As promised, a post about giants

[zoatebix]

So Joe sent the Thursday Night crew's mailing list links to four posts on Jonathan Tweet's blog on Gleemax. There was one on the storied tradition of gaming group in-jokes, and a pair that revealed to me the influence of Doctor Strange on early D&D art. One in particular, a synecdoche illustrating how novel D&D's appropriation of myth and

Comments

[severefun]

I am totally up for GMing either Everyway or OtE, but a) my life has been mildly hectic the last few months (Godlike RoD has also been a casualty of this), and b) I think we'd also have to do them as mini-campaigns, since character creation is half the fun in both games, which then brings up the issue of splitting the group. We'll see how things develop.

[thesporkinator]

Wow. Against the Giants. You totally gave me a flashback, there. Meanwhile, why is it that everyone I know has a great time playing BSG, but my two attempts have been relatively awful?

[zoatebix]

Hey hey hey, now - I said "a fun time," not a great time :P

There were a couple of "why do I have to deal with this?" moments, the crowning glory of which was the tedious rolling the game's single included d8 twelve times one turn and fourteen times the next while my Raiders tried to damage the Galactica on 8s. It seems like the designers should have anticipated that situation and included a chart to (1) speed things along (a fistful of dice would also work for this purpose), (2) keep the randomness in check. Sure, I rolled about the mean number of hits (I only I could hit the Galactica three and a quarter times!), but the potential for wackiness was huge, and seemed kind of out of place.

How'd your games go?

[thesporkinator]

Well, game one was mediocre, largely due to the fact that none of us knew the rules, and the Cylon was obvious by about the third round. We still lost, but barely. A vaguely fun time was had by all.

Game two was an absolute disaster. For the first 4 hours, literally nothing happened, then 3 Cylons sitting in a row revealed themselves for no reason except boredom and slaughtered us in under 10 minutes. Everyone left bored, miserable, and grumpy, and my wife rated it as the worst boardgame she'd ever played.

[zoatebix]

Four hours!? That sounds pretty miserable. I really don't know about the distribution of stuff in the crisis deck (say, how many cards advance the jump track - wait, google and BGG told me -- 40 of 70 advance jump prep), I'm having trouble fathoming how that would happen. I mean, if your admiral and president were Cylons, didn't act suspiciously, and the Cylons dicked around didn't play to win...

I repeat, that sounds pretty miserable.

I mean, I'm not going to go out of my way to play BSG again, but that's more because I'd rather be role-playing than because I thought it was bad.

I wish I could find the link to the bad report I read on BSG -- I'd love for you to compare your memory with that guy's notes. It was by some current (or former?) WotC or maybe Atlas games employee. I'll keep searching.

[tcpip]

There are two elements about the good Mr. Tweet's post which I probably should make at the forum, but will start here.

- G1, in my opinion, was best suited for a commando-style mission rather than an all-out brawl. Indeed in a standing battle without fudged dice, the giants should have a better than equal chance of defeating PCs who charge down the hall will a view of engaging in a brawl. Further to this it was possible, through stealth, to actually march all the way to the giant's treasure room with no encounters if one took the right path.

- Also, the character level was 8th-12th. The only reason why the giants were killable was because the PCs were superheroes.

[zoatebix]

Yeah, I was feeling kind of funny about posting on the subject here in the middle of nowhere. Maybe I'll drop a line linking here on WotC's boards, or maybe I'll send Jonathan Tweet an email.

So during the composition of this response, I figured out that he's on livejournal: wanton-heat-jet