Games I want to run:

[badmagic]

Legend of the 5 Rings. The Seven Clans plot and war against each other, while Fu Leng, the Abandoned One, waits to destroy them all.

Why I want to run it: First, I already promised I would. Second, the background is both seriously nifty and massively described online. If anyone wants to know something about the gameworld, they can look it up

Comments

Hmmm...

[starfyrone]

Tales of the Atlantean Empire space opera game I ran at DianeCon52 worked, apart from the mechanics, but that seems to be mostly me screwing up the math when I tried to scale the four opponents to be able to withstand 8 player characters.
After I nerfed the NPCs the combat system worked pretty much the way I wanted it too,[1] and the players were (mostly[2]) in the spirit of the game.
Anyway it convinced me it would indeed make for a viable campaign.

No Name Yet For a long while I wanted to take the cosmology of classic hollywood deal with the devil type movie, and things like Here Comes Mr. Jordan, combined with Ray Harryhausen movies and set it all in the Old Testament world of the big budget biblical epics like Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur. Have no idea of a system, I was hoping In Nomine would work, but the mechanics for that kindof suck. With bronze age sword & sandal heroes defending mankind and winning brownie points with god, while angels and devils are brazenly running amuck

[badmagic]

Darn. I liked Charmed City. OK, I thought the rules needed bashing with the Playtesthammer a few times, but its Witchcraft meets The Wire vibe had possibilities.

(To anyone who wasn't there: one of the potential magic effects was "Make the cops show up.")

[starfyrone]

Part of the problem, there had been three playtest sessions prior to that. Not run as a game, just scenarios, a character gen session, a couple of bar fights.

The magic system will likely make a return appearance at some point - I really like the idea of "realistic" magic in a real world setting. My canonical example is "Bell, Book and Candle" : I cast a spell to make famous author come here even though I know he's doing a lecture in another city - and in he walks, the plane had mechanical problem had an emergency landing in this city, so he's being laid over for the night and the cab driver just dropped him here at West Jefferson street instead of his hotel on East Jefferson.

The system was less crunchy than my usual, but it made up the complexity in too many sliders and dials.

With smart phones and tablets, a 'smart' character sheet should be possible to do all the math and such City Of Heroes press a button easy.

[selki]

Legend of the 5 Rings ... I need a game mechanic that will give you an actual, measured-in-numbers advantage if your character comes up with a better haiku than the next guy.

Oh, yeah.

Ironclaw... Not everyone is as interested as I am in stories about Renaissance theology and economics

D'oh, should have pointed you at some academic essays I came across this fall.

[andrian6]

I was told I could not play in an L5R campaign because I was known for writing better haiku than everyone else in the party...

[selki]

Grump. I bet Badmagic would just come up with a nifty handicap if an excellent haiku-er wanted to play, as in choose one of the below
* You may not use the letter s
* Every haiku must include a z
* Every haiku tonight must include this random word from the dictionary

[badmagic]

What, did you start speaking in haiku and refuse to stop? Some GMs, give them an asset and they don't know what to do with it.

[arashinomoui]

Smallville.: The superhero game that is about betrayal and in-party bickering.

Why I want to run it: My games seem to devolve to this eventually anyways.

Why I don't: I doubt I could find players willing to actually buy into the fact that to get new cool powers, they have to suffer first.

I'd love to do Dresden Files again, but I'm burnt out on high player buy-in required games.

[starfyrone]

find players willing to actually buy into the fact that to get new cool powers, they have to suffer first

oh wow. A group I have occasionally played with are all "if my character isn't suffering some sort of angst, I'm not having any fun." I've yet to hear of a game they've done that didn't turn into a soap opera, regardless of the GM or starting genre. High school superheroes who are gaining their powers one trauma at a time seems to be one of their favorite settings.

[squishydish]

Well, the GURPS system builds that in -- if you accept a major handicap, like Blind or One-legged or (pick a disease), then you get dozens of points you can spend on whatever skills you want. Suffering makes one great (in other areas)!
Although of course you could game that a little bit -- picking Paranoia could actually help you in some settings, although it cuts down on your ally relationships...

[arashinomoui]

Yeah, I realized there was a problem when we were playing Dresden, and most of players were resisting every Aspect related compel I threw at them with "I wouldn't do that."

My favorite? The person playing the naive, sheltered wizard resisting every compel to do something rash, and perhaps foolhardy, due to inexperience.

Now I'm running 13th Age where they (well a slightly different table make-up of people) are all agents of the emperor so they can be given missions with very defined goals and objectives.

[starfyrone]

It handles physical combat well, but glosses over social conflict

that was one thing I was very eager to see about 4thEd D&D. The advance press claimed they had a new mechanism for dealing with those sorts of things.

I think it was covered in a couple of paragraphs that boiled down to "decide how many times they need to roll dice, and how many of those rolls need to be above number N".

Very disappointing.

[arashinomoui]

Yeah, though thankfully I've seen some people do some neat things with skills challenges.

Though, I've not figured out the hang up with skills challenges, as a thing, as that basic system seems to be how every extended roll challenge works (which may explain why I hate most extended roll systems).

[prehensile_wit]

A) I would play in any or all of these.
b) Gods. It's been so long since I've revisited my LARP idea page that I have to Go Away to think about this. I may actually be back though, if dusting off the LJ continues at the current rate. Most of the problem is how often we say, "this situation would be a great LARP" without having paper or laptop at hand.