Fair Play
Posted by Jason on November 13th, 2005 — in Conventions, Playtest
Last night I ran an interesting game of the Roach. It was the first time the game didn’t really fire on all cylinders and I’m not sure why. There was not much mayhem (Regina was molested a little but never really used) and things were very sedate, and the endgame was pretty unsatisfying. What went wrong? We had six players - four Forge regulars and two old skool guys who were a little uncomfortable with taking narrative control, who struggled to frame scenes and passed a lot. I don’t think that player mix was the problem, per se. Eric suggested that nobody used NPCs to drive the action, which is true, and we didn’t roleplay very much - and this is, I think, the root cause of the problems. I have another session scheduled for 10 AM, and if it happens (not sure if I’ll have any people, no one signed up) I’ll really emphasize assigning opponent dice to people and narrating scenes.
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Posted by Jason on November 12th, 2005 — in Check this out dude, Conventions
…apparently I get a Lulu tote bag and some other stuff. Hooray!
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Posted by Jason on November 12th, 2005 — in Playtest
I wrote a short game for the “Iron MACE” contest called Grey Ranks, which I think is pretty cool. Thanks to Eric, Lisa and Rami, I also think that it is tragically broken. We kicked it around for an hour last night in the hotel bar and exposed numerous ugly flaws. Expect a complete mechanical re-write.
The things that are cool about Grey Ranks are the notion of socially ablative damage (which I totally stole from Sheyras Sampat) and the escalating tension between love and violence. I want to retool the game so that the system for completing missions (killing nazis) and winning affection (killing your inner teen loser) are functionally identical, or nearly so.
One thing we came up with in the brief test was maybe using exploding dice - re-rolling 6’s, and maybe lowering that number (a la Burning Wheel shades) as characters gain intimacy or experience.
Posted by Jason on November 12th, 2005 — in Conventions
Stop by and say hello. Roach schedule is on the main page; you can certainly join in if you have half a mind to.
