Rip It & Run! Monster of the Week

This week we look at the mainstay of sci-fi and fantasy-based TV shows, a device that can be utilised to make your gaming work, especially if you and your team are pressed for time.

As gamers age, they get fewer and fewer opportunities to indulge in their hobby. Real Life has a way of taking up all of that free time you used to have in your teens and twenties. Work impinges; offspring become demanding; families intrude. On top of this, general decrepitude starts to set in and that means that you can’t stay up all night the way you used to do, living solely on a diet of fizzy drink and pizza. It boils down to commitment, and at this time of life, gaming has a priority ranking somewhere slightly above gouging your eyes out with a spoon.

Other things replace the gatherings that were so much fun in your youth: crappy TV shows; online gaming; PC-games. The only person who needs to be motivated for these events is yourself; no-one needs to hunt down a baby-sitter or re-schedule their workout session. From my experience, if gaming is automatically coming at you from your too-hard basket, then don’t say “sure! I’ll play” if you get the invitation. You’re automatically wasting more people’s time than your own.

Time is an issue for busy people, but there’s a way to work around it. Most remarkably, it’s been there in front of you all along, on all of those television shows which you’ve been watching on TiVo while chugging your dinner before heading to the gym. What you need is a Monster of the Week (MOTW) game.

The basic premise is that each session that you get together – be it fortnightly, monthly, whatever – a case is presented, explored and solved by lights out. There are some basics that are fundamental to getting this right:

Character Establishment: each and every player needs to know what they’re doing and why they’re there. The party should have well-defined strengths and weaknesses: someone good at fighting; someone good at research; someone good with social skills. If this sounds like the “A-Team” then that’s perfect – you’ve got it. Without this the thing falls quickly to pieces. This doesn’t mean that characters can’t grow and develop over time, branching out into other areas of expertise, but everyone needs a firm starting point.

Time Management: Whatever time frame in which your sessions take place, your games need to fill that space exactly. This can take awhile to gauge: Keepers always think that they have to be parsimonious with clues and information – that’s crap. The players are there to wander through your plot; not be foiled from entering. It’s the difference between having an open-door policy and posting a bouncer. Hand out the clues like corn-chips; players love to know that they’re on the right track. Also, your Keeper needs to be aware of how much story can be accomplished in say, three-hour’s play. This is a learning curve too, but then many TV shows have 2-part episodes during their kickoff, so don’t feel badly about it.

“Less is More”: Always be aware that roleplaying will fill out the space provided for it. The more you add in, the more will happen. If you keep it simple, you’ll generally run to time.

So much for the essentials; now what do you do with it? Here, I’m going to be speaking to Call of Cthulhu players predominantly, but other Horror RPGs and even other types of games can benefit from these observations too.

Most horror-based TV shows follow a basic premise – one episode, one monster. This is what you should start with. It’s a tried-and-true format that, admittedly, has its limitations; but these can be mollified somewhat. The kickstarter for this style of action was “Nightstalker”:

Poor Karl Kolchak could never catch a break: always working against stuffy officials, jealous co-workers and an angry boss, and never trusted, no matter how many times (all of them) that he actually got the story straight. The show was a sleeper, because it broke new territory in a time when people wanted re-runs of “Bewitched”, or “My Favourite Martian”, or the burgeoning abomination of the family sitcom: “Good Times”, or “Happy Days”. On a practical note, engineering a different monster each week in terms of (not so) special effects, costumes and actors, took its toll. In the long term, the format wasn’t self-sustaining: credibility (although admirably maintained by the writers) eventually fell to the wayside. Something else was needed. As a more recent example, “Brimstone”, was an excellent show that leant too hard upon the MOTW format and quickly lost its ability to surprise (despite a host of excellent features going for it).

Chris Carter took the MOTW format and kicked it up a notch with the “X-Files”. Here too was the MOTW, but Carter added over-arching storylines to weave through the weekly dose of spookiness and pique the interest of fans. In the long haul, it just became too complex to follow, and the so-called “mythology” episodes were soon the ones that people remembered  - for the most part - least fondly. “Twin Peaks” had the same problem, and worse, the directors and producers deliberately wanted it to be that way.

Along comes “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the excellent writing of Joss Whedon created a new take on the MOTW to pull in the fans. In this iteration, each successive season of the show had its own story arc including a top villain, or Boss, to use a computer gaming reference. In this fashion, the focus of the viewers became narrowed: previous season issues were wholly character-based and the current nemesis drove the action, with the occasional freaky weirdo popping in for a bit of variety. Each episode brought the heroes another step closer to that season’s nemesis, with a grand conclusion in the final offering.

Currently, top dog in horror TV-show stakes (ahem) is “Supernatural”. It takes all of the lessons learned by its forebears and rolls them into a post-modern take on the entire genre. There’s enough Whedon-esque humour, ongoing conspiracies, and down-and-dirty heroes to catch everyone’s attention, along with a hefty dose of self-reference and in-jokes. Essentially though, it’s still a MOTW program. And it’s not perfect:

So much for history: how does this help time-poor gamers? It’s all about structure.

Obviously, in gaming there’re no such things as "seasons", although we can pretty well define an individual session as an “episode”. Each episode needs to be one of four types of events:

A Scübidüberism;

A High-level Action-fest with Low-level Servitors;

A Random Horror; or

A Mythos Event.

Let’s take these one by one:

Scübidüberisms, as you might infer, are incidents that look as though there’s a supernatural element operating, however it turns out that it’s a front for some other (usually illegal) activity. Bootleggers imitating the Jersey Devil to smuggle hooch past an otherwise-occupied police force; sneaky kids haunting a decrepit local house to keep nosey-parkers away from their hydroponic weed crop; a ruthless developer causing “accidents” at an old theatre in imitation of a legendary ghost to keep patrons away, thereby forcing a sale: you know the drill. These kinds of stories are great for developing a team’s ghost-hunting skills and providing them with some credibility; later on when some NPC rings up out of the blue to ask for help with their little ghost problem, it will seem completely natural and un-forced.

Obviously though, it’s not always going to be a case of some cranky old dude getting away with it but for those pesky... um, ghostbusters? Sometimes it will be actual mayhem connected to Mythos entities enacted by their low-level minions. Face it: every organisation has logistical requirements and the fulfilling of these is usually left in the hands of grunts; facing these grunts is where the players will get their first taste of the greater Evil that’s hiding in the shadows.

...And then sometimes, a vampire will leap out of the woodwork. Every series needs some genuine monsters to spice things up: Keepers should pin down the rules concerning these guys and stick with them (“True Blood” vampires react negatively to silver, for example), but they should also mix things up a little so that the players have to work things out. Is the vamp the late-working head of the local blood bank? Is the werewolf a park ranger with a hard line in keeping wolves out of rancher’s lands? Adding layers to the onion is the way to hide the true nature of what’s at the heart of the mystery, but remember – less is more.

Finally, there’re those moments that all of those cultists you’ve been butting heads with have been working towards, when something horrific gets summoned in from some extra-dimension and the world goes pear-shaped. These should always be “season finale” episodes, cliff-hangers where it’s all or nothing and some characters may (*gasp!*) die. Clues as to what is being planned should have been strewn like breadcrumbs throughout the previous sessions, but this is where it all comes together – do or die.

The end result of all this planning is that characters have some time to grow and develop, and their players get a good grasp on how to use them; NPCs are generated that can be dragged-in to support later tales and story arcs; and – unlike a lot of CoC games – no-one’s a gibbering wreck in fifteen minutes flat. That ol’ longevity problem that keeps people from really enjoying Call of Cthulhu is solved from the word “go”.

So, if you’re time-pressured but still keen, give the MOTW style of playing a shot. It’ll certainly be cheaper than shelling out for the next season of “Supernatural”!