The Friday group had our fourth Qin: The Warring States session tonight, which involved taking down the evil lord of one town over and his External Alchemist henchman, then putting a likely local in charge of redistributing all the evil lord's goods among the townspeople to help restore the Mandate of Heaven to the town. When it hit me, I said ( Read more... )

Friday group had a fun chargen session for Qin: The Warring States tonight. Qin seems like a fun game, though I'll be glad when we're through making characters because it's a fairly fiddly process, with different point-pools for attributes, skills, Qi tricks and outright magic for starting characters, and then, for the campaign-specific, a big pot ( Read more... )

More gaming chronicles ( Read more... )

Postscript to the previous post . . .

ptevis's A Penny for My Thoughts - In some ways this is a "very indie" game: no GM; meant for short-term/one-shot play; all about who gets to narrate what, when. It is also downright dangerous in the absence of trust, mutual care and "friendship, or good faith in friendship to come." You can really hurt somebody ( Read more... )

I appreciate the sympathy expressed in comments to the previous post, and while it was cathartic to get the experience off my chest, it was mainly a way of considering some of eyebeams arguments about friendship, meetup games and Forge/Story-Game design principles in his long post on the subject and comment-thread thereunder. I agree with him that gaming ( Read more... )

Yesterday was Terpcon, a local twice-yearly minicon at UMD. How mini? There were two tables at the morning session, though a full four for the afternoon. Good weather made for a lot of morning absenteeism, and in fact our first-session table of five included two people at loose ends because their own GMs didn't show ( Read more... )

Second session of Unknown Armies with the new gang. I managed to get pretty far on absorbing the necessary rules for a Global campaign, thanks to, let's just say, the internet. While I own a completely legitimate hardcopy of the corebook, someone - oh, maybe chadu - might mention to Atlas Games that their book layout is really really unfriendly to those ( Read more... )

We had Session Four of Polaris Tuesday night and it was pretty successful. It seems like this session was particularly heavy on the freeplay, though I did win a duel-to-the-death with an enemy Knight, and K. and I got some ways toward marrying off a couple of our Knight's relations. My Knight still faces the problem of having a demon sword he can ( Read more... )

Jim

___Should

___Should Not

dive into the recent Story Games threads on immersion.

On the OD&D boards, they think about inventing FATE. Possible problem: "But maybe the whole concept is too story-based and not old-school enough ( Read more... )