Games to Write, Campaigns to Play

The big problem with every near-future game currently in existence is that they were written several years ago, or written recently with the same assumptions as those games (OGL Cybernet, I'm looking at you). The future doesn't look like it did then. If you look at something as simple as the mobile phone in these games, you see how odd those things appear.

It is also the case that the so-called cyberpunk games on the market don't actually match the source material. The cyberpunk authors wrote stories about creeping obsolence, and they were talking about their present. The games that these stories spawned seem to be nothing more than action games in a dark-future setting.

Which is a shame.

I would dearly love to see a new game, written today, using a hard-science, properly speculative version of the future as it looks today. I would also dearly love to see a 'proper' cyberpunk game, with all the grit and fire of the setting. Sadly, to play such a game, I would need to write it myself. Which is possible - all the d20 rules required exist, they just need assembled.

Another part of me, the really geeky part, would dearly love to see a Transformers d20 game. Again, all the rules required already exist - they just need assembled. (Actually, I think I'll do this - a game like that is just too much fun to leave undone.)

Finally, the game I would most love to play, or even to GM, is any game featuring 'real' characters, with proper flaws. RPGs are replete with tortured characters. However, their flaws and demons seem to exist solely as an excuse to be a really cool badass who strides through the world killing things. Vampire is most often played as "superheroes with fangs". No-one plays Wolverine - they play a Wolverine clone without the personality. I would dearly love to play a game with fully developed characters, with all the quirks and oddities of real people. Of course, such a game is system indepenent, but it relies on finding a group of players all of whom understand what is being done, and are going along with it.