Hi Mysteron,

Not to discourage you, but do you have a name we can use? We like people to use real names here if at all possible.

In all honesty, polling for opinion will lead to a lot of "yes", "no", "maybe", "jam" and "my hat of XX know no limit!". Can you reframe the question a little more specifically? More along the lines of "what issues are there with a game in X time period?" or similar? You'll probably find the responses more helpful.

Any game might be possible, you only have to look at Grey Ranks to see a recent example of straight history as a setting. The question is more how you go about making it engaging, than whether people have an interest in playing with the subject matter itself.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

Speaking as someone with a passion for history, I can all too easily feel the appeal of running a game in a historical period that I have a deep knowledge of. But, there's a problem! Sometimes historical detail (just like in-depth canon in a fictional setting) can swamp the others taking part. Are we playing a game, or listening to someone pontificate about their favourite period? Is the person running the game going to quibble and get upset about he game not being historically accurate?

Games which have been very firmly rooted in a specific period (from my own experience games such as Grey Ranks and Spione) are a worthy experience. yet, neither of these games makes it beholden upon the participants to adhere to strict historical accuracy. The fun of playing in the game is moe important than getting all the facts right.

And this is key to games set in a real-world period: don't get hung up on the detail, don't make it a history lesson for the participants. Historical games can often turn into such a thing and I myself have often had to hold back on my impulse to share knowledge or correct an inaccuracy. To do so would have made the game less fun for the players at that point in time. The same can apply to almost any game with a detailed background. Awareness that it is a game and not a lesson is vital.

And welcome to the Collective Endeavour!

Edit: Matt, in his post above, makes a good point. I'll leave this post in place just now, but don't feel a need to respond to anything it says at the moment. Matts post is far more valuable.

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

I think it's a matter of familiarity on occassion. I would imagine that given a poll of 100 roleplayers they could probably tell you far more about the fantastical world of Star Trek than they could about the state of the New Model Army in the English Civil War? And indeed, taking what Malcolm said, I bet they would niggle more with deviations from the Star Trek canon than from the world of Oliver Cromwell.

Whats most important (for me anyway) is that the game is engaging and produces good fun at the table. I think thats where small press games and history tend to come together well. You can really zoom in to a period that interests you (like I have with Duty & Honour) and do with it what you will without a massive onus upon you to be commercially viable.

Your game sounds intriguing - I like roleplaying, history and LARPS - so go on ... tell us what the period is then?!

And welcome to Collective Endeavour.

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

I have the same problem sometimes when people start talking science. If I shoot a car in the petrol tank, I want it to go boom, 'cause that's what happens in the movies and stuff. I don't much care if the actual chance of that happening in the real world is slim unless you're using tracer rounds! I want things to go boom! Aaaargh! Death! Bombs! Blood! Killing! Entrails and stuff in mid-air, slow-motion splurge-fests while the camera swings around them making a noise like whhhhhhhhhhhhhhppp!!! Aieeeee!!!

Ahem. Sorry. Just took me pills, ok again now.

I guess it's all about expectation, isn't it? Do people want to find themselves in something that's absolutely accurate, or do they want to find more or less what they expect to find so they can get involved without the worry? For my own personal preference, I'd rather play in a fictional setting because my knowledge of history is limited and I don't want to spend half of the session asking for facts and figures, and the other half being preached to because what I just tried to do is wrong for some reason, despite popular misconception.

Ash

Thanks for your input guys. While I'm not interested in developing a pure historical game in the sense of preventing the characters from doing virtually anything that could 'alter' the course of true history, I do want to retain a lot of the historical detail in order to allow a close resemblance of the world while the gaming sessions are taking place. Afterall the game is to be designed to 'play' and not just present players with a timeline they are expected to follow.

OK, so to be a little more specific, the game is tentatively called 1601 and is set in the closing years of the reign of Elizabeth I. I have run several sessions including a LARP at a local convention that all went well and the players got into the spirit and theme of the game fairly easily. I think the players knowledge of the game world / history though certainly slowed the game and affected the actions and decisions the players made (however on the plus side I find people get more into their 'role' when the character has more of a 'realistic' feel to it).

This is the biggest drawback I have found (lack of knowledge of the historical setting affecting the gameplay, and that has been confirmed by Ash's post as being one of if not THE primary issue relating to historical settings) - is this something you have encountered Malcolm and is there anything that you did that helped? My concern is that most gamers are already too entrenched in fantasy style games and worlds and playing in fantasy and historical require different playstyles and strategies. Is there an easy way to convey this difference to a group of players or are my experiences uncommon and people can generally adapt?

Thanks for any input and I hope I've worded things to avoid the yes / no answers.

Dave Herber

Well, the mechanics of the game go a long way to transmitting the sort of play you want to convey. Want a game of courtly intrigue? Just don't have any combat skills! Want the rules of courtesy and rank to be paramount? Make sure that they are front and centre in the rules AND build in a learning mechanic through chargen so that players who are unfamiliar can ease their way in.

Reference is also crucial in my experience. Have in mind some good reference material that people can dip into to experience the period - even if you aren't that keen. So, I would imagine that there are a number of period dramas in that period that people can see on DVD, up to and including Elizabeth: The Golden Age? And fiction as well - hell, even the Marvel tpb 1602? What about Blackadder II? Different people will have different reference points.

This is something that I have had to face with Duty & Honour. In the UK, and sometimes in the US, all I have to say is 'Sharpe' and people know exactly what to expect. However, when they don't, the Peninsular War is pretty obscure, especially to many American gamers. Thats why I have the War of 1812 on hand as a secondary reference point!

With a great premise, engaging mechanics and a decent point of reference, anything is possible.

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

Hey Dave,

As our friends across the Atlantic might at sometime say "Don't sweat the little stuff". Offering people the big details is good, getting caught up in minutae is bad. So, someone says they pull out their flintlock when actually it would have been a matchlock, so what? Or they suddenly decide that the Duke of Burgundy has sailed his fleet into the Medway, meh! It's all good fun in the context of the game and historical accuracy be dammed!

There can sometimes be a tendency in game for one or more individuals to correct others, in all types of game. Correcting people for historical detail throughout a game is just bad form and ruins the flow and feeling of whats happening in play. I tend to tell people (this is especially true of con games of Cold City) that they do not need to know a damn thing about 1950s Berlin to have fun playing the game. They might keep referring to the KGB, but it's not necessary for me to tell them it was actually the MGB up until 1953! They know what the KGB was, what it did, what we all imagine it to be like, so that's good enough for me.

Boiling all this down:

Give people a brief precis of big details (The Virgin Queen, Walsingham, the Armada, whatever big, significant things are happening in the game)

Don't worry about the little details ("Well there wasn't a bridge over the Thames there in 1601!" or "Royal Guards would actually have carried the glaive-guisarme, as opposed to the pike, because..." and all that kind of stuff).

Let people have fun in the world you have presented, but let them make it their own. Let them feel that just maybe they are affecting history, rather than simple being passive watchers of great events.

Cheers
Malcolm

Contested Ground Studios

Neil, have you added your own 'historical' information pertaining to Duty & Honour? Have you changed the actual real world timeline as a result, producing to some degree an alternate future for the period your game is set in?

My initial thoughts were that this is what I would do and the actual year of 1601 would be an alternate track that broke away in 1593 after the attempted murder of Christopher Marlowe.

So, while the historical perspective exists and the period is historically accurate, in order for things to occur within the flow of my game (and allowing players/characters to change the actual course of history if necessary) I have contemplated setting forth on this alternate timeline. The strength I see in this is that it gives me flexibility within the actual world to add/remove characters or change historical events while retaining the exact setting. At present the game has no historical variation and plays as a backdrop to the real world machinations of late Elizabethan England.

Dave

For no reason I can really put my finger on I have never been terribly interested in realistic roleplaying games. I'm similarly uninterested in realistic fiction. This is not the same, of course, as being uninterested in stories set in the real world!

For example I love secret history, or hidden magic games. These are usually set in the real world, or something close to it, but with a hidden twist that makes them not realistic. The joy with these games is having a solid foundation in the familiar, with the wealth of details that Malcolm mentions, but then being able to discover something new and magical within them. It's the same with the best (IMHO) Fantasy fiction. Books that start in the real world and then reveal the hidden magic within it (e.g. The Weirdstone of Brisengamen) are much better than ones that just have fantasy throughout from the start (e.g. The Belgariad). I enjoy the later too of course, but I think the former might be finer works, as books and games.

Of course there is a lot of value to the very fantastic as a setting as well. I've written games set on one-face worlds, or on worlds held together with giant trees, and the like. These were fantasy settings, but they were fantastic in the same sense as much science fiction, allowing us to explore something strange and odd, but with it's own internal consistency.

Now the common factor between both those two styles of games is that they have a central concept that is easy to grasp, either because it is familiar (the modern-day settings), or big and bold (the world is a tree) and there to explore. What doesn't work, to my mind, is a setting where nothing is familiar, but it is all mundane enough that there is nothing to latch on to that helps you understand what the setting is about. This is what other people have described as needless historical settings, where it is history for history's sake.

So my advice is, if you want a realistic historical game fair enough, but it should have some sort of strong and graspable central conceit or image that the players can latch on to. This is much like Neil was saying (but less coherent).

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

What I have done so far to convey background in D&H is:

- two one page vignettes about the war, one from a French Colonel and one from a retired English Major General.

- each section of the chargen chapter (and subseqent ones, I have decided) is narrated by a redcoat who has returned to England and is recounting his adventures to boys in a pub.

- the game is scattered with 'Nosey Comments', pieces of opinion on game matters written from the perspective of the Duke of Wellington.

- five short 'essays' on facets of the period ('It’s a Brutal World', 'The Three Ladies of the World', 'Yes Sir! You Sir!', 'The Only Good Frog…' and 'Sex and the British Abroad')

- a one page primer on some rudimentary regimental structures (ie. the difference between a regiment, a battalion and a company)

I'm just about to start a sort of 'Dummies Guide to the Peninsular War' which will be a simple timeline of events, seeded with example Military Conflicts for the game and key areas that the GM might want to zoom in on.

Thats the stuff I have planned for the basic game. In my free-to-pdf support that I have planned I can easily drill down on a particular topic and give a more detailed examination. So, for example, if I get feedback from people which says they would like to know more about British troops in the West Indies at the time, I can do a four pager on that. If they want more on Horseguards and the military bureaucracy, thats easily done too.

General, play-aiding, simple stuff in the basic book and then more refined stuff in the support is how I have it planned.

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

Why treat a historical setting any different from a non-historical setting, at least from the point of view of timelines and the like? The creators of Forgotten Realms don't feel terribly beholden to historical fact or timelines, or worry overly about people "changing" things. It's a setting, a starting point for adventures, not a script.

A historical setting shouldn't be any different. History informs how the setting has come about and the sorts of things that are going on. Hell, it might also inform some future events or plots, but it shouldn't dictate them. The timeline should end at the point the adventure begins - if it doesn't you're encouraging players and the GM to be sticklers for the facts, and the facts don't make a good story.

There's a really interesting discussion on adapting history to games over at Story Games at the moment:

http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=6242&page=1#Item_0