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.
This Saturday I had my crazy double feature of gaming: dungeon crawl style Exalted followed by Werewolf: The Wild West. Commentary behind the cut.
[I’m made of dumb. I originally friends locked this. D’oh. Force of habit.]
Some thoughts on the first session of D&D, plus thoughts on the upcoming Werewolf: Wild West and Exalted games.
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.
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.
Have an assortment of things that I’ve been mulling around regarding roleplaying games. Let’s see how many I get through, huh?
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.
I’ve been thinking more about D&D4 since playing in the demo. Part of it inspired by posts by rob_donoghue and gloomforge. Some of it because I got to play another one-shot of D&D4 this week. Thoughts behind the cut.
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.
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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