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.

My normal inclinations are similar to Russell’s: I prefer to use random elements ahead of time to provide creative frission. I often use them to put a bunch of options before my eyes before I pick one or just decide to do something else. But then, the game is no longer random, which defeated the point of my exercise. After this experience, I’m feeling that random story elements are like random numbers — too few, and they end up going all over the place, but too many and they all end up averaging out to the same kind of muddy middle ground.

The Old School is Not Always The Best School

One of the other reasons I did this because I wanted to see how much nostalgia added to the game experience. There’s a strong resurgence of old-school sensibilities over the past couple of years, and I was curious to see how I personally found an older system to be fun in 2010, and how much was really just nostalgic remembrance.

I really missed unified resolution mechanics. Since Mutant Future is essentially based on “original edition” Dungeons & Dragons, rolling d20s for combat differs from rolling d20s for saving throws, and I constantly messed up which direction was which. That frustrated me more than I realized it would. I also fudged the encumbrance and equipment rules, letting people assume basic equipment based on concept, even though I knew that resource management is a pretty big part of that kind of design. I was also surprised that henchmen (such a large part of that style of design) didn’t have any form of combat mechanics, requiring me to fudge some from the monster rules — even in such a minimalistic design, it seemed like that would have been an important consideration.

Also, I think both the players and I had troubles with the idea that “player skill” trumped “character skill.” I was often asked what knowledge PCs would have. That’s maybe less important in fantasy games, since it’s all based on a fictional world, but it’s more of a problem when you’re trying to describe a car bumper and the player has no clue if their character would recognize it or not. I found I was defaulting to the technology rules for a lot of mental tasks, which worked okay but meant that even the incredibly intelligent characters were often only batting about 50/50 in terms of knowledge. However, when the system is designed to encourage player tactics and questions over “roll to see if you notice the clue,” it’s hard to fudge.

And yet, it was a blast, and a couple of the players wanted to play again (although generally it was agreed that we’re all probably prefer a different system). A lot of the fun came from the nostalgia from playing Gamma World, I’m sure, and some of it came from the players being willing to throw themselves into the game. I’m certainly not turned off completely by this style of game design, and I’m even looking forward to the “white box” hack that Russell’s planning to run over our company vacation.

What I really got out of running Mutant Future is that while the system is important to a game, as well as the participants, there’s also a lot to be said for how much both sides are willing to bend for the joint experience. If the rules are flexible (or sparse) enough to accommodate a particular setting, and if the players are willing to go the extra mile to really sell that setting, I think the resulting game will be a lot stronger. Nostalgia is a great lubricant to help both rules and players to bend toward that ultimate experience.

So with all that said, I think people who liked Gamma World should really give Mutant Future a look. I don’t know if I’d run it again, but the fun and nostalgia (as well as the personal education) I got from it was well worth it.