That one...
Or that one...
The setting remains the same, and there’s only so much you can do when
you’re playing the Law, I always felt that the original got the gritty feel of
the Mega cities more, but that could simply be because of the larger amount of
artwork in it. The other book was
cleanly laid out, all sharp artwork that was more in keeping with higher
production values, but they forgot along the way that a lot of the older 2000ad
stuff was just as popular because of
the rough edges.
So what about the game...
What’s to tell?
You’re a judge, you go around bringing the guilty to justice, it’s as
simple as that, you can spend entire sessions just riding around looking for
trouble to occur and putting it down.
This is a game where random encounter tables are not only a valid
approach, they’re almost mandatory given the nature of the world that you’re
working in.
It’s possible to play the big Dredd story arcs, such masterpieces as
the Cry of the Werewolf, the Apocalypse War, the quest for the Judge Child and
the City of the Damned that followed it, and herein lies the hidden bonus with
this particular game.
You’ve already read all those adventures, you were there with Joe when
he went seeking justice. You were there when he brought them down, when he
prevailed, even when he failed, and here you are with a chance to do what he
did. It’s important to realise that
Dredd wasn’t trying to make the world a better place, this wasn’t Robocop, you
weren’t looking for the human story in amongst all this, you were looking to
make sure that the law was obeyed. It’s
this that I liked most of all, to be true to the Dredd RPG, you’re not looking
for what benefits you, you’re looking to make a difference every day, it’s not
an adventure, it’s a calling, it’s something that you need to do because if you don’t, civilisation will fall down and
it’ll all down in short order. You have
some of the tools you need to do the job, you have some backup but nowhere what
you need to make it against things like block wars or major threats to the
city.
And that’s the only place where the game fell down, those times when
you found yourself in a situation that couldn’t be dealt with by a bunch of
street judges, you had to call for backup and the problem there was that when
you take the ability to solve the problem out of the hands of the players, and
left it in the hands of the NPC’s, it removed something from the game.
To be sure, in the first game, you could have judges that were street
judges, tech judges, medical judges, psi judges and so forth, in the second you
were limited to Street and PSI. You
could never play SJS (Special Judicial Squad, Those who judge the Judges...),
and this was a good move from all sides, because at the point at which you’ve
got players looking over their shoulder to see whether or not the other players
are about to send them to Titan (the prison planet for the judges), and
unfortunately with a split set of skills between different judges, you end up
taking the jobs that you can do rather than just responding to every call that
gets made. There’s not many problems
that can’t be solved with High Explosive, but making a game where you don’t
spend every day cruising around can sometimes be challenging.
It remains my favourite licensed product to this day because of the
clarity of its characters, of the universe that it stays in, that even now, some
thirty seven years from its creation, it remains fresh. There’s only so many stories you can tell about
the Mega cities, but with new material coming out every week, and a back
catalogue stretching back for nearly 1900 episodes together with film (we won’t
mention the stallone thing...) annuals, specials and even serialisations in
newspapers, it’s possible to get new ideas just by getting this weeks
comic. The other thing is that the base
purpose of the characters remains the same, the preservation of the Law. With games like the Doctor Who RPG, there was
a greater range of purpose, but it becomes easier to be sidetracked as a
result, whereas this requires that you set out every day with only one thing in
mind and only one thing to do.
Dredd has a simplicity that can be appreciated by anyone, but the
direct nature of the world isn’t for everyone, there’s not much space for
diplomacy or development as characters, which makes it good for short games,
but not so much for campaigns, but that’s alright.
No one plays with the Law...
