Roleplaying then and now
This year has been good in my roleplaying front: I've started playing in two campaigns and I'm gamemastering one of my own. The games I have a single character in are Exalted and GURPS Vorkosigan, and I have played one session of both. They seem brilliant games and I expect to have fun playing those. My own game is a game of Heimot, a Finnish scifi game I have wanted to try out since it was published.
Yesterday we played the first session of the Vorkosigan game, and it seems to be a very good game, with nice people and fun characters. Our characters are a scientific team from Beta sent to Barrayar to study the planet and tie contacts to it. The session was fun and people seemed to easily get into their characters. There have been times when I'd thought that this kind of game just can't work - we're pretty close to the old Papers and Paychecks joke, with four academics and one security captain, but the social play and the game world makes it very, very fun. My character is an doctor in economics, so it is very close to a chartered accountant. It probably could work as one.
The trappings make things all different: the character is a designed hermaphrodite in space, even though it's best skills are Economics and Diplomacy. Also, the focus of the game seems to have shifted somewhat from my roleplaying beginnings: when I was young one important thing was the marching order in the dungeon. Yesterday we had tactical maps, but the first one was the seating arrangement during our dinner with our hosts and the second one was a map of our rooms in our designated wing, to determine who can easily hear what in which rooms.
Much fun was had. The game was a nice example of the rules not really mattering. I was a bit afraid at GURPS, because this is my first time playing it and the character creation was a bit more counting points than I like, but the game went smoothly and we used the character sheets mostly as memory aids about the character and their, well, character.
About the old games: the other day I found out that James Maliszewski, an RPG author, has a nice blog called Grognardia. He talks mostly about going to the roots of roleplaying, in a sense. He has interesting posts about the origins of D&D and also reviews of new and old games. I read through that blog and dug out my old red D&D box to read through. The game was fun the twenty-odd years ago, and I see no reason why it couldn't be fun now. I think I'll run that for some time after I have less other games. Of course rolling 3d6 six times in order, starting from the first level and seeing what happens. I think I'll pass the first group adventure as many people have played that already, and that first carrion crawler is a killer.
So, lots of good gaming going on, and also with new people.
Yesterday we played the first session of the Vorkosigan game, and it seems to be a very good game, with nice people and fun characters. Our characters are a scientific team from Beta sent to Barrayar to study the planet and tie contacts to it. The session was fun and people seemed to easily get into their characters. There have been times when I'd thought that this kind of game just can't work - we're pretty close to the old Papers and Paychecks joke, with four academics and one security captain, but the social play and the game world makes it very, very fun. My character is an doctor in economics, so it is very close to a chartered accountant. It probably could work as one.
The trappings make things all different: the character is a designed hermaphrodite in space, even though it's best skills are Economics and Diplomacy. Also, the focus of the game seems to have shifted somewhat from my roleplaying beginnings: when I was young one important thing was the marching order in the dungeon. Yesterday we had tactical maps, but the first one was the seating arrangement during our dinner with our hosts and the second one was a map of our rooms in our designated wing, to determine who can easily hear what in which rooms.
Much fun was had. The game was a nice example of the rules not really mattering. I was a bit afraid at GURPS, because this is my first time playing it and the character creation was a bit more counting points than I like, but the game went smoothly and we used the character sheets mostly as memory aids about the character and their, well, character.
About the old games: the other day I found out that James Maliszewski, an RPG author, has a nice blog called Grognardia. He talks mostly about going to the roots of roleplaying, in a sense. He has interesting posts about the origins of D&D and also reviews of new and old games. I read through that blog and dug out my old red D&D box to read through. The game was fun the twenty-odd years ago, and I see no reason why it couldn't be fun now. I think I'll run that for some time after I have less other games. Of course rolling 3d6 six times in order, starting from the first level and seeing what happens. I think I'll pass the first group adventure as many people have played that already, and that first carrion crawler is a killer.
So, lots of good gaming going on, and also with new people.