. I guess I could try banking on that god, status quo, but I don't want to. I'm not sure what I'd need to keep coming, a breadcrumb or carrot each adventure, to ensure that the characters don't give up on ever going home and just settle down in the first reasonably nice world. (I guess I could just drag them from warzone to slave pen to dystopia, forcing them to do something to escape, but that seems awfully one-note and like it would seriously limit my adventure options.)
I don't suppose anyone else has some ideas of how I can tie everything together? I'm not planning to do this immediately, but the sooner I can answer questions like "Why should the characters care?", the better my preparations are going to be.
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Old 08-05-2018, 03:35 PM   #2
whswhs
 
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

Is following the antagonist something they're choosing to do? Or is it something that happens to them, will they, nill they?
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Old 08-05-2018, 03:52 PM   #3
johndallman
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

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Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
Why do the PCs want to confront the villain and do the adventure?
It's the only way to stop being dragged from world to world? It's the only way they can get home?
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Old 08-05-2018, 07:36 PM   #4
Kelly Pedersen
 
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

I'd definitely suggest tying the world/time-hopping to the villain, yeah. It gives the characters a built in reason both to pursue them, and to keep them alive. The latter concern, I find, is the real difficulty with ongoing opponents in RPGs - players tend to be pretty willing to resort to violence in the first place, and ongoing villains seems to bring this out even more. By the second or third time a foe shows up, there's very frequently a feeling among the players that "this time, we kill them for sure". So having a reason to keep them alive is always good.

Of course, you've also got to be careful about how you keep your villain alive and re-occurring. It's very easy for constant escapes to become frustrating to the players, particularly if it seems like the opponent is not only escaping, but winning. At bare minimum, they should almost always be escaping while cursing the PCs and exclaiming that they'll get them next time, not gloating about how their plan is going swimmingly. Better than that, let the heroes capture the villain at least a couple times. The villain can escape from this once or twice, perhaps, but not more than that, I'd say, before it starts to feel like the players are having their victories negated. Finally, consider having, not a single returning opponent, but a series of them - Captain Chronos is captured, but her sycophantic minion takes up her mantle and becomes the Time Terror, for example. As long as these sequential villains are either steadily lowering in threat, or there's a sensation that the heroes are working their way up some kind of chain, to an eventual end, the feeling of running on an endless treadmill should be reduced.

With all that in mind, here's a suggestion for how you could frame your campaign, based on time travel. The villain is some unknown individual who's trying to change history for their benefit, which is antithetical to the PC's "real" history. The PCs aren't sure when in the timeline the villain comes from, but they were able to latch on to the opponent's "temporal signature" with their own time machine, and follow them back to the first place they messed up the timestream. There are two catches to their time travel, however. First, they weren't able to get a really accurate "fix" on the villain's temporal destination, so they couldn't arrive ahead of them, and weren't able to get very close after, either, meaning they show up when the villain has already messed up history to some degree. The second issue is that if history is messed up, their own time travel device is somehow neutralized, until history is somehow restored to its proper course, at least reasonably closely. And even once history is restored and the time travel device is back online, the PCs can only follow the villain's time travel signature to the next temporal spot where history is being messed with.

This framework has a few advantages, I think. First, it provides a pretty clear structure for missions for the characters, while still leaving a fairly wide range of activity. The task of the week is always going to be "find out how history has been changed, and restore it to its proper course", but how history has changed, and the actions required to reset it, can change quite a lot.

Second, this provides a reasonably clear victory condition for the players. The faster they fix history in each adventure, the clearer the "traces" of the villain's time travel will be, and the closer, temporally, they can arrive to the villain in the next hop. This makes reverting the changes progressively easier, if they keep succeeding, and eventually, will allow them to arrive either simultaneously, or before, the villain, and capture them, finally allowing them to return to their own time period without fear.

Finally, this setup also lets you have the recurring villain without too much risk of the players just capturing them or killing them outright before you've got very far in the game. In the majority of the adventures, the villain has already left, leaving the mess for the PCs to deal with, but they can still react to the PCs' actions, using their knowledge of how the heroes stopped their previous time-alterations to set traps and arrange plans to stop them.
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Old 08-06-2018, 02:03 AM   #5
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

For a reason to not stay in a alternate dimension I give you entropic cascade failure. If it takes a couple of weeks to kick in they have time to have an adventure before they move on and heal up from any damage caused by staying tooling in the previous dimension before it kicks in again.
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Old 08-06-2018, 07:33 AM   #6
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

Steal the villains plot from 'The One' (Jet Li, 2001) - "A rogue Multiverse agent goes on a manhunt for versions of himself, getting stronger with each kill."

The villain is hopping worlds to kill either himself from other worlds, or alternatively people in each world who have so special power (or pieces of a special power). The villains grows stronger for each target he eliminates.

The PCs have somehow been dragged along, they need to stop the villain killing his target in each world and from gaining extra power.
Perhaps the time in each world is limited (and not necessarily a fixed duration) - giving time pressure for the villain too.

Killing the villain will leave them stranded, which may become an acceptable circumstance eventually!
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Old 08-06-2018, 09:03 AM   #7
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

What kind of genre is it (apart from "world-hopping")? Like, does it have more of a supers vibe, like DC's Legends of Tomorrow, more sci-fi, like Infinite Worlds, or perhaps an anime or action-adventure feel?

And what kind of characters are the PCs? Random civilians who happened to be nearby? A team of investigators or heroes? The students of the mad professor?

Also, the PCs don't have to be modern day. Perhaps a group of Renaissance adventurers end up caught up in Dr Dee's cross-world alchymical war?
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Old 08-06-2018, 02:14 PM   #8
johndallman
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

Quote:
Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
The version in my head has some more wrinkles, like introducing magic, psi, and other subsystems in specific worlds (and letting the PCs keep the spellbooks, psi powers, etc from one world to the next) once they're comfortable with the rules they have.
A caution: getting good enough at magic or psi for it to be worthwhile in combat tends to require high IQ, or lots of the appropriate Talent. Of course, maybe they always had those talents without knowing, but SoD may get rather stretched if this happens a lot.
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Old 08-06-2018, 02:25 PM   #9
ericthered
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
A caution: getting good enough at magic or psi for it to be worthwhile in combat tends to require high IQ, or lots of the appropriate Talent. Of course, maybe they always had those talents without knowing, but SoD may get rather stretched if this happens a lot.

My Lost in Dreams game had a rather similar conceit. I addressed this by saying that that their gifts with magic and psi were WHY they were jumping in the first place.
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Old 08-14-2018, 08:51 AM   #10
GreatWyrmGold
 
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Default Re: Narrative/Motivation Advice for Introductory GURPS World-Hopper

I swear, I meant to get back to this sooner.

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Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
Of course, you've also got to be careful about how you keep your villain alive and re-occurring. It's very easy for constant escapes to become frustrating to the players, particularly if it seems like the opponent is not only escaping, but winning...
My placeholder for that bit of the design was something like "PCs find villain, villain's plans are foiled, villain worldhops to next world and gives the PCs a bit of time to tie loose ends and get ducks in order before getting dragged along".

Quote:
Finally, consider having, not a single returning opponent, but a series of them...As long as these sequential villains are either steadily lowering in threat, or there's a sensation that the heroes are working their way up some kind of chain, to an eventual end, the feeling of running on an endless treadmill should be reduced.
Hm. The first such transition would fit well with the PCs taking control, or at least gaining some kind of agency.

Quote:
With all that in mind, here's a suggestion for how you could frame your campaign, based on time travel. -snip-
It's neat, and does have advantages, but there are a few restrictions which conflict with my intent.
First, sticking to one timeline restricts the scenarios I can put the players into. History has a lot of scenarios, but ignoring history gives me more...especially with regards to supernatural elements, which I do want to be able to include. As mentioned, I want to use this campaign to introduce the players to as many GURPS systems as possible.
Speaking of which, I like the idea of keeping the characters in the dark, at least somewhat. This means they can learn about their situation as the players learn about the rules, and that feels like a potentially interesting parallel. (Also, it means that I don't need to start the first session with an infodump.)
Third, it limits PC concepts. My idea was to have them create characters fro whenever in time they want. Want to play a caveman? Spaceman Spiff? A Sengoku Jidai-era ninja? One of Al Capone's goons? A Roman deserter? Go ahead, whatever you can imagine. Having the players act as temporal I-Cops doesn't let that work with that quite so smoothly.


Quote:
Originally Posted by SCAR View Post
Steal the villains plot from 'The One' (Jet Li, 2001) - "A rogue Multiverse agent goes on a manhunt for versions of himself, getting stronger with each kill."
-snip-
Ooh, I like this idea.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
What kind of genre is it (apart from "world-hopping")? Like, does it have more of a supers vibe, like DC's Legends of Tomorrow, more sci-fi, like Infinite Worlds, or perhaps an anime or action-adventure feel?
That is definitely something I need to figure out.

Quote:
And what kind of characters are the PCs? Random civilians who happened to be nearby? A team of investigators or heroes? The students of the mad professor?
Also, the PCs don't have to be modern day. Perhaps a group of Renaissance adventurers end up caught up in Dr Dee's cross-world alchymical war?
I answered this question above. They're people who the players think would be fun to play.


Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
A caution: getting good enough at magic or psi for it to be worthwhile in combat tends to require high IQ, or lots of the appropriate Talent. Of course, maybe they always had those talents without knowing, but SoD may get rather stretched.
It shouldn't be hard to pass off the magic/psi potential as something that came from the world-hopping (or vise versa), but the "you need good IQ" bit is a good point. Access to spellbooks will help smart characters a lot more than fools, and I need to account for that. Psi powers are a bit easier to handle; give the powers less-reliant on IQ checks to the fools and you should be good.



So, here's by current semi-plan.

The PCs awake in some kind of limited area where most of the people around are slaves or otherwise subservient. Maybe a transatlantic slave vessel, or a bunch of Bronze Age captives being dragged through a featureless desert to their new masters, or something along those lines. Or maybe a penal colony. Anyways, the players notice each other because they stand out in some way. (Which is easiest if the PCs are all distinct from the local culture, which is why I can't nail down exactly where they are until I have character concepts. A Roman slave market doesn't work so well if one of the players is a Carthaginian soldier.)
PCs being PCs, these people aren't going to be happy with the situation they find themselves in. (It should help that I intend to ask the players to include something they would want to go home for in their backstory—a close friend, an inheritance, an unfinished vengeance quest, whatever.) So they set out and try to find a way to escape. As they do so, they come across someone who we'll call T. Villain. T also stands out from the locals, and is in the process of killing a local who looks a lot like him. He seems to absorb something from the corpse...at which point, he notices the PCs and demands to know how they followed him. After the PCs offer their confused explanations (or clever lies), T focuses for a moment and then vanishes. The PCs get a chance to search for clues, loot the area, or whatnot before they get pulled along. (I'm not sure what the timetable should be on that.)
This introductory mini-adventure would introduce the PCs to the basic adventure loop (end up in strange new place, search for T. Villain, confront him, repeat) and give them two potential long-term goals (stop T from doing whatever he's doing and/or find a way back home), both of which tie into the short-term goal of finding T. Villain in each individual location (assuming the PCs assume T knows more about world-jumping than they do, but that seems like an obvious conclusion). I'll try to also clue them in to various mechanics about this world-hopping, like how they get dragged along by T. Villain, how they and T look like appropriate locals to everyone except each other (which conveniently makes it easy to find each other), etc.

The PCs would go from world to world, quickly finding either evidence of where T. Villain is and what he's doing (say, a newspaper mentioning a new adviser to the king with T's face on the front) or where his next target is (seeing a prominent actor who happens to look like a localized version of T). With a bit of investigation, they'll receive a some hints on what they need to do to find T. Villain or his target ("The king will reward anyone who slays the dragon with five hundred gold pieces carries by a fine stallion, which he will present himself," "Actor Guy is distraught over his mother's heirloom necklace being stolen," etc). If I put more thought into each adventure than I did into this explanation, this should put the PCs on a path to confront T. Villain. Ideally, at some point they'd get an idea of T's plan and timetable, enough to understand the time pressure and stakes and whatnot.
If they succeed quickly enough, they will either confront T halfway through whatever plan he's hatching or warn his target and stick around long enough to do the same. T. Villain will realize he's been foiled and skedaddle, leaving behind something or other; the PCs have a chance to tie up loose ends, investigate clues, and decide whether or not they want to take whatever T. dropped with them. If they fail, or take too long, T. Villain's counterpart is killed and T. sticks around a bit. If the PCs are just a little too slow, they can still confront him, for all the good it'll do. Either way, they'll get character point rewards and whatnot (more if they succeed, less if they fail).
If I design things right, the players should be foiling enough of T's schemes that they can keep up with him power-wise, and also putting together their situation and T. Villain's plan. At some point (hopefully just before they get bored of this formula), they'll get a "proper" confrontation with T, where he fights them with all the power he's gathered and all the preparations he's made (knowing the PCs would be chasing him), and tries to kill them. The PCs presumably succeed, and get full access to T. Villain's notes, which not only give them the ability to control their own movements through time and space but also hint at a greater threat...and a few ways to deal with it.

The PCs (hopefully) won't be onboard with killing alternate versions of themselves to gain power, but if they are we can do some manhunt missions like that. Otherwise, we can switch from "Fall from world to world, performing a series of largely-unrelated tasks to stop a villain from killing his (alternate) self" to "Jump from world to world, performing a series of largely-unrelated tasks to [find MacGuffin parts/win powerful allies/gather the spells and materials needed for the Whatever-Banishing ritual]".
...Oh, and I'm planning to give each of the PCs a sort of extradimensional space they can stick things they want to take from world to world (signature equipment, spellbooks, villain notes, jewels, etc). Seems worth mentioning.
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