Sophie's Comments on CCGs

Playing collectible card games is fine, I really like Atlas Games' On the Edge myself.

Trying to have a timeline continuity between a CCG and a role-playing game is at best a pain in the ass, at worst a complete screw-up.

Come on, I'm glad to know that in So-and-so's game, the USS Enterprise was sunk by Berek's Black Dawn, crewed by 136 Shadowlands-tainted Malkavians tapping all their pink manna or whatever, but why the hell should that have anything to do with the ROLE-playing campaign I'm currently enjoying?

Arguments against using a CCG-RPG timeline or plot continuity, or for that matter, any kind of ex cathedra timeline taking place after the game's starting point:

• It makes the player characters completely pointless.  They're working in the margins of history, and those margins keep getting thinner.  In some games it might still be OK, but 7th Sea is explicitely about Heroes, not average joes.  I can play daily in the margins of real-life, thank you very much.
• It creates situations that are just plain silly in role-playing because they happen to fit the CCG's rules.
• It forces a constant retrofitting of everything that has gone on in a campaign ("Oh, well, I guess it wasn't the Enterprise after all that you guys met last month!  It must have been the Bozeman...")
• It ruins hanging threads and future plot lines that the players and GM might have planned on, not to mention might have paid points for ("There goes my 3-point Background and my 2-point Connection...")
• It invalidates half the material in the sourcebooks you just paid beaucoup dubloons for ("Nope, sorry, my mistake: Charouse has been vaporized by the explosion of a Syrneth device...  Let's see: Empereur Léon – dead, Montegue – dead, Impératrice Morella – dead, Dominique de Montaigne...")
• It's not even a good idea from the publisher's perspective: in a "time-static" universe, you can put out as many adventure scenarios as you want, since the buyers pick and choose what fits their campaign.  Ideally, you'd want a bunch of low-cost, low-price modules (sound familiar?).  When you string them along a fixed timeline, there is suddenly a very limited number of adventures the GMs can fit into their campaigns.  Go check what AEG did: there is a specific date set for Dominique de Montaigne's letter to be handed to General Montegue (A Lady's Favor), for The Kire's escape from Talon Prison (Drake's Footprint), and for the Battle of Freiburg (Hammer & Tongs).  How many more adventures can you fit in between?  What if you ran those in a different order (as we did)?  And when you add the fact that AEG is now dumping the CCG, it seems to me it just tied a cannonball to the RPG's ankle with this timeline.

So if you're getting the impression that I hate the official timeline crap from AEG's recent supplements such as Waves of Blood and The Montaigne Revolution, congratulations, you're getting the right impression.  Hey, it's up to the GM to decide how much to include of anything, but by Jove, I'm the Webmistress so I can bloody well have my rant if I want to.

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