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I'm actually getting into more games lately. People are actually running things. It's great.
I played in part of my first Exalted game a couple of weeks ago - my first character was a Twilight Caste Solar who specializes largely in tailoring and archery (I still need to figure out her Motivation and Intimacies.) The man running the game wants to continue it, and wants to have us have three different groups of player characters - one the ones that we're playing now (mixed group of Solars and Lunars,) one that start as mortals, and one group of Dragon-Blooded. (I wonder if he'd allow a Sidereal in that group...) It's an ambitious concept to say the least, and I'm hoping it works.
Other games... let's see. I'm in a fairly large Pathfinder game that a guy I only recently met is running at the local gaming store, that has a rotating crowd of PCs. It's quite fun. My Bard/Rogue combo, though, is probably the weakest of the characters because he's dual-classed. If he ends up dying, I might drop him from the game and start over with a player I level in one class... maybe an Oracle from the APG. The guy's running from a module, which involves clearing land and exploring a frontier and building various cities for a kingdom. So far it's been fun.
Aside from that, there's one oWoD Technocracy game that I keep hoping will start up again, and the nWoD mixed supernatural game (with several traditional templates, a few homebrewed templates and a couple of mortals) that was on hiatus while the ST was in Florida and is back now. The latter has changed a lot since it started, though. It's not the same game it was before and I'm not sure what I think about that. Things have become... well, overpowered. Which is only natural, considering that we have tons and tons of experience and therefore lots of dots in just about everything, but it still throws me off. We'll see if I decide to continue - there are other issues that I have with it aside from the game itself, like the fact that the ST runs from his house in a neighboring city and I've lost count of the number of times I've nearly fallen asleep at the wheel on the way back. If I had to make the drive alone I think I probably would have gotten myself in trouble by now.
I'm thinking seriously about running a game, too. I just don't know for sure, and I don't know what I want to do with it.
You see, while I was at Ye Olde Local Gaming Store, some guy dropped off a bunch of old AD&D stuff. I snagged a module (somewhat incomplete, having obviously already been run once before) called Treasure Hunt, and I love the concept of it. But I don't know if I want to try to run it in a system I'm not that familiar with running, or if I want to try to adapt it to a system that I just don't know if it will work very well in. Either way, I may run into problems.
You see, the big hook behind Treasure Hunt is that it starts off with Level 0 characters - people with only one small weapon proficiency, no classes, no alignments and minimal adventuring skills at best. The game starts off with the characters having been kidnapped and being transported on a slave galley, which promptly crashes on an island. The story focuses around the players finding a way to get off of the island before a vengeful goddess who's become disgusted with the desecration that's been visited on her temple scours it clean of all life. Of course, they don't know this at first. They just want to get away from the orcs and goblins who are trying to kill them and find shelter and a way to survive.
At any rate, the players don't progress by spending skill points and whatnot in their chosen skills. They earn their classes and alignments through their actions. For instance, a character who refuses to attack their half-orc jailer while he's drunk and staggering about on a beach because it wouldn't be fair is probably leaning towards Lawful; a character who is willing to do so has Chaotic leanings. Good characters are eager to help the requisite kidnapped maiden because it's the right thing to do; Neutral characters want to help her because she'll offer them a reward if they do. (The game doesn't really talk about the possibility of Evil PCs, but I can think of more than a few scenarios. Most of them are counterproductive to the goal of escaping alive.) Likewise, if a character, say, spends his time learning to use every weapon that he comes across, he gets points toward being a fighter; if he doesn't pay that much attention to weapons but spends a lot of time studying a mysterious book that he finds in the ship, he becomes a magic user. And so forth - I think you can see how this works.
I really, really like this concept, because I like the idea that these normal people - the game encourages players to come up with professions for them - grow into being heroes, instead of being the product of players who wanted to create PCs to do certain things. Instead of being made, say, a rogue, the player's character becomes a rogue because he learns to sneak around and possibly pick open a couple of doors. A PC who is fond of animals and who finds ways to navigate the forest on the island might become a ranger. And so on.
There are two problems. One, the smaller of the two, is that I've never run the system before, and really haven't played it in years. I'm toying with the idea of converting it to Pathfinder, except for the rather large problem that there are no Level 0 characters in that system, and so the main hook of the adventure would be lost... and honestly, I wouldn't run this adventure without that. Still, that's easily surmounted by learning more about AD&D, if I want to.
The second problem is simply the fact that the people I would normally play such games with are all avid gamers. Almost all of them know AD&D better than I do. And all of them would pretty much know exactly what to do to get whatever class/alignment combo they would please. Some of them would take advantage of that, I think - and that, in my opinion, would undermine the entire point of the game. They probably wouldn't do it on purpose, but it's hard not to act on knowledge like that without really, really working hard not to do so. I strongly suspect that this module is really meant for beginning players - people who want to play the game but who aren't that familiar with character creation.
I might run it at some point, if only to attempt to run a game with that ruleset. Hopefully I'd be able to find a few people who were willing to roleplay things out and not just go with whatever they wanted to be. I'd still have to figure out exactly how to assign classes and alignments in such a way that their assignments are meaningful, but still make everyone happy. The game recommends talking to people one-on-one about it.
In other news, wrote a few more words on![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fantasybigbang, but not as many as I really need. Already have an idea for FFXIII fic despite not having finished the game (Chapter 13 is hard.) Being tired a lot because of work, and it'll be worse next week. Those are the main points.
I played in part of my first Exalted game a couple of weeks ago - my first character was a Twilight Caste Solar who specializes largely in tailoring and archery (I still need to figure out her Motivation and Intimacies.) The man running the game wants to continue it, and wants to have us have three different groups of player characters - one the ones that we're playing now (mixed group of Solars and Lunars,) one that start as mortals, and one group of Dragon-Blooded. (I wonder if he'd allow a Sidereal in that group...) It's an ambitious concept to say the least, and I'm hoping it works.
Other games... let's see. I'm in a fairly large Pathfinder game that a guy I only recently met is running at the local gaming store, that has a rotating crowd of PCs. It's quite fun. My Bard/Rogue combo, though, is probably the weakest of the characters because he's dual-classed. If he ends up dying, I might drop him from the game and start over with a player I level in one class... maybe an Oracle from the APG. The guy's running from a module, which involves clearing land and exploring a frontier and building various cities for a kingdom. So far it's been fun.
Aside from that, there's one oWoD Technocracy game that I keep hoping will start up again, and the nWoD mixed supernatural game (with several traditional templates, a few homebrewed templates and a couple of mortals) that was on hiatus while the ST was in Florida and is back now. The latter has changed a lot since it started, though. It's not the same game it was before and I'm not sure what I think about that. Things have become... well, overpowered. Which is only natural, considering that we have tons and tons of experience and therefore lots of dots in just about everything, but it still throws me off. We'll see if I decide to continue - there are other issues that I have with it aside from the game itself, like the fact that the ST runs from his house in a neighboring city and I've lost count of the number of times I've nearly fallen asleep at the wheel on the way back. If I had to make the drive alone I think I probably would have gotten myself in trouble by now.
I'm thinking seriously about running a game, too. I just don't know for sure, and I don't know what I want to do with it.
You see, while I was at Ye Olde Local Gaming Store, some guy dropped off a bunch of old AD&D stuff. I snagged a module (somewhat incomplete, having obviously already been run once before) called Treasure Hunt, and I love the concept of it. But I don't know if I want to try to run it in a system I'm not that familiar with running, or if I want to try to adapt it to a system that I just don't know if it will work very well in. Either way, I may run into problems.
You see, the big hook behind Treasure Hunt is that it starts off with Level 0 characters - people with only one small weapon proficiency, no classes, no alignments and minimal adventuring skills at best. The game starts off with the characters having been kidnapped and being transported on a slave galley, which promptly crashes on an island. The story focuses around the players finding a way to get off of the island before a vengeful goddess who's become disgusted with the desecration that's been visited on her temple scours it clean of all life. Of course, they don't know this at first. They just want to get away from the orcs and goblins who are trying to kill them and find shelter and a way to survive.
At any rate, the players don't progress by spending skill points and whatnot in their chosen skills. They earn their classes and alignments through their actions. For instance, a character who refuses to attack their half-orc jailer while he's drunk and staggering about on a beach because it wouldn't be fair is probably leaning towards Lawful; a character who is willing to do so has Chaotic leanings. Good characters are eager to help the requisite kidnapped maiden because it's the right thing to do; Neutral characters want to help her because she'll offer them a reward if they do. (The game doesn't really talk about the possibility of Evil PCs, but I can think of more than a few scenarios. Most of them are counterproductive to the goal of escaping alive.) Likewise, if a character, say, spends his time learning to use every weapon that he comes across, he gets points toward being a fighter; if he doesn't pay that much attention to weapons but spends a lot of time studying a mysterious book that he finds in the ship, he becomes a magic user. And so forth - I think you can see how this works.
I really, really like this concept, because I like the idea that these normal people - the game encourages players to come up with professions for them - grow into being heroes, instead of being the product of players who wanted to create PCs to do certain things. Instead of being made, say, a rogue, the player's character becomes a rogue because he learns to sneak around and possibly pick open a couple of doors. A PC who is fond of animals and who finds ways to navigate the forest on the island might become a ranger. And so on.
There are two problems. One, the smaller of the two, is that I've never run the system before, and really haven't played it in years. I'm toying with the idea of converting it to Pathfinder, except for the rather large problem that there are no Level 0 characters in that system, and so the main hook of the adventure would be lost... and honestly, I wouldn't run this adventure without that. Still, that's easily surmounted by learning more about AD&D, if I want to.
The second problem is simply the fact that the people I would normally play such games with are all avid gamers. Almost all of them know AD&D better than I do. And all of them would pretty much know exactly what to do to get whatever class/alignment combo they would please. Some of them would take advantage of that, I think - and that, in my opinion, would undermine the entire point of the game. They probably wouldn't do it on purpose, but it's hard not to act on knowledge like that without really, really working hard not to do so. I strongly suspect that this module is really meant for beginning players - people who want to play the game but who aren't that familiar with character creation.
I might run it at some point, if only to attempt to run a game with that ruleset. Hopefully I'd be able to find a few people who were willing to roleplay things out and not just go with whatever they wanted to be. I'd still have to figure out exactly how to assign classes and alignments in such a way that their assignments are meaningful, but still make everyone happy. The game recommends talking to people one-on-one about it.
In other news, wrote a few more words on
fantasybigbang, but not as many as I really need. Already have an idea for FFXIII fic despite not having finished the game (Chapter 13 is hard.) Being tired a lot because of work, and it'll be worse next week. Those are the main points.
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Date: 2010-09-04 03:27 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2010-10-17 04:20 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2010-10-17 04:27 pm (UTC)From: