Author Archives: Jeremy Zimmerman

Encountering the Random and Mattering System

A few game related thoughts I’d had since my last post. One continuing my thoughts on random encounters, one regarding an idea I’m poaching from tatterdamelion for the kids game (which the random encounter thoughts reminded me of) and one regarding a quote from the White Wolf team on game design.

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I want so much more than they’ve got planned.

After my post a couple weeks ago about, among other things, my need to play more and GM less, I’ve gotten invited to play in three games. ZOMG. One is the D&D 4e game I mentioned previously. Another is Werewolf: The Wild West and the third is Exalted. Additionally, the kids game has rebooted rather than combusted.

I’ve been frantically working on characters since the first session of D&D is today and the first sessions of the other two games are the following weekend. This work has brought up a number of thoughts. I’ll try not to let this devolve into, “Lemme tell you about my character.” I’d hoped to cover all three games in this post, but in the time it’s taken me to write up just the thoughts on D&D, I’ve kinda run out of time. I’ll try and post about character creation thoughts about Werewolf and Exalted within the next week.

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One Hit Wonders: Fading Suns

Had our second installment in our series of “lets try these games we’ve always wondered about.” This time I was behind the GM’s screen running a game that’s always rated high on my list: Fading Suns. For this run we used the 2nd edition version of the rules which came out in 1999.

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One Hit Wonders: Deadlands Reloaded

This last weekend, I had the first installment of what I’m call “One Hit Wonders.” It’s something I’ve tried once in the past and it died pretty quickly. The idea is just having a chance to try out games that you’ve always been curious about but have never been able to play. When I’ve tried it in the past it’s invariably been a little work intensive and hence contributed to it either failing or (when I’ve tried to get it going again) never starting in the first place.

This time around, I thought I’d try it with less work. No pre-gens. No rules summaries. Not necessarily even a lot of game prep outside of maybe reading through a sample adventure. There’d be some reading of the rules in advance to prepare, but otherwise we show up, make characters with whatever copies of the rules we have, and have a simple one-shot. Add beer and pretzels, and you’re good.

For this first run, the group chose Deadlands: Reloaded using the Savage Worlds system. Details behind the cut.

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