Only took me a month. I blame NaNoWriMo. And laziness. This will be relatively brief since time has faded the crazy high I left the convention with and I don’t want this to be even later than it already is.
Belated ACNW 2008 Recap
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Tag Archives: indie rpgs
“The place plus everything else …That is Amber.”
This last weekend I picked up a couple of game books. My intro got long, so I’m putting the whole damn thing behind a cut. What’s behind the cut? A couple mini reviews and some commentary on baggage with roleplaying games.
Assorted Thoughts on Gaming
Have an assortment of things that I’ve been mulling around regarding roleplaying games. Let’s see how many I get through, huh?
By funny coincidence, I did in fact level.
Went to Go Play Northwest this weekend and played for four of the six slots. Report of how the weekend went and stuff behind the cut.
I feel vaguely dirty.
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.
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
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.
Oh, it burns.
I have a post I’m working on, but in the meantime, I offer you this:
http://indiegamingscene.blogspot.com/2006/10/discouraging-actual-play-recounting.html
I get the impression that it (and most of the rest of the blog) is meant to be tongue in cheek. Honestly, my immediate reaction was to have PTSD flashbacks and foam a bit.
Then it occured to me that I’ve similarly tried to impose my own gaming ideals on others, especially in games I’ve run. In my defense, most people at least find me entertaining.
Most.
AmberCon US 2008 After Action Report
Another 4 days of gaming in beautiful and scenic Livonia, with very little sleep and eating very poorly. Comments on the games I played and other aspects of the con behind the cut.
Roleplaying Blues
I’d mentioned in my private LJ that I’d been feeling sort of frustrated and depressed by roleplaying games in general. Thoughts behind the cut. I have other things I should be doing. But this has been on my mind a lot lately so I figure I might as well get it out.
