1KM1KT Free RPG Community

Where do you draw from when you design games or GM or play as a player? (Being inclusive here. Don't want to leave people out.)

For me I have a bunch of Sci-fi staples that I draw from.
Star Trek for the application of science concepts to moral challenges.
I like the "used universe" of Star Wars where the tech looks old and battered.
The movie Stargate because it portrays an alternate but related human society and the difficulty of language barriers.
SG-1 because the teams feel like they're PCs being played by the writers.
Robotech because, massed combat giant robots are cool. It's also burned into my brain from childhood.

As far as RPGs I draw from, even though I'm not a fan of the resolution system, I love the huge vehicle stat blocks in Palladium.

If anything, a lot of my inspiration comes from things I don't like about stories or other games. Things I want to fix. In that sense, there are a lot of games that inspire me.

I missed posting a question last week, sorry about that.

My influences are vast and numerous... Basically everything I read about has the chance to show up in some way. Unfortunately, these are sometimes fleeting intertests and it's hard to really grasp something and get a worthy result.

I'm really influenced by pulpiness and strong visual styles... borderline campiness, even. I like exaggerated, vibrant colors. Right now it all comes down to interest in gritty, dark sci-fi movies of the 70s and 80s. I want to play in a world that's a mix of the Planet of the Apes (okay, late 60s), Logan's Run, with some Cronenbergish paranoia thrown into the mix, all pulpified...

(I even made a ... I will try to get a few of my old friends together and run this thing in the summer)

Generally movies and comic books are great for inspiration, as they combine the narrative with visual display. They captivate you - that is a good thing, but also "force" certain limits to you. Texts are more free, you have to find your own way to translate them into your gaming environment.

I'm influenced by what I read as well, of course, how can I not be?.. But what ends up used in gaming is mostly the non-fiction: mythology, urban legends, historical stuff, biographies, etc.

These are the direct influences. Non-direct influences are the ability to structure your narrative, dramatize events, introduce themes... I'll try to write up some random thoughts about those later.

Icar was inspired by most of the Sci Fi I watched as a young lad:

Star Wars
Star Trek
Aliens
Bladerunner
Dune (yes, it is a terrible film but it is oddly gripping)

I didn't read a great deal (I still don't), so I don't really have any book inspiration.

I like to tear inspiration from other places... far from gaming. I read Ulysees and wanted to write a game about killing 20th Century Irish Authors. I find random places are the best places to get inspiration. It sort of pops up when you're not expecting it.

Generally speaking, whatever I watched or read in the past half hour. Well, a lot more than that, but I am very fickle and bounce from impulse to impulse as it comes up.

A lot of anime, Hard SF, Buckmeinster Fuller, mid to late twentieth century history, early cyberpunk, cartoon adaptations of marvel comic-books, and bits of the horror genre.

Currently, my obsessions are Lacanian psychology & quasi-quantum physics. This is abominably pretentious, I know, but I find my drives choose me rather than me them. Inspiration is too pretty a word for the way I 'work': I steal other peoples' ideas & then think about them until I've dragged them down to my level.

The kiddie-retro stuff is important too. I'm wargaming with childhood friends at present, and it takes you back to why you do it in the first place. Psychologists have something to say about this too: D. W. Winnicott's 'Playing & Reality' is a classic. Creativity is born in childhood & roleplaying exists in that place between internal & external reality. I tend to like games that express this.

When I design games, I'm influenced a lot by what I learn in school. This is made possible by my studying of cultures, media and games. I've studied a fair bit of anthropology, which really helps with the details, but somewhat obscures the mass-scale effects.

I am also indebted rather heavily to the various games, especially the supplements, I've collected over the years. So much so that I often keep the supplements on my shelf long after I've discarded the game that inspired them. The supplements have the details that bring the game to life.

Although my fiction collection is dwarfed by my games and nonfiction collection, it is still fairly big. Most of the books I've read have been signed out from the library. As you can tell, I'm mostly a book person.