I recently watched the last of the Harry Potter movies,which was fun (and had a good dragon!), and thinking about it afterwards was struck by the absence of an RPG for this world. As far as I can tell, there is no official RPG. There are a lot of forum-based RPGs, but no apparent real ones. I’m pretty sure that this has something to do with the strict licensing rules that J.K. Rowling has put on her world, but I was also wondering if it might be related to the snootiness of RPG players and developers, who often seem to dismiss Harry Potter as either a) not serious or b) a rip-off of “better” books or c) too popular. Often I hear complaints from role-players about Harry Potter that seem to include all three at once. I wonder if this influenced developers’ decisions about whether to try? I also guess that Rowling doesn’t have much connection to the role-playing world, unlike, say, Jim Butcher or George Martin, and so didn’t entertain requests from developers with the same openness that she might have treated, say, movie-makers. Finally, I’m guessing that acquiring the rights to Harry Potter for an official RPG would have been expensive and would have involved a lot of development work
Anyway, regardless of the reason for the non-appearance of such a game, I think it’s a missed opportunity for the RPG world. Harry Potter is as popular as Star Wars, and its appeal mainly lies with impressionable kids. A good, age-appropriate RPG for this mob, even if not a “proper” RPG by the standards of your average traditionalist, would be an excellent gateway drug for a huge cross-section of the non-nerdy community. Rather than expecting them to read a bunch of obscure texts from Appendix N before they can get into the game, they’d turn up at the ripe age of 13 having already absorbed the entire setting, and eager to get into it and do their own thing. For younger gamers even a semi-board game system, heavy on the fluff, or barely more advanced than a choose-your-own-adventure, would be fine. With a captive audience, a well-established world and a set of references that they’ve all read, there would be the potential to draw in a very large number of people who could be trained up for the fantasy genre and introduced to the ideal of RPGs. After that, I would say, some small proportion of them would stick it out.
The Potter books are unique, too, for drawing an age cohort through them. People start reading these books at somewhere between the age of 8 and 12, and keep going all the way up to 16 or 17. A whole cohort of high-school leavers spent their entire school lives reading this stuff. Just as the books get darker as they progress, a well-designed Basic-Expert-Master style of game design could hook them in to a semi-RPG at 8 and spit them out the other end at 16, fully versed in demonology and necromancy. Even a lot of the spells have been written already, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that could be run as a spin-off – an attractive miniature-based Quidditch system, a series of campaign books based on innovative involvement in the original story, some kind of card game based on all the Hogwarts characters (sold by house) – that could be either directly related to the game or just released by the same company. It’s the kind of thing that Fantasy Flight Games could surely excel at. And those 16 or 17 year olds would naturally start looking for other systems to play in their own fantasy worlds at some point – the benefits would soon spread across the entire RPG scene.
It’s a shame this hasn’t happened, because I think it would invigorate the scene, draw in a lot of new blood from diverse backgrounds, and maybe give whatever company did it a sufficient revenue stream to enable them to not bastardize their other RPGs for maximum profits. I wonder if anyone thought of it, tried, and failed, or if the developers overlooked it from the very start? Whatever the reason, it’s a shame it didn’t happen.
August 21, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Nice post!
August 21, 2011 at 11:43 pm
No license is “too popular” for an RPG company: they want to make money as much as the next person.
This subject is often raised on rpg.net. JK Rowling is apparently strongly against the notion of a Harry Potter RPG. She’s also very protective of her IP in general. It’s likely she wants to further develop RPG-ish products based on Harry Potter (the new endeavour, I forget what it’s called, seems like a step in that direction) and doesn’t want some RPG getting in the way, fucking up “canon”, and fragmenting the fan base.
In any case, it’s not as if you can’t “do” Harry Potter with Risus, GURPS, BRP… really any generic system.
August 21, 2011 at 11:44 pm
It is a shame though. There’d be no better “gateway drug” to RPGs than Harry Potter, as you say.
August 21, 2011 at 11:56 pm
“no game is too popular” … I would have thought I could agree with you about this, but having seen the way that modern film-makers manage to trash what should be a license to print money (e.g. anything with dragons in; the more recent “Star Wars” (<- those were scare quotes); etc., I can believe that a company is capable of biting off their nose to spite their face.
I thought it would be because of Rowling's position on protecting her work but yeah, regardless of the reasons, my main point is that it would be an excellent gateway drug, and I tend to fall on the "our hobby is shrinking" side of that particular debate. New blood would be nice.
Thanks for visiting, Jeyna Grace!
August 22, 2011 at 3:03 pm
I like Harry Potter, but I think any such RPG would suffer heavily from a “But what do they do?” question. A large part of the charm of the books is the close parallels and subtle differences between the life we know and life as a Wizard or Witch.
For example, the scenes of Harry visiting Ron’s family are a charming part of the books, including Mr Weasley’s inability to fully understand Muggle life – but you can’t make a game out of that any more than you can most Enid Blyton books [1]. The same is true of most of the time at Hogwarts – we’d love to be there, but if you tried to narrate a Potions class to me I’d probably be bored stiff.
So to avoid that you’ve got options of:
1. You’re stuck playing a game where the grandest things that can happen are the books and your characters a left with a feast of crumbs. Harry Potter is facing Voldemort! Can you keep the Dementors from the folk of Hogsmeade while he saves the world?! Or
2. You avoid the Harry Potter setting either in time or location, but these strip the familiar elements from the novels and rob you of the reason you’re playing it in the first place. Or
3. You play Harry and friends, but you already know the plot that you’re playing through [2]
So it has appealing elements, but I’d expect most of the effort required to make it to go into developing a series of adventures that you could play.
With those complaints made – I’d probably still get it 🙂
[1] Which are another series I love for similar reasons to the Harry Potter series.
[2] Remember those Dragonlance modules that paralleled the Dragons Of X series?
August 22, 2011 at 4:53 pm
[…] Paul suggested that a Harry Potter RPG would be limited by the problem of knowing the characters and the world too much, in his words: 1. […]