Keepin' it Chronological
The Thursday Night crew helped playtest Brennan Taylor's How We Came to Live Here. It's a South-Western Native American myth kind of role-playing game that's not quite finished. Until it gets finished, you can download it for free. As you already know, I've enjoyed playing his game Mortal Coil, and I've got his crazy d20 space game Bulldogs! on my shelf, but I've never met or corresponded with the guy until today. Buddha (buddha_davis), or maybe Jason, set up this playtesting gig, and Jeff made the recording; all I did was show up last week, and post a comment and a private message when Mr. Taylor mentioned it.
Mini Review
HWCtLH has some neat features. It uses two game-masters, for starters; one for matters inside the village, and one for external forces. They're not referred to as such - they're the "Outside Player" and "Inside Player," and the folks who take on a traditional RPG-player role are called "Hero Players," but the Inside and the Outside are pretty much GMS. The game has some neat meta-gamey resource management in it. So by participating in conflicts, you accumulate (capture?) a resource called Victory Dice (which have the unfortunate acronym "VD". Thankfully, this abbreviation is not used in the text). After the conflict, you spend your dice on cool stuff for your hero, to put cool stuff in the story, or to reduce your opponent's Victory Dice. It can make for interesting dilemmas, "Do I become a Chief and let the other guy do mean stuff to me, or do I make my opponent's Dice go away and only have enough to make an ally?"
It's not really my cup of tea -- "You want me to look at a shopping list? Can't we just say I won and move on?" -- but I appreciate what the author's going for.
That's a lot more game geekery than I had originally planned to write tonight.
I leaned a hell of a lot of waltz in 30 minutes last night, and I'm going back for more next Monday.
I'm about this close to throwing out all of the footage from one of the cameras from the 7/22 gig at Bangkok Blues. Two cameras isn't too bad - it worked OK for classical music, right?
I'm heading to Charlottesville tomorrow to chill out, travel with my friend who's visiting people kind enough to write rec letters for her, and to see Mates of State at Gravity Lounge! Rock!
Mini Review
HWCtLH has some neat features. It uses two game-masters, for starters; one for matters inside the village, and one for external forces. They're not referred to as such - they're the "Outside Player" and "Inside Player," and the folks who take on a traditional RPG-player role are called "Hero Players," but the Inside and the Outside are pretty much GMS. The game has some neat meta-gamey resource management in it. So by participating in conflicts, you accumulate (capture?) a resource called Victory Dice (which have the unfortunate acronym "VD". Thankfully, this abbreviation is not used in the text). After the conflict, you spend your dice on cool stuff for your hero, to put cool stuff in the story, or to reduce your opponent's Victory Dice. It can make for interesting dilemmas, "Do I become a Chief and let the other guy do mean stuff to me, or do I make my opponent's Dice go away and only have enough to make an ally?"
It's not really my cup of tea -- "You want me to look at a shopping list? Can't we just say I won and move on?" -- but I appreciate what the author's going for.
That's a lot more game geekery than I had originally planned to write tonight.
I leaned a hell of a lot of waltz in 30 minutes last night, and I'm going back for more next Monday.
I'm about this close to throwing out all of the footage from one of the cameras from the 7/22 gig at Bangkok Blues. Two cameras isn't too bad - it worked OK for classical music, right?
I'm heading to Charlottesville tomorrow to chill out, travel with my friend who's visiting people kind enough to write rec letters for her, and to see Mates of State at Gravity Lounge! Rock!