[DL] Timelines, stories and RPGs

["Ronald Conner" <ronald@teleport.com>]

Haveing just read the long list of arguments and comments on the new voteing
system that pinnicle is testing I have come to a few conclusions.

    I'm not going to be running the adventure any time soon.  I've still got
the road to hell and a few other short things planned for my posse.  If all
goes well the world will not end when it is supposed to, (cut to shot of the
world saying "Reports of my death have been greatly exagerated")

    But enough background...I think that the voteing for the outcome of
events like this one is better than just printing it and saying poof
jefferson davis is no longer president and General Lee is defecting to the
Union for some dumb reason or something equally rediculous, which is not to
say that pinnicle would do that, they have too much respect for the course
of history and personal character for that.  John is right no matter how
sleep deprived he was when he wrote all thoes messages.  It is a lot better
to have some influence on the world where so many of us spend a good deal of
time.

    The difference that I see between Deadlands and the other RPGs which
have gone before is limited to what I can observe from history.  I've only
really played a few RPG's and only own books for two, HOL and Deadlands.
But RPG's as a rule have problems with progression in timelines.  One look
at battletech can show you what an overly abundant amount of sourcebooks
spread out over a long period of time can do to a game (is that mech legal
in 3067 or 3045?  I don't know what year are we playing in? 1876.)  D&D as
far as I can tell has suffered from one critical flaw since its inception.
D&D never really had a base world to draw story from.  THAT is why I don't
think the DND movie will have very much resemblance to the actual universe
of dnd, there isn't one.  Gary and crew bought up so many different worlds
that they died because of world glut.  The DND system was streched over
dragonlace, forgotten realms, forbiddon suns, birthright, ravenloft, and
finally planescape which took the whole thing and said, all these different
world exist and you can go to any of them, thus corrupting each of the story
lines by throwing the possiblity of rastilin meeting up with Vecna or some
other equally super powerful mage from another plane.  The whole thing stank
with a capital S.

    Now that WotC has control of DND they are creating a base world from
which all future storylines will either eminate or cross in some way I
guess.  They are taking the basic world of Greyhawk which Gary Gygax created
as the first world book for DND and making it the default world for the
entire game which is a bold step forward for a company that basicly buys
every game it can get its hands on says this isn't nearly as profitable as
pokemon and magic and then puts it in the back of the company on a burner
with spellfire, netrunner, vampire the eternal struggle and the star wars
dice game.

    As to advanceing worlds I can't speak from total experiance on the white
wolf system but I hear that it advances only slowly and not in a way that
would give rise to any noticeable changes in the world of darkness universe.
There is always the impending threat of the time of thin blood and the rise
of the methuslas (actualy name of such upriseing escapes me right now) and
the werewolf apoclypse which has been looming since the game was first
released.

    Some other games that don't seem to advance to an outsider, Shadowrun,
gurps, rifts, and a few others.  I'm probably wrong and I'm sure some of you
will tell me so but thats what I see.

    The real problem with an advanceing storyline is that eventually you can
run out of evil villains to slay.  Now I don't see that happening in the
pinnicle fiction, all the major ones are still intact and will remain so as
far as I can tell.  Even in the road to hell Stone only really made a big
appearance in the last book and if you kill him he doesn't really die he
just comes back later and saves himself or something, time travel can make
things really sticky.  I turn my mind back to the Xanth books of peirs
anthony.  The first ten or fifteen books were great but eventally you tired
of the same characters or their offspring doing incredible things, taking a
leak and avoiding looking at panties.  Piers eventually solved every problem
that had ever existed in his make belive world and ran out of really
interesting things to write about, I didn't even bother to pick up his
latest one.

    So as this extremely long example has run on I see that if you do it
correctly you can keep the world running for an indefinte ammount of time.
So what happens when deadlands catches up with the HOE universe?  I know it
may take a long time but 218 years could pass pretty fast if nothing is
happening for most of it.  A couple more world wars, one big depression, and
then you get to the mid and late twentith century and it all gets to be a
lot like a shadowrun/HOE/guns of the south kind of world.  I really dont
want to live to see that.

    In closeing, keep up the good work, try not to make the story more
complicated than it has to be.  Don't kill off your villians until you know
that somebody is waiting to take his place, and if you really need to make
world changeing events make sure that it has an outcome people will like.

Ron "I woke up from my nap" Conner