cyst13
Apr 16th, '04, 08:41 AM
I was recently lamenting with a friend that I don't have enough time in my busy schedule to write good games any more. I wished aloud that I could somehow just come up with the basic ideas for the campaign and have some one else actually write it all up for me. He said that he had worked out this very arrangement with his pet frog. Apparently amphibians are naturally creative since they occupy that liminal position between aquatic and terrestrial. Also, since they were the first animals to evolve to live on land, they have a vast store of real world knowledge inherent in their genomes.
This all sounded great to me, so I purchased a bullfrog from my local pet shop and tried to set it to work. That's where the problem started. This frog didn't do a damn thing! It just sat there for hours, often hopping away from the work area altogether. At first I thought the problem might be that the frog was unfamiliar with the Hero System. I think I remember reading somewhere that most amphibians favor systems like GURPS and D20. So I sat the frog down in front of FReD for a few hours to get it familiarized, even turning the pages for it. Talk about an exercise in frustration! I could barely get this critter to look at the text and it offered me no indication that it in any way comprehended the gist of the rules. Needless to say, since the frog doesn't understand the first thing about Hero, it has been no help to me at all in the game writing dept.
Unfortunately, I am no longer in contact with the guy who recommended amphibian GM's aides to me, but at the time, he assured me that many GMs have had remarkable success with not only frogs but newts, salamanders, toads and even pollywogs. I just don't know where I've gone wrong. Would I have better success with a frog caught in the wild? I've heard that the breeding programs for pet stores select for docility. Perhaps a frog intelligent enough to find its own food and evade predators would be able to create point-balanced NPCs. Are there any good reward/punishment techniques to teach frogs to write good games?
If any Herophiles have had success in training amphibians to write games for them, I would be thrilled to benefit from your wisdom.
This all sounded great to me, so I purchased a bullfrog from my local pet shop and tried to set it to work. That's where the problem started. This frog didn't do a damn thing! It just sat there for hours, often hopping away from the work area altogether. At first I thought the problem might be that the frog was unfamiliar with the Hero System. I think I remember reading somewhere that most amphibians favor systems like GURPS and D20. So I sat the frog down in front of FReD for a few hours to get it familiarized, even turning the pages for it. Talk about an exercise in frustration! I could barely get this critter to look at the text and it offered me no indication that it in any way comprehended the gist of the rules. Needless to say, since the frog doesn't understand the first thing about Hero, it has been no help to me at all in the game writing dept.
Unfortunately, I am no longer in contact with the guy who recommended amphibian GM's aides to me, but at the time, he assured me that many GMs have had remarkable success with not only frogs but newts, salamanders, toads and even pollywogs. I just don't know where I've gone wrong. Would I have better success with a frog caught in the wild? I've heard that the breeding programs for pet stores select for docility. Perhaps a frog intelligent enough to find its own food and evade predators would be able to create point-balanced NPCs. Are there any good reward/punishment techniques to teach frogs to write good games?
If any Herophiles have had success in training amphibians to write games for them, I would be thrilled to benefit from your wisdom.