Book(mark) It!
A: In the original Choose Your Own Adventure books and their various clones, it was easy. Throw a spare bookmark (or knowing how quickly and often you can fail, just hold a few chunks of pages with spare fingers - although it is weird how you keep all those severed fingers around....) and you can jump back to a previous decision and take the road less... travelled by. If you’re going to consider including "What If" sessions in your tabletop games, you’re going to need to be sure "bookmark’" those moments. Listen for when players are really struggling between a small number of choices. Or when they’re considering taking a huge risky move - like attempting to Scrooge McDuck their way into a dragon’s treasure hoard. Any time they’re making a decision could be one of those key moments... do they trust the town guardsman? Go down through the sewers instead of overhead by rooftop? Find those moments, and jot them down during the game. Then, to really make it work, take a snapshot of that session. Make a bulleted list of what led up to that moment, along the moments right after the player(s) made their decision. Take note of what level they’re at, where they are positioned in the story, what they were carrying, etc. Then, in a few weeks time, maybe after you’ve hit the crescendo of a major story arc, you can go back with everyone and re-visit that moment.
The "road not taken" isn’t the only route to the "What If" question, though. Stealing Borrowing from another media trope, you can have your players change characters, or even play a completely new type of character. What if you’d been a bard instead of a sorcerer? What if you’d been a science officer instead of security? These are the kind of questions that can be answered by replaying scenes from your current campaign, but mixing things up a bit. Certainly, there have been numerous times where characters have swapped bodies throughout media, and your tabletop games can absolutely do the same. Make sure that there are no permanent consequences for fair play, though. (Emphasis on "fair" - to paraphrase Wil Wheaton, don’t be a dick with other people’s characters.)
The Gangsta Duck Approach
B: Despite it being form of media I experience the most these days, I try not to talk about anime much in this blog. Unless it's something I can approach in isolation, I'd rather not assume readers have the baseline of familiarity needed to properly engage with the medium. I'm not even sure I have it myself, having "married into" anime fandom and still learning to navigate the landscape of translation and criticism. Nonetheless, there's a show airing right now that's so appropriate for the "What If" conversation, it'd be criminal to pass up the opportunity to use it as an example of what you can do with a "What If" scenario: Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX - which is the real name and not the result of walking on my keyboard.. generally pronounced "G-Quacks," like if a duck with sick rhymes had signed with Death Row records in 1992.
First, a little about the Gundam franchise. The original series, Mobile Suit Gundam, debuted in 1979 and, like the original Star Trek, had something of a slow burn in popularity, growing audiences with novels and comics after the show had gone off the air, then movie versions, and, eventually, a follow-up series that picked up the story some years after the events of the original. Since then, also like Star Trek, there has been a huge number of works that take place before, after, or even especially during the time portrayed in the 1979 series. All of this forms a continuity called, rather ironically as we'll see shortly, the "Universal Century." We see this time and again with various franchises - besides Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who have had similar life cycles.
Where Gundam differs from these Western media powerhouses, though, is its "alternate universe" approach. Rather than simple reshufflings, these are standalone properties with zero narrative connection to the Universal Century storyline. The requirements are simply that the work be about a morally fraught conflict between Earth and one more space colonies that's fought with mechs called "Mobile Suits," some of which are particularly unique and/or powerful, called "Gundams." Additionally, there are recurring themes of children coming to terms with their parents mistakes, but unable to escape the situations they were born into, the futility of war and the way it perpetuates unfair systems, and stupid, stupid character names. It was one of these series, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, that first introduced many westerners to the franchise, making the original (now inappropriately-named) Universal Century the "alternate universe" from their point of view... I guess it's all relative. The first Gundam series I saw in its entirety was one of these "alternate universes," Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, and rather like this approach - it gives new creators an opportunity to
tell original stories while keeping the safety of a familiar series name and sturdy corporate backing. The franchise owners will usually alternate between alternate universe stories (at least twelve by my reckoning) and those set in the Universal Century, thus ensuring a constant stream of new toy designs to sell new incoming fans.
GQuuuuuuX, on the other hand, is something different - an "alternate universe" in the way most western sci-fi fans understand the term. It's a "What If" that assumes the first scene of the first episode of the first series had gone differently. All the backstory up to that point is the same Universal Century, and all characters introduced in that timeline are going to be somewhere, but the circumstances are entirely different. I won't bother going into the specifics, but for those unfamiliar with Gundam, the Star Wars equivalent would be something like "what if the droids hadn't been able to escape the Tantive IV at the start of the 1977 movie, and Vader was able to recapture the Death Star plans?" Luke, Han, and Obi-Wan would all still exist in that universe, but their stories would all go in wildly different directions than the established canon ones.
Of course, this doesn't apply only to licensed games or those taking place in some variation of our own world - to combine this with Andy's bookmark approach, this could be a chance to revive some pre-published adventures your group has already done. They already know the basics of who and what is involved, but this time there's a whole different range of possibilities. And this doesn't have to be a matter of retreading, either, another thing GQuuuuuuX does is present an entirely new set of characters and their lives in a different part of alternate Universal Century setting. If you were playing something with a large enough scale, you can shift things over a bit and tell an entirely different kind of story in a (somewhat) familiar setting. This has the bonus effect of making the setting accessible to new players as well - like GQuuuuuuX (which will be the first series installment for some number of new viewers), you can throw in little references to the main storyline or cameos from established characters, but without the baggage of knowing what's going to happen to them. (It's been helpful that we have a friend who's an oldschool Gundam fan that can point out some of the more subtle references and callouts in the show, but none of these are necessary for understanding the story in any way.)
Whether you use either of these approaches or a combination of the two, remember that the story beings told at your table belongs to everyone there - you aren't beholden to any established storyline if the participants want to go somewhere else. That's the beauty of this medium, there will be as many alternate universes as there are games running and people participating in them. I'd like to see Marvel try to compete with that.
Send questions, comments, and Marvel/Gundam crossover stories and art to neversaydice20@gmail.com.
