How I ruined a game without actually doing anything wrong
Another title for this post might be ‘Know your own strengths.’ Before the Wraith game I’m starting, my last Storytelling excursion was a Trigun RPG. If you’re an 80s and/or 90s nerd, you probably know Trigun. But just in case, here’s a quick run-down.
Trigun was one of the early animes brought over to the US. That is, Japanese animated shows directed not only at kids, but often adults. Trigun was originally a manga (graphic novel), but I was a fan of the anime, and that show was the basis of my role-playing game.
Trigun was a weird, wonderful combination of wacky and incredibly poignant. The lead character was an (arguably) immortal gunman, Vash the Stampede, who was both an incomparable badass and a kind, soft-hearted man who wept with joy over a bag of donuts. Trigun took place on the fictional desert planet of Gunsmoke, and told the story of Vash trying to find and deal with his vindictive twin brother, Knives. His companions on this wild adventure were Millie and Meryl, a pair of exasperated insurance investigators, and Wolfwood, a priest-slash-gunman who got into constant and comedic/pointed debates with Vash over his refusal to take lives.
Trigun was a weird and silly series, and it inspired me to run a game. Specifically, Vash ends the series capturing Knives rather than killing him… But I always wondered what the hell Vash planned to do with his brother. Knives had already proved to be wild and powerful, not easy to persuade or convert to Vash’s ways of love and peace.
So I conceived of a role-playing game in which Vash had himself and Knives sealed into the huge lightbulb-shaped plants that power the technology of Gunsmoke. It put them both into a sort of safe state of limbo, where Vash could begin the very long process of helping Knives to heal his scarred soul. In the years since, a new city — Stampede — grew up around the paired power plants. But a plant engineer in Stampede had made accidental contact with Knives, and that turned into a maddened obsession with freeing the monster. My player characters were local folks who fought to keep the old engineer from freeing Knives and resuming his plan to kill all the humans on Gunsmoke.
Whoops, you really didn’t need to know that much about my plot.
But as you might have picked up, I was excited about the idea. I still love it, even a couple of years after having run the game. And almost ruining it.
The problem wasn’t my story. I worked hard on the plot and ran it by multiple other friends who were familiar with Trigun, but not available to play my game. And they agreed that it sounded good.
The problem wasn’t the rules, either. We used Big Eyes, Small Mouth, which is a game system specifically designed for running anime games. And it did the job admirably… after some house-rules.
And it definitely wasn’t my players’ fault that I ended up so unhappy with the game. They all knew their Trigun lore and worked admirably to make their characters fit in with the world and my story.
The problem was my Storytelling. Not because it was bad, but because it was a bad fit for Trigun. I’m good at dark, serious mysteries… but I was trying to describe the funny, wacky world of Gunsmoke, where a strange little black cat appears in random places and everyone has a funny one-liner to drop. I’m not a bad Storyteller — I hope — but I’m not good at being funny.
It was as simple as that. My story was coherent and my combat presented the level of challenge that I was looking for, but I couldn’t snap off silly dialog for the NPCs. I couldn’t think of weird enough places for the black cat to show up. The game just… wasn’t funny. As a result, it ended up feeling more like some other space western. It almost would have worked better as a Cowboy Bebop game, which is also a space-based anime, but one with a much more serious tone.
It was a damned good thing that I scripted a brief meeting between Vash and the characters, or my players might have forgotten entirely that it was a Trigun game. Alright, I’m exaggerating there… but not by as much as I’d like.
It wasn’t a bad game, but it wasn’t a Trigun game.
We got through the campaign and my group had fun, but I learned something really important for future games — to know my own strengths and weaknesses. I’m not funny, but I did well on the serious mystery elements of my story. Guess which one of those I’m focusing on in Wraith?
Does that mean I’ll never try to run another funny game? Hell no! If a story comes to me that calls for a wacky setting, I’m not just going to reject it. But I am going to set myself up for success… I’ll downplay the humor element as much as possible and emphasize the parts of the RPG that I’m best at. And if I’m going to try something outside my wheelhouse again, I’ll do my best to prepare for it. I’ll script some funny bits, if I can, and make doubly sure that I’m well-rested and fed before running a game that I know will be difficult for me.
Know yourself, and know when you’re giving yourself a challenge. If you’re not up for that challenge, maybe put that particular game campaign on the shelf for a while until you’re ready. There’s no shame in doing something that will be more fun for you and your players.
