Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 12-11-2019, 12:12 AM   #1
transmetahuman
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Default Adventures in Journalism

Has anyone played a game where the PCs were a team of journalists? I'm thinking in terms of an alternate set of hypercompetent but basically mundane characters having their own "get the story" adventures for when too few players show up to play the main supers (well, people-with-powers) game, with both sets of characters in the same newly-Supers world.

Would you enjoy playing generally noncombatant investigative journalists? Would it be too boring or frustrating, especially in a world that has people with superpowers? Has anything like this been tried before?

I'm curious about all that, but my main reason for posting is to ask where I can find 4e templates for journalists and/or support personnel like cameramen, assuming any exist. Failing that, templates for vaguely similar professions. Failing that, would anyone (especially any of you with actual journalism experience) like to try their hand at coming up with some?
transmetahuman is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-2019, 07:26 AM   #2
ravenfish
 
Join Date: May 2007
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

Horror has a journalist template, andSteampunk 3 has a reporter (two, in fact, so you have your choice of plausible journalist and cinematic adventuring journalist).
__________________
I predicted GURPS:Dungeon Fantasy several hours before it came out and all I got was this lousy sig.
ravenfish is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-2019, 07:22 PM   #3
tshiggins
 
tshiggins's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

If you wanted to do this, I'd pick up Boardroom & Curia, to help you get a handle on the sorts of organizations journalists investigate (and work for...); and how well they'd respond to any investigation they learn is under way.

As for the day-to-day activities of journalists, Bill Stoddard's Social Engineering would prove invaluable.

Journalists engage in conflict, every single day. However, when it comes to violent conflict, reporters mostly act as observers.

Modeling non-violent conflict that, nonetheless, significantly impacts lives and livelihoods is really hard to model in a game system. Additionally, the development of a good reputation -- and its associated credibility -- is usually a bit below the granularity of a tabletop RPG.

However, that's the key to a successful career in journalism, really (at least, in a society that values news reporting enough that journalists can make a decent living, at all...).
__________________
--
MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1]
"Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon.
tshiggins is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-2019, 08:01 PM   #4
AlexanderHowl
 
Join Date: Feb 2016
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

Mystery would also be a good choice. After all, the most journalism involves solving mysteries.
AlexanderHowl is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-2019, 09:07 PM   #5
dcarson
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

There was a thread on Code of Honor for a journalist a few years ago. http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=127083

I remember as post with a gaming quote I can't find that was something like. "I don't care if you have Code of Honor(reporter) the first thing you do in a zombie apocalypse is not publish retractions for all the obituaries."
dcarson is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-2019, 09:36 PM   #6
transmetahuman
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

Quote:
Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
There was a thread on Code of Honor for a journalist a few years ago. http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=127083

I remember as post with a gaming quote I can't find that was something like. "I don't care if you have Code of Honor(reporter) the first thing you do in a zombie apocalypse is not publish retractions for all the obituaries."
LOL

Hey, thanks everyone. I wanted to have something tentatively set up before I looked for (more) players, but I'm thinking it would probably be more palatable to them to have some relatively low key powered characters for the sideline game - maybe more humor oriented. I'll run both ideas past everyone.
transmetahuman is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-12-2019, 01:25 AM   #7
johndallman
Night Watchman
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

Quote:
Originally Posted by ravenfish View Post
Horror has a journalist template, andSteampunk 3 has a reporter (two, in fact, so you have your choice of plausible journalist and cinematic adventuring journalist).
For the sake of completeness, here are a couple more from the template list in the GURPS Resources sub-forum:

Journalist (GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars, p. 151) [65]

Journalist (Discworld Roleplaying Game, p. 123) [50]
johndallman is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 12-12-2019, 09:20 AM   #8
Culture20
 
Join Date: Feb 2014
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

Supers tend to be journalists in older media. Journalists are less "on the pulse of the city" these days for that trope to mean much, but there have been a few successful comics about journos investigating criminal enterprises in a supers world. The suggestion of Mystery above is probably the best option for a team of media investigators. It would probably work for Black Ops cover too.
Take a look at Marvel's "Pulse", "Front Line", or "Marvels" for some compelling stories of journalists among supers. Players may want contacts, an ally who is secretly a super, levels of serendipity, and/or enhanced dodge. Body armor when covering a building-buster fight.

Last edited by Culture20; 12-12-2019 at 09:26 AM.
Culture20 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-12-2019, 11:06 AM   #9
SolemnGolem
 
SolemnGolem's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: The Hall of Fallen Columns
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

From my own time in journalism, a lot of the material in GURPS Social Engineering would be spot-on. Also the recent Keeping In Contact supplement would be helpful.

Most journalism (as of early 00s) was still being done by phone, with a bit by email (social media not really existing back then, though NYT journalist Jennifer 8. Lee was briefly notable for posting requests on message boards essentially asking for tips, leads, etc. in an early form of crowdsourcing).

For stories with some degree of actual legal liability, we had to rely heavily on contacts and trust built over years. You'd try to attack a certain question from multiple angles - "who would know anything at all about this topic and what relationship do we have with them going back when?" - and like as not your first two or three calls would whiff (the nice ones would tell you they can't help you at all, others just wouldn't call you back).

Protecting your sources was important too, and not just in the Watergate Deep Throat sense, but also in the sense of maintaining plausible deniability about who they were and what they knew. Say one source gave you an exact dollar amount, but this information could potentially be used to reveal who the source was. You'd try to get a second source, perhaps blur the actual dollar amount somewhat so it could have come from a variety of places. (A similar wartime practice was used by the US intel codebreakers to mislead Japanese counterintel about their leaked sources for Admiral Yamamoto's assassination). Less dramatically, a source could be fired or potentially cut out of future information leaks if they became implicated in media reporting.

I never did any "cloak and dagger" style reporting - the most sensitive source I ever had was a North Korean defector, but he was safely in the USA by the time I spoke with him, and he was very happy to have his photo and name publicly associated with his family's story. But hopefully these could give some idea of the trade.
SolemnGolem is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-13-2019, 03:21 PM   #10
Agemegos
 
Agemegos's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Adventures in Journalism

Quote:
Originally Posted by transmetahuman View Post
Has anyone played a game where the PCs were a team of journalists?
I have. It was a non-interstellar SF game set on Earth in 2100, but we played it in about 1990, which was before we had any inkling of the changes that were going to hit journalism. We worked for a "newspaper" that distributed stories over a ubiquitous data network, on a subscription/micropayment model with a paywall. We had an "editor" who assigned us to and authorised our investigating stories.

Quote:
Would you enjoy playing generally noncombatant investigative journalists?
I did, but the other players were mostly interested in the action/thriller aspect. The GM responded to their taste, I left the game, and very shortly afterwards it fell apart because no-one else would investigate.

____________

Heh!

(1) I still have the character sheet for the character I played in that.

(2) The character sheets in my character morgue seem to be sorted alphabetically by first name.
__________________

Decay is inherent in all composite things.
Nod head. Get treat.

Last edited by Agemegos; 12-13-2019 at 03:23 PM. Reason: typo in date
Agemegos is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
journalists, noncombatant games, people with powers, supers, templates

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 07:47 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.