The media I want to see in an RPG right now is Minecraft. Not because it is especially beloved to me. But because I’m taking on the ambitious goal of running a Minecraft campaign, using the Just a Game playtest, for a 9 year old (you may remember her from last year’s Epyllion campaign), and her dad.
To that end, I bought the Minecraft Pocket Edition this weekend and woke up Monday morning, groggy and with a pervading sense of dread that the night had brought hissing spiders and creeping things that explode on impact.
I am playing mostly on Survival mode, which means anything but survival. I have finally carved out a tiny cave in which I store things so they won’t disappear when I die. Which is often. I have a furnace, work table, and a stonecutter table. I was finally able to make a couple of torches. I’m in a bad location, but don’t particularly care at the moment. Everything is hilly and there’s an inconvenient river which exists solely to block my passage from one mountain to the next, and drown me at inopportune times.
I found the Minecraft wiki and now have an idea for the campaign’s trajectory. That said, I haven’t even decided if we’re going to play Fate, *World, or Gumshoe for the campaign– all three mechanics are testable in the playtest packet.
The premise of the game is that the players are stuck in Survival mode and can’t get out. They are on a multiplayer server, and some of the other players are, to put it plainly (and with the wisdom of a child), "jerks."
If we play Gumshoe, then I map out a path from the point where they are stuck until the escape point (kind of like making a puzzle for the players to solve). If they’re in *World, I create a couple of dangerous fronts that push them until they come up with an ingenious way to get themselves out. If Fate, they should be telling me what the solution is.
I’m leaning towards Fate, largely because the kid player really likes the sandbox part of Minecraft.
I will probably also blend in a little bit of the Worlds of Fate setting Save Game, but since the goal of the Just a Game playtest is to playtest that game, I’ll try to stick to that setting as faithfully as I can. The main goal, as always, is player fun, so whatever doesn’t work will get booted out of my campaign, even if it would otherwise be delightful in any other campaign.