RPGzzzz
So. We finished up Pirates! last Sunday. Not yesterday.
I was pretty pleased with it overall. I gave in to some of my indulgences (jRPG music, time paradoxes, and evil or alternate versions of the characters) but I think it was a suitable send-off to the game. There were a couple things that I would never have expected and they scraped by the get a Good End (mostly) by the skin of their teeth.
I thought I'd written myself into a corner by making 10 (!) evil masks that they now had to deal with all at once. I wasn't sure how to make it interesting - I certainly didn't want them going down a laundry list of the different masks, smashing them one by one. So I made sure that there were three different ways to approach destroying the masks and that two of them provided little flashes of backstory. Pat was the one who ended up doing most of that portion and did a great job. In order to keep in some combat and active antagonism, the alternate versions of the characters attacked using their own versions of the Masks.
I also tried not to over-prepare; I knew that I'd need the names and backstories of the masks at my fingertips but left some blank spaces for the rest. Overall I was pretty pleased with it and with the campaign as a whole. I feel like I learned a huge amount while runnig it - about things that work for my style, about this particular group, and about coordinating a long-running storyline.
Of course, in having it done, I felt a space open up in my brain. A vacuum that I hate and want to dispel by running more games. This is how my brain works.
Sadly, the Pirate world kickstarter I backed expecting to have some neat stuff for the second half of the game still has not delivered. Welp. (Though my luck/care in selecting kickstarters has mostly been good so far.)
Here's my thoughts, not quite refined into pitches:
Feng Shui
I'd like to read through this a bit more, but the way that the archetypes are set up is really good for one-shots. It comes with a starting adventure, but I'm not sure I would dive right into the whole of the Chi War. Sometimes a one-shot is just a one-shot.
Eclipse Phase
EP is a weird one. A relatively crunchy, complex system with a huge amount of backstory - neither are the sort of things that generally appeal to me a whole lot. But the world it presents is super interesting and I feel like it does some very new, very interesting things. As is sometimes the case, RPPR is letting me do sort of a test drive; without reading the books, I am going to listen to their "Tutorial mission" game for EP. I'll see how much I get and then move on to other recordings, making notes of the things that I find hard to follow. If that goes well I'll actually pick up physical copies of the books and maybe start a campaign. Or take parts of the system and use it for Cyberpunk.
Because of its ambition and unwieldiness, I don't feel that EP is well-suited to one-shots. It's campaigns or mini-series or nothing, and that's not quite what I want to tackle just now.
Apocalypse World with a side of The Quiet Year
Mad Max has left me in a post apocalyptic mood, what can I say? Quiet Year is a really neat map-drawing GMless game, while Apocworld is still ApocWorld. I think running them together (Quiet Year to generate the settlement, then ApocWorld to explore after-effects) would be a pretty awesome combination. I am also very surprised to read trough ApocWorld now - I first read it back in 2012, partly on our honeymoon trip. Anyways, the "MC-eye view" that Vincent Baker includes is really, really close to a lot of how I run games - partly explaining why this school of games seems to work pretty well for me.
Gumshoe - Trail of Cthulhu or Night's Black Agents
I really like both of these, but it will take running a tutorial adventure for almost everybody, since the Ghouls of New York crew is hard to schedule and didn't really click for the last game I ran. I feel like I grasp the rules much better now, but, uh, listening to 20+ hours of other people playing with them (and asking questions) will do that. I think I could run it for one-shots, but the first one would have to be tutorial mode. Esoterrorists might be a good fit for my UA idea, but UA itself might also work. (To me UA is more about flavor than the specific rules.)
Delta Green
I have two adventures pretty much ready to run on this, with the possibility of others pretty easily. We also made characters back in October, so it'd be nice to do a game with them.
Better Angels
a ORE game with supervillains. The most interesting thing about it, I think, is how it modifies some of the social structures at the table - since players help to build each other's characters and then play the demon. It's a neat way to work in the mechanic without having the DM do all the work. It also has a sample adventure, which always makes it a little easier to get the thing to the table...
Overall
I left some very good games off this list. For instance, 13th Age; another sprawling fantasy epic is just not what I have in me right now. Finishing this game and thinking about the future also puts me in a weird place; I don't actually know how long we'll be in town and how the job search will go. Somehow having that reality encroach on my RPG sphere makes it a bit more real.
I am really fascinated by how people learn RPGs. It's become pretty clear that a bad experience in reading, learning, or even hearing about an RPG can poison someone on it forever. (As evidenced by countless flame wars, edition wars, and several individuals I've talked to later.) It's also extremely difficult to dislodge an incorrect idea that's taken root. So the questions are:
1) How do you break an RPG into manageable chunks?
2) Why are more RPGs not presented this way?
And I think a lot of it goes back to D&D setting the trends, where Gygax and Arneson taught things through play and added on to them, but everyone else looked at the books they made and took that as a template.
I was pretty pleased with it overall. I gave in to some of my indulgences (jRPG music, time paradoxes, and evil or alternate versions of the characters) but I think it was a suitable send-off to the game. There were a couple things that I would never have expected and they scraped by the get a Good End (mostly) by the skin of their teeth.
I thought I'd written myself into a corner by making 10 (!) evil masks that they now had to deal with all at once. I wasn't sure how to make it interesting - I certainly didn't want them going down a laundry list of the different masks, smashing them one by one. So I made sure that there were three different ways to approach destroying the masks and that two of them provided little flashes of backstory. Pat was the one who ended up doing most of that portion and did a great job. In order to keep in some combat and active antagonism, the alternate versions of the characters attacked using their own versions of the Masks.
I also tried not to over-prepare; I knew that I'd need the names and backstories of the masks at my fingertips but left some blank spaces for the rest. Overall I was pretty pleased with it and with the campaign as a whole. I feel like I learned a huge amount while runnig it - about things that work for my style, about this particular group, and about coordinating a long-running storyline.
Of course, in having it done, I felt a space open up in my brain. A vacuum that I hate and want to dispel by running more games. This is how my brain works.
Sadly, the Pirate world kickstarter I backed expecting to have some neat stuff for the second half of the game still has not delivered. Welp. (Though my luck/care in selecting kickstarters has mostly been good so far.)
Here's my thoughts, not quite refined into pitches:
Feng Shui
I'd like to read through this a bit more, but the way that the archetypes are set up is really good for one-shots. It comes with a starting adventure, but I'm not sure I would dive right into the whole of the Chi War. Sometimes a one-shot is just a one-shot.
Eclipse Phase
EP is a weird one. A relatively crunchy, complex system with a huge amount of backstory - neither are the sort of things that generally appeal to me a whole lot. But the world it presents is super interesting and I feel like it does some very new, very interesting things. As is sometimes the case, RPPR is letting me do sort of a test drive; without reading the books, I am going to listen to their "Tutorial mission" game for EP. I'll see how much I get and then move on to other recordings, making notes of the things that I find hard to follow. If that goes well I'll actually pick up physical copies of the books and maybe start a campaign. Or take parts of the system and use it for Cyberpunk.
Because of its ambition and unwieldiness, I don't feel that EP is well-suited to one-shots. It's campaigns or mini-series or nothing, and that's not quite what I want to tackle just now.
Apocalypse World with a side of The Quiet Year
Mad Max has left me in a post apocalyptic mood, what can I say? Quiet Year is a really neat map-drawing GMless game, while Apocworld is still ApocWorld. I think running them together (Quiet Year to generate the settlement, then ApocWorld to explore after-effects) would be a pretty awesome combination. I am also very surprised to read trough ApocWorld now - I first read it back in 2012, partly on our honeymoon trip. Anyways, the "MC-eye view" that Vincent Baker includes is really, really close to a lot of how I run games - partly explaining why this school of games seems to work pretty well for me.
Gumshoe - Trail of Cthulhu or Night's Black Agents
I really like both of these, but it will take running a tutorial adventure for almost everybody, since the Ghouls of New York crew is hard to schedule and didn't really click for the last game I ran. I feel like I grasp the rules much better now, but, uh, listening to 20+ hours of other people playing with them (and asking questions) will do that. I think I could run it for one-shots, but the first one would have to be tutorial mode. Esoterrorists might be a good fit for my UA idea, but UA itself might also work. (To me UA is more about flavor than the specific rules.)
Delta Green
I have two adventures pretty much ready to run on this, with the possibility of others pretty easily. We also made characters back in October, so it'd be nice to do a game with them.
Better Angels
a ORE game with supervillains. The most interesting thing about it, I think, is how it modifies some of the social structures at the table - since players help to build each other's characters and then play the demon. It's a neat way to work in the mechanic without having the DM do all the work. It also has a sample adventure, which always makes it a little easier to get the thing to the table...
Overall
I left some very good games off this list. For instance, 13th Age; another sprawling fantasy epic is just not what I have in me right now. Finishing this game and thinking about the future also puts me in a weird place; I don't actually know how long we'll be in town and how the job search will go. Somehow having that reality encroach on my RPG sphere makes it a bit more real.
I am really fascinated by how people learn RPGs. It's become pretty clear that a bad experience in reading, learning, or even hearing about an RPG can poison someone on it forever. (As evidenced by countless flame wars, edition wars, and several individuals I've talked to later.) It's also extremely difficult to dislodge an incorrect idea that's taken root. So the questions are:
1) How do you break an RPG into manageable chunks?
2) Why are more RPGs not presented this way?
And I think a lot of it goes back to D&D setting the trends, where Gygax and Arneson taught things through play and added on to them, but everyone else looked at the books they made and took that as a template.