#RPGaDay2015 Day 9 - Favorite Media You Wish Was an RPG

You come into camp, rent my lot, within six hours you blow in a guy's eye with Wild Bill Hickok backin' your play. Next day, I'm supposed to sell you the lot, put you in business, without askin' who the fuck you are or what the fuck you're doin' here?

- Al Swearengen, Deadwood

I'd love to see someone taking a stab at making an RPG out of HBO's Deadwood. One of the problems I've had with running a campaign set in the American Old West is getting a good frame for the campaign. Sure, one can add the undead (which Deadlands does to great effect), but I'd love to see a historically accurate Old West. The challenge in adapting Deadwood is the loads and loads of characters. Such a setting seems a great option for troupe play, as described in Ars Magica and in other games. In this model, every player has a few characters, often of varying importance and/or power levels. While Deadwood is a violent place, you would want to use a system that also deals with varying motivations, handles challenges like overcoming addictions, etc. Fate is an obvious system of choice and I suspect Hillfolk, with its emphasis on modeling drama, would work well. For a bit of an odd suggestion, it does occur to me that one could do a pretty bizarre variation of Pendragon with its passions and morals.

I'd be inclined to do something rather similar with HBO's Boardwalk Empire as well, which is in many ways was the successor to Deadwood.

I'm also going to suggest some properties that I'm not as familiar with but I know my thirteen year old daughter has a bit of an obsession over. First of all are the young adult post-apocalyptic novels, films, and shows that have been popular over the past several years - The Hunger Games, Divergent, The 100. Similarly there's the popular young adult supernatural television shows such as The Vampire Diaries and Teen Wolf. These properties have the potential to bring a new audience into RPGs. With that in mind, in all these cases I'd like to see a straight adaptation with the proper rights acquired instead of something with the serial numbers filed off. Such properties also seem to warrant having their own full RPG, not as a supplement for another game. It can use a common gaming engine like a Fate or a World of Darkness variant but the system would need to be complete in the rulebook. I think Fantasy Flight Games has a great model with an introductory boxed set which gives you characters and teaches you the rules and then has a full core rulebook for making your own characters.