Seriously. Who even remembers pen and paper role-playing games anymore? In college and the first three years of law school, me and a bunch of fellas used to converge every evening at a place called Bamboo behind the UST Main Building. It’s not there anymore; a perfect example of paradise paved over. There, we would break out the dice and pens and our imaginations. We role-played DarkSword, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Ghostbusters, and Vampire: the Masquerade. I don’t remember the character I played for Star Wars; only that Vic played Cok Solo. With DarkSword, I was a renegade Illusionist. For DC Superheroes, I played a character with catastrophic rage and who shot quills from his hands, like flechettes. At one point, we even played around with the idea of armored characters so I designed one called the Sybernetic EXo-Armor. It had a distinctly mushroom shaped head, in keeping with the theme. And for vampire, I played a high-level Tremere whose debtors included the Prince of New York. When that character grew to powerful and became a non-player character, I created a Nosferatu who screwed an opponent’s blood doll to the hardwood floors of the opponent’s Fifth Avenue apartment.
That was a long time ago, but those evening sorties into imaginary worlds have never lost their shine for me. Gamers have dwindled, of course, drawn towards the instant gratification offered, first by Magic: The Gathering and later on, by ever more bad-ass video RPGs. Still, I believe that there are still some out there who remember how sweet the pay-off could be when, after weeks of campaigning, you get to take down the chief enemy with a good strategy and luck crackling around your dice.
Fast forward to a few days ago when I watched Real Steel for the first time. In that movie – Hugh Jackman, with a surprisingly hawt Evangeline Lily – the main protagonist, Kenton, is a robot jockey in a world where boxing has become the exclusive domain of robots. The movie featured several robot boxers: Ambush, a kind of generic fighting ‘bot; Noisy Boy, an ex-champ who’d been touring the boxing circuit outside North America, particularly Japan where “the ‘bots are softer;” Midas, a consistent winner in a low-brow boxing arena; a junkyard ‘bot named Metro, and a weird two-headed ‘bot called Twin Cities. And of course, you had the biggest bad-ass of all, Zeus and the puny hero-bot Atom.
Each robot had its own characteristics – weaknesses and strengths – that made each unique and, in theory at least, gave them all a fighting chance against everyone else. Is any of this sounding familiar yet?
That’s exactly how characters in pen and paper RPGs are. A player designs a character, gives it advantages, gives it flaws and round it out with a back story that can be as complicated as a short novel or as rudimentary as “he woke up one day with the ability to fly.” So it should come as no surprise that, after the movie, my imagination was all on fire with the idea of a Real Steel RPG. I’ve even drawn what my ‘bot would look like.
Say hello to Gilgamesh.
Sadly, there isn’t a Real Steel RPG in real life, so I’ve decided to put down notes about how I imagine such a game would be. I haven’t started yet, obviously, but if you are an enthusiast too, do not hesitate to add your ideas via the comments below.