Category Archives: Gaming

One Hit Wonders: Deadlands Reloaded

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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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What are your games like?

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No, I haven’t finished the bigger post I’ve been working on. But it did germinate a question I thought I’d posit for y’all:

What are your games like?

I don’t mean this in the Forgian “What is your game about?” Just curious what other people’s games are like. If you GM, what sort of games do you like to run? If you only play, what sort of games do you like to play in? I’ve been mulling around the thought of very non-standard Shadowrun games, and what sort of games those might be, and it began to occur to me that I’ve gotten increasingly insular in terms of what I play. For the last decade I’ve mostly been playing Amber or Amber style games.

Most of what I’ve played (and it is, honestly, the sort of game I prefer) are games with a larger story arc with smaller, personal story arcs woven through there. It’s the sort of game I also try to run, though I will refrain from commenting on how successful I’ve been at that. Mixed in with this have been occasional variations on this, often more along the lines of mission style games like the classic Shadowrun model. I’ve also played in the occasional straight up dungeon crawl. Then there’s the sprawling absurdity of the kids’ game.

So I’m curious what y’all do and play. I’m especially curious about games that fall outside the typical Amber or D&D experience. I’d love to hear about what you do with your Traveller game. Or your Vampire game. Or Seventh Sea, Legend of the Five Rings, Fading Suns, Transhuman Space, or whatever.

The more things change…

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I’ve been noodling around a bigger post about possible house rules for Shadowrun in order to neuter some of the aspects of it I’m not fond of. I don’t know that I’d actually use any of these rules, but maybe someone would find a use for them.

But that post, combined with having picked up Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy last night (a game I’ve been, in a way, waiting almost 15 years for), I’ve been mulling around aspects of game design that persist in staying around. For some of them it’s probably a matter of target audience. For others, it may just be a matter of design by committee. (As I’m fond of saying, a camel is a horse designed by committee.)

I mean, I can kind of understand why some games having keep track of your individual bits of currency. Shadowrun is all about your gear and using your gear to do missions. Okay, sure. But 7th Sea has a mechanic like that, when it’s supposed to be about buckling your swash and stuff. I think Fading Suns also has that as well, which makes a little bit of sense, but not entirely. As does Dark Heresy. You work for the church, but you have to keep track of how much Throne Gelt you have. I’m a big fan of abstract resource systems, like they have in assorted Storytelling games. I can see why that wouldn’t be a good fit for some groups, but I find it interesting what sort of games persist in treating money that way.

Random elements in character creation continue to survive. Dark Heresy doesn’t have any sort of sissified point-buy system. No sir, they have a hard core “you get one re-roll per stat if you want it, but you gotta keep the new result, n00b” attitude.

And then there’s the dungeon crawl. You can’t seem to have a fantasy game of any sort without having the option of going into ancient ruins and looking for cool swag. 7th Sea and Fading Suns both have options for that built into their cosmology. The one time I played in a canned adventure for Legend of the Five Rings, we went through a dungeon in the big finale. Even Exalted has it. In Exalted you are supposed to be larger-than-life demigods that will change the world. Their sample adventure that they’ve used for both editions? “The Tomb of Five Corners,” in which you put your characters through a very basic dungeon.

Now, there are of course many games that don’t have this aspect to them. But I find this lurking around the edges more than I’d expect. Especially in games where I wouldn’t expect it. I’m certain that there’s a marketing reason behind these choices. But I wonder how much of it is just due to inertia.

Anyway, I need to skedaddle, but I thought I’d at least toss this out there since I haven’t posted on here in a bit.

I feel vaguely dirty.

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I’m not sure how many Sandman fans read this, but for several years now I’ve been trying to figure out how to adapt the storyline from “World’s End” to a one-shot. The basic shtick is that an odd band of people from different times and realities all end up in an inn as reality is torn assunder about them. To pass the time, they tell stories. Each of the stories revolves around the character Dream in some fashion.

That’s always seemed like a great parallel to the giant Shadow storm in Courts of Chaos and so I’ve wondered how I could adapt it to Amber in some fashion.

My first attempt had revolved around players having standard Amber characters basically playing Baron Munchausen, while also trying to obtain from the other characters something that their character required but was in the possession of another character. I did a trial run of it locally, and it sucked pretty hard. It could have been re-worked, but it was pretty iffy to begin with so I shelved the whole thing.

Today it occured to me that it may work if each player were to essentially run a mini-game, each about an hour at length. So, each player would present the game as the story their character is telling, but the other players would play out the story themselves. I started to scratch that idea, since getting people to offer to GM is a pain in the ass in the first place. Getting people to sign up for a game where they would be expected to GM would be a failure from the get-go.

But then a devil on my shoulder cleared his throat and said, “Well, what if each player just had to come up with a concept, perhaps even at the game itself, and then the other players may just have to come up with simple, easily defined characters and the whole game was some player-narrated story-game?”

And that is when I knew there was no God.

Now I have to see if I have the patience or stomach to come up with a simple story-game mechanic. I could probably use something poached from InSpectres or PTA, but ultimately I’d want something that would allow players to come up with a broadly defined character in under a minute.

The earliest I could probably run this is ACUS, which would give me several months to try and do a trial run of it.

A vaguely amusing follow-up to my last post.

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I should be polishing up my notes for the kids game today, but thought I’d post this really quick.

After spending all that time talking about the Aspect system I sloppily poached from Spirit of the Century, I finally actually played Spirit of the Century yesterday. I thought I’d share some of my experiences of it. There’s a bit of explanation as to how I ended up running Spirit of the Century on the fly yesterday, too, so please bear with me.
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Amber, Aspects, Resource Management

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I just wrapped up a six-session Amber campaign. (It was intentionally six sessions. It wasn’t a matter of me just snapping, deciding I hate everyone and just killing the game. I’ve only done that a couple times. Really.) It had involved a good chunk of experimentation with blending in elements of a few other games, including Apects from FATE/Spirit of the Century. I had mixed experiences with the mechanical portion of the game, so I thought I’d share what I dragged into this game, how I felt about it and then wrap it all up with a broader discussion on the concept of resource management and how I fail with it.

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