Category: Roleplaying

Lunchtime Poll #21: Game Spinoffs

What’s the best media tie-in game out there—Star Wars? Buffy? Take a position and explain it. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your opinions!

I own it, but haven’t played it. Despite that, I have to go with Decipher’s Star Trek. Its system is quite similar to the norm– 2d6+Stat bonus+skill, but the Narrator’s Guide is excellent. It gives concrete advice on how to structure an episode, how and why you’d want to choose different eras, practical advice on themes, and introspection on episodic versus campaign structure.

Character creation is pretty good, allowing you to select the character you want, plus it gives you enough picks to add some detail.

Honorable mention goes to WEG’s d6 Star Wars.

Ire #18: Sic Transit Papem

Our latest IRE (I missed last week thanks to ACUS) will acknowledge the 800 pound elephant in the news; the death of Pope John Paul II.

So, the death of a major religious figure. How do you figure it into a game?

Lunchtime Poll #20: Bait & Switch

You’ve got your character rolled up, a backstory with lots of plot hooks created, and you are perfectly equipped to survive in your environment. Only…you aren’t in your environment. Your GM has dropped you through a wormhole/dimension door/time warp/Stargate, and you are completely unprepared for so much as asking directions to the nearest bathroom-equivalent. From either a player or a GM perspective, discuss the pros and cons of a surprise setting switch.

Lunchtime Poll #19: My So-Called Life

What does gaming bring to your real life?

Gaming (both roleplaying and boardgames) provide me with “fun things” to do with friends. They are a good way to do something while friendship grows… though they’re also subject to taking the place of real friendships if you let them. Mostly, they’re like most hobbies– something to do with likeminded people.

IRE #16: The Revolutionary Document

Today, March 17th marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s completion of the first of his major papers that would revolutionize physics forever. So even with the recent Ides of March, I am choosing Einstein’s papers as the inspiration for the latest IRE.

Introduce something that changes all the rules, mid-game. For the best parallel, I prefer that it be something the PCs have been working on, with effects even more dramatic than their imaginations anticipate. In some games this is perfect– sci-fi in particular has very skilled character types (Engineers, Science Officers, etc.) that don’t do much more than “scan”.

In Li’s Lunchtime Poll #18: Not in Kansas, she asks:

What alternate-historical setting would you most like to play in, and why?

Wow, there are a number of great worlds I’d love to play in. One of the ones that has me intrigued is the Chronoplane Wars, The Empire of Time was particularly interesting.

I think it’ll work well because you can muck around with history without worrying about paradoxes– you can meet and negotiate with the big names of history. It’d also be cool as a conspiracy, since no one knows who runs the Intertemporal Agency… nor why people and missions are shunted around, why people have blocks– there is lots of room for internal politics.

In Lunchtime Poll #17: Long-Term, High-Yield, Li repeats Narrative Guy’s querstion:

“New games are popping up all of the time, yet they don’t stay around very long at all anymore. Magic: The Gathering has lasted 10 years…The White Wolf “storytelling” system reached its apex at about 4 years old…the (*shudder*) Pokemon game lasted maybe two years…what’s going to last?”

The games that are established are the ones that will stick around; long after D&D was obsolete, it was still the gateway RPG. More importantly, though– I don’t care which ones stick around. Once I buy a game, I’m rarely interested in a lot of supplements [Mage was a sad exception]; I can run the core game at my leisure.

Except that I’m really enjoying the new wave of indie games. I want to play them– and to play any significant proportion of them, the games I do play should be short. That works fine for me, for now at least.