Temeraire Discussion starter 7) Gaming

RichardAbbott

Clash has, of course, got a prior advantage over the rest of us here because of In Harms Way: Dragons What features of the book would you use in a game? Would you prefer to play it as battle-heavy, or political, or strategic? Do you think it would make a better tabletop, board, or roleplaying game (and in passing, which games work well in each of those modes)?

Apocryphal

Definitely better as an RPG than board game.I haven’t read In Harm’s Way: Dragons, but my gut feeling is that this book captures the feel
Of that game quite closely.

clash_bowley

I developed my game based solely on the ideas in the book we read, the first in the series. I had not read any of the sequels - there were none yet IIRC. The In Harm's Way series of games are military RPGs, and this was based on the military aspects, but I must say one of the most entertaining campaigns we played was where the PCs were all members of a clutch of young feral dragons in the Great lakes region, with no human PCs at all. The 'standard' game would have each player with a captain PC and a dragon PC which was bonded to another player's captain.

NeilNjae

It could make a decent enough RPG setting, using something like Beat to Quarters as a system and having the dragon being one character among the ensemble. Also, the idea of the dragons being strategically important assets means that there will always be a collection of characters and plots surrounding them.

It could be a good military game with some, but not a lot, of nerd-troping over a straight historical game.

I'm not sure what the dragons would add to other types of game in the setting, such as politics, social life, or grand strategy.

RichardAbbott

To repeat a thing I said on the Discord channel, "Back in the day, a bunch of us had some WW1 flying rules played with Airfix models (1:72 scale) on long bamboo poles so you were doing the manoeuvring and all for real, lateral and vertical, to try to get into a good position. No internet back in those days of course so we all spent hours in the local libraries trying to find out statistics like speed, rate of climb, turning circle etc. It needed a fair-size hall to play but I remember it being great fun, and surprisingly hard to get right." And then went rambling on about maybe doing the same with dragon combat.

Anyway, that in turn led to me musing about how a lot of the games I played in back in the day were basically tabletop, whether single combat on land or air, naval battles, or armies of various periods. So we bought minifigs models of sundry warriors, built Airfix and other scale models, made plasticard scale models of warships and so on.

Role-playing was something we got into later, and often still felt a need to have some kind of physical component to give some grounding to the ideas. Since you folk are much more heavily involved in contemporary gaming than I, I'm curious to know if there is still much gaming that has a tangible component like that?

clash_bowley

Most D&D and Warhammer is done with figures. I have never run a game that way.

RichardAbbott

@clash_bowley said:
Most D&D and Warhammer is done with figures. I have never run a game that way.

While I was writing that I suddenly had a little wave of nostalgia for those plasticard ships and poring over Jane's Fighting Ships and other similar sources in Godalming and Guildford libraries. I had a quick search online for the rules we used and (though memory is unclear about the details) I think it might have been the Skytrex ruleset (or possibly an earlier incarnation of same) http://navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?detail=7217.
We tried a WW2 equivalent but the balance wasn't right and submarines basically won all the time, which didn't make for an interesting game...

clash_bowley

@clash_bowley said:
I came to RPGs from wargames, and built hundreds of models, including kitbashing and trash models, so I do like tangible bits; but I have always run RPGs theater-of-the-mind style.