Role playing gaming centers around people who aren't everyday folks.
GURPS: Accounting and GURPS: Fast Food Worker didn't do well in playtesting...
Yet, even in the Traveller universe those same people you see everyday will have their counterpart.
Most people live the same life you do today. They never really travel, they go to work, they socialize they're just normal people.
It just happens there's a starport or two on their planet and goods can conceivably shipped in from a lot farther than China.
It's pretty boring and not good adventure fodder. It makes the future so... mundane.
It's a bit strange to think that a city in Traveller will look a lot more like Los Angeles than Logan's Run.
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I've wanted to play in/run a campaign where everybody in the party has 9-5 day jobs, and adventures on the weekends (except maybe that one guy who just does odd jobs). Used something kind of similar for a horror campaign, basically told the players to build a character around their day job first, with a little bit of capability to help keep them alive. I then had them all start in a speakeasy (dieselpunk setting in basically Call-of-Cthulu Chicago), and chased them into a meeting of mob bosses with nigh-unkillable otherworldly horrors, leaving them in substantial debt to the mob. Their first bit of repayment demanded was "weird things are happening, and they're bad for business. We're looking into it, but you should do so as well, or else"
ReplyDeleteIt went pretty much fantastically. Throwing in the odd bit of magic to screw with players can lead to incredibly hilarious results at times.
One Champions campaign our GM made us role-play our daily, secret identities. Perhaps the most frustrating and unfun gaming experience I've ever endured. Especially since my character had a Guardian (from Alpha Flight) style powered suit and needed to fix it on a burger flipping job. Which was all I could land since my character's genius for inventing and building the suit was not accounted for by any advantage that equated to a degree that would get him hired someplace where he could apply it professionally.
DeleteI seriously considered a life of crime.
My team was comprised of a hitman android with legal immunity (who hilariously failed every fear check no matter how many levels of bravery he bought), a food critic/bumbling spy, and a former combat medic wolfman butler, (who passed every fright check with flying colors without ever buying anything to help with doing so). At any given moment the murderbot and spy would be terrified out of their minds, and the shy butler would be totally unfazed.
DeleteWe just kind of glossed past the weekdays for the most part, but it was amusing when someone's duty would come up and the party would be doing things like swinging by the grocery store on their way to investigate spectral oddities because the butler needed to pick up stuff for dinner. Largely it was a "What, if anything, do you do during the week on your time off?". Usually they did a bit of investigating, such as newspaper clipping, and buying stuff for their weekend adventures.