Linked Stories with Different Systems

[Michael]

Dreaming up a campaign that tells follows a single story (from many perspectives) while switching between multiple systems.

Episode 1: The King is Dead
A GM-less game about rival noble houses with competing claims on the throne. The game ends when we determine the new Queen.

Episode 2: For the Queen
A GM-less game about the members of a Queen’s retinue accompanying her on a diplomatic journey. The game ends when the Queen is ambushed and we find out which characters rise to her defense.

Episode 3: Kingdom
A GM-less game about a community facing peril. The game ends when we determine how to the kingdom resolves the instability caused by the Queen’s ambush.

Finale: Undetermined
Depending on events of the first three episodes, we could play:
A second session of Kingdom (if there’s more to do)
Follow (if there is an obvious quest to pursue)
Archipelago (if we’re most interested in the fate of specific characters)
All Men Must Die (If the Kingdom breaks into warring factions)
Microscope (if we’re more interested in the long-term fate of the Kingdom)
Apocalypse World Fallen Empires (If things go very poorly)

Any thoughts on this premise? Have folks implemented anything like this?

[Jmstar]

My local crew has done similar things, without a lot of planning, returning to the same worlds using whatever system fit the sort of angle that interested us at the time. I’ve also used Fiasco as a way to generate setting material, characters, and a trajectory for a campaign using a different game more suited to longer-term play.

I should add that shifting between thematically related AW games is very easy - we’ve done Monsterhearts to Urban Shadows for example, with the same characters aged up.

[Grant_Woodward]

I suppose you could say that any game that kicks off with a gamified world-building session (using something like Microscope) sort of does this automatically, doesn’t it?

I don’t foresee too many issues with this as long as you’re explicit with your players about it. My one concern is that you’re asking players to potentially learn multiple games in a short amount of time. That’s a real mental cost for some players, so make certain your systems are very easily learned, or make each ‘episode’ long enough that they pay off learning each new system.

[Michael]

Yeah learning time is a worthy concern. These are mostly games we’ve played before, so that should be low-friction. We’ve done world creation in different systems, or switched to a GM-less system as a finale for a longer campaign. Our only shift here is threading more than two systems in sequence.

[Alexi_Sarge]

I dig this.

Somewhere I saw people discussing playing a three part campaign with a series of Monsterhearts following characters as teens in a small town, then a series of Monster of the Week following the same characters as young adults on the road, concluding with a series of Urban Shadows following fully-grown versions of those characters enmeshed in the supernatural politics of a city.

[AviatrixCat]

Hah! I have a long tradition of using a custom Fiasco playset at the start of a campaign to generate relationships and lived backstory between the characters

[Anders]

One of the features I’ve wanted for my never-going-to-get-played Changeling-esque YA horror game is to use different systems for the mundane world where the characters are tweens or young teens and the Dreaming-equivalent where they are powerful heroes, both to enable those to parts of the game to focus on different things and to emphasize the difference between being young and vulnerable vs. powerful and capable.

[Paul_T]

I’ve always liked this idea, and experimented with mixing and matching systems for different effects. I particularly like the idea of using different rules for different aspects of reality (like @Anders suggests).

I’ve also always wanted to pick a scenario/module/situation, and play it through a handful of times, using a different game each time.

It’s a big commitment to a weird project, so I’ve never been able to pull it off, but I think it would be incredibly educational in terms of showing how game design affects what would at the table.

[Haladir]

We did something like this back in the '90s/early aughts, although it was more organic than planned.

We ran in a modern-day world where a small number of very-powerful superheroes & supervillains existed. (More Watchmen than Justice League.)

We started play by running the superheroes, using Champions. At the end of the campaign, the heroes realized that they were doing more harm than good, and exiled themselves to another planet.

We then ran an “X-Files”-style game set in the same world, post-supers, using GURPS. That game dealt with cleaning up the messes that the supers left behind, and dealing with the consequences (robot armies, magical creatures, weird monsters, etc.)

A couple of years after that, we ran a street-level occultist game set in the same world, using d20 Modern: Urban Arcana. Occasionally, we would encounter an NPC that was a former PC from the previous game… sometimes as an ally, sometimes as an antagonist!

Unfortunately, that last group broke up after only four or five sessions, so we never concluded that campaign.

[marden.muller]

Yeah, as a GM I tried this once with a long-running campaign that I had planned. It didn’t pan out in the end due to scheduling issues the players and I were having at the time. I’d love to give it another shot sometime.

I started with a hack made from parts of Trevas (a Brazilian RPG from the 90s) and classic WoD, then switched to Dread for a flashback episode set in the 1920s, starring a cast of different characters. From that point on, my plans were to allow the surviving characters from the previous Dread session to act as protagonists once more in a Trail of Cthulhu game before finally resuming the main timeline and main cast in full-on Apocalypse World mode (the story-arc as a whole was this pre-apocalypse/post-apocalypse schtick, so resorting to 1920s’ flashbacks granted us, at the very least, a non-boring venue for narrative exposition).