Mutant Future cover

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but life kept getting in the way. However, Russell’s own retrospective on the Mutant Future game I ran at the office prompted me to move this up in my queue. Go ahead and read his post first, since the first half of this will be a response to that post, before I dive into some of my other conclusions.

Nature’s Slot Machine

Russell’s dead right about my main intentions with the game — I wanted to push the random elements of the game in a quasi-sandbox style. There were a number of reasons why I did that, but the main one was that I wanted to see if random elements could produce a cohesive narrative. ¹ Justin had run a game of Labyrinth Lord late last year, but I wanted to examine the same style of gaming but outside of a D&D structure.

Russell’s also right that the strict adherence to letting the dice fall where they may got to annoy me after a while as GM. I knew it would be futile to run the game completely seriously, but I didn’t want it to become slapstick. And yet, when a random encounter on the empty plains led to the group killing a monster and finding a cache of coins, I was left with a hilarious scene with John’s Pure Human explaining that the shadow wolf was nature’s slot machine. In another encounter, fighting a relatively low HD monster landed the party an extremely powerful warp sword (which is totally not a lightsaber, no way, nuh uh).

Russell’s comment about the encounter tables turning the sandbox into a beach is pretty accurate (and an analogy I’m likely going to steal and use at some point) — by going purely random and letting the dice dictate the world, the underlying logic of the world eroded more and more. For games like Paranoia, this is actually a boon — any random element can be easily blamed on the increasingly insane Computer — but for a game with a narrative spine going through it, it became a problem.

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