DFRPG In Other Time P... *AHEM!* Yadda-Yadda, Something About Claws and Stuff.

[Pbartender]

Has anybody considered this or tried this?

A Dark Ages or Medieval campaign seems an obvious choice for an alternate era, but I have visions of a Pirates of the Caribbean style game, complete with voodoo and Fountains of Youth and Cities of Gold and Aztec legends and such.

[Mr. Death]

I was in a short WWII-based game, so yeah, I think any of those would work.

[Ghsdkgb]

A futuristic Star Trek world would be hilarious, what with technology malfunctioning all over the place. It would certainly explain a large chunk of Next Generation episodes!

[MAK]

We are currently running a renaissance era campaign set in Venice. Other than tweaking gear a bit and removing the Drive skill, everything works with only very minimal changes.

Some logs in RPG Geek http://rpggeek.com/thread/672156/venetian-masks-1-city-creation

[Orladdin]

A futuristic Star Trek world would be hilarious, what with technology malfunctioning all over the place. It would certainly explain a large chunk of Next Generation episodes!

By the time the far future comes about, the catch to magic will change from tech-hex to something else.  Bob has said it has changed before, and if people rely on technology simply to live, magic would have to adjust or cease to exist (a wizard born on a starship would likely not survive to procreate, for example).

But the system would work otherwise.

[Orladdin]

We are currently running a renaissance era campaign set in Venice. Other than tweaking gear a bit and removing the Drive skill, everything works with only very minimal changes.

Some logs in RPG Geek http://rpggeek.com/thread/672156/venetian-masks-1-city-creation

Did you add a pilot/sail/teamster skill in its place?  After all, cars did not exist, but carriages, gondolas and ships were far more common.

[Ghsdkgb]

By the time the far future comes about, the catch to magic will change from tech-hex to something else.  Bob has said it has changed before, and if people rely on technology simply to live, magic would have to adjust or cease to exist (a wizard born on a starship would likely not survive to procreate, for example).

Good point. Bob did say "every three centuries" or so. Maybe it'd have subspace effects, since that's the newest technological advancement by then.

[MAK]

Did you add a pilot/sail/teamster skill in its place?  After all, cars did not exist, but carriages, gondolas and ships were far more common.

No, we rolled those trappings into Craftmanship and Survival instead. Situations where the characters drive or pilot a vehicle themselves (instead of using a driver or rower) don't really come up that much. Hired help is also far more common in that time period, after all.

[Mr. Death]

Honestly, Drive seems to end up neglected in most of my games, so I could see you just dropping it altogether.

[Pbartender]

No, we rolled those trappings into Craftmanship and Survival instead. Situations where the characters drive or pilot a vehicle themselves (instead of using a driver or rower) don't really come up that much. Hired help is also far more common in that time period, after all.

Craftsmanship?

I'd have thought it would have been split up between skills like Athletics (rowing), Scholarship (navigation), Presence (commanding a ship) and Survival (driving a team of horses).

[MAK]

Craftsmanship?

I'd have thought it would have been split up between skills like Athletics (rowing), Scholarship (navigation), Presence (commanding a ship) and Survival (driving a team of horses).

A lot of common sailor's skill is knowing the boat and what to do with all the equipment. So - craftmanship. Not that it has ever come up in the game... Commanding a ship and the kind of marine navigation skills needed in that era wouldn't really be covered with a "drive/pilot" kind of skill anyway. There could be a skill called Boating or something that covers handling of small sailboats (if really necessary in the setting), but commanding a large ship is a lot more specific than that.

Drive skill is there for car chases but naval chases are lot less common - the heroes are supposed to fence on the deck and rigging, not work the rudder.

[Sanctaphrax]

Possibly-useful links:

http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,23142.0.html
http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,21629.0.html

[MAK]

Yep, if you want to go back to a medieval-style fantasy there more fixing to be done. I considered that in the beginning when starting DFRPG, as we had played a pseudo-historical crusades-era setting before, but ended up forwarding the timeline a few hunderd years to get a more pulpy/swashbucklery feeling. Noir does not translate to heroic fantasy that easily. The basic premise of having the city as a fixed setting does assume a certain level of civilization - pretty much any age after gunpowder weapons is easy to use, but I could see a campaign set in late Roman Empire as well.

[Mr. Death]

You don't have to have a city as a fixed setting. It's how the book's set up, but nothing says that you have to do it that way. My games tend to have a new location for each scenario, and some of them jump around quite a bit.

[MAK]

Of course you don't have to. My point was that the further away you go from the way the game is described in the books, the more stuff you have to figure out by yourself. At some point the game can cease to be Dresden Files and become another FATE variant. So if I think about DFRPG in other time periods, I focus first on settings that produce something that is as close to DFRPG as possible except for the time period. What is it after all that makes a game Dresden Files? The mechanics? The genre? The setting?