#RPGaDAY2015, Day 16: Longest Game Session

by ThomasNo Comments

I don’t recall what was the longest game session I’ve played—the first time I encountered a roleplaying game I was twelve or thirteen and I know that I’ve experienced quite a bit of gaming since then. Games in college would last up to six hours with my friends and I gathering for an afternoon (and the requisite pizza break). But, none really stood out as a long game session.

Maybe that thing back in high school.

I still remember the last name of the guy who invited everyone over: Smet. SmetCon was this guy inviting over two or three groups of gamers to his house one weekend afternoon, where he was going to run us through an adventure. Perhaps a dozen players were there. Make the most powerful AD&D character you can at whatever level. So I made a druid, which I never played before, but at that level would have been super powerful if any element of the adventure took place outdoors. It turned out to be a dungeon crawl. ((Yeah, I was kind of a stupid kid.))

Anyway.

Our large party decided to split up so our characters could cover more ground—which naturally meant that half of the players had to be sent out of the room, because “you get to have no fun for a while” was the accepted method of playing RPGs back then—and then the game slowed to a crawl as the two groups decided the heck with plundering the tomb of whomever and decided to set up traps and kill each other off.

960It could have been awesome, but we were all pimply-faced teenagers and it turned into a crappy afternoon if you were on my team’s side, who seemed to have longer gaming timeouts than the other (although I’m sure that’s because the “you have no fun in the other room” time seemed slower than actually doing things at the table), and one egregiously asinine moment when the red team successfully detected an anti-magic force field thing you could pass through which disenchants everything ((This is the type of bullshit we had to put up with in the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. Did you know that Gary Gygax’s first game with his children had them finding a huge chest full of coins and treasure, but the chest was too heavy for them to move? What a dick. No wonder so many people approach the GM/player divide as adversarial roles instead of as a collaborative one.)) so they teleported to the exact opposite side of the field in an attempt to fool any of us who could track them into thinking they walked right through. Of course, when our team investigated the barrier and—not finding anything odd—we passed through, we didn’t notice the instant neutering of our magical glowing and floating stuff. We were all near 20th level: the half of our gear that didn’t glow actually spoke to us. Hell, at least one adventurer had a bunch of magical pebbles that were orbiting his head.

Cue the inevitable cries of foul from teenagers going through puberty once the subterfuge “and none of your magical items work” ambush was sprung.

Crazy kids.

That might have been it, but it’s one of the few games I actually played in and one of the few games in which I, and half the players, were sent away to not play the game while playing the game ((?)) which is why it probably seemed so loooooong. Thing is, I didn’t learn from that—in the college games, I still regularly sent people out of the room to have No Fun until much, much later when I realized that I characters keeping secrets from each other is far more rewarding when the players know what’s going on.

#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 16 – Game You Wish You Owned

by ThomasNo Comments

Last year on #RPGaDAY, I wrote about the Game You Wish You Owned and this year, I revisited the question in the Day 9: A Licensed RPG post. Here’s what I wrote last year:

What game do I wish I owned? That’s pretty easy. It’s an official Crimson Skies RPG.

Originally created as a miniature war game, set in a post-Great Depression no-longer united United States of America, where air travel is the most common mode of transportation, air piracy abounds!

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Real-life pirates of the 16th century. Crazy Nazi prototype aircraft. Old Errol Flynn movies. Swing music. Black Sheep Squadron. The Flying Tigers. The Hell’s Angels. Indiana Jones. Betty Page. Vargas and Petty pin-ups. The golden age of Hollywood. The 1930s in America was the last truly romantic period in modern history.

I would play the crap out of this game.

It’s got to be something slightly more complex than Fate – I want to tinker with my plane, like you did with Car Wars. Yet it’s got to be faster to play than a game like Shadowrun or Pathfinder, so combat actions have to flow quickly – no multiple charts and steps to determine the outcome of fights. Because this game is full of action. Two-fisted action.

It also has intrigue as it is nation versus nation: which means spies, femme fatales, and all that good stuff.

The Crimson Skies RPG is set up so each player has their guy in the game, but not every scene has to have all the characters present at a time. Cal’s character is in there, so we give Emily control of one of the NPCs in the scene. Maybe she’s got an antagonistic NPC to run for the scene. Then after that, we’re at a thing with Emily’s and Ryan’s characters and Cal isn’t there, so maybe Cal gets to help run one of the important NPCs in that scene.

And the dogfights! Not every player is going to be flying a plane, so the dogfights have be quick affairs – fast, crazy blazing battles in the sky. It’s the problem with vehicle chases in other games: you’ve got the driver, someone shooting back, and maybe two other players whose characters aren’t really built for this so they just hang out at the table for twenty minutes while everyone else is driving and having fun.

Half the fun of Car Wars and BattleTech is the solo play of creating the vehicle or ‘Mech. I want that solo play in Crimson Skies to kit out your plane, if you’re playing a pilot. If you’re playing a non-pilot, you get to tinker with the air base you strike out of or the zeppelin you’re flying around.

Yeah, that’s the game I want. And if I can’t have that, I’ll take a game based on Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century novels. Alt-history Dieselpunk, hell yeah.

A mirror of Microsoft’s old Crimson Skies website:http://firedrake.org/roger/csarchive/universe/index.htm

#RPGaDAY2015, Day 15: Longest Campaign

by ThomasNo Comments

Today’s #RPGaDAY2015 topic is Longest Campaign Played, which threatens to fall into the horrible space that Let Me Tell You About My Character does. ((My first time at Gen Con, I was chatting with Adam Jury and Paul Tevis came up and we were talking about things, like humans do, and I mentioned a steampunk costuming booth up the aisle and Paul said he was looking for a good vest for his character in a LARP but he’s kind of picky because the character does this type of thing and then Paul just stops and says, “Oh god, I was just ‘Let Me Tell You About My Character’, wasn’t I?” We all laughed and Paul never returned to Gen Con.)) When someone tells you about their character, it’s a bit like someone trying to describe an awesome movie in about three minutes, which means leaving out a lot of the context and all the other things that makes what you’re describing awesome. Plus, the life of an adventurer kind of meanders around a lot when you think of it. It’s not as straightforward and concise as a novel or movie and just kind of wanders all over the place, narratively, and seems to go on just a little bit to long, just like most of the sentences in this paragraph.

Now, imagine that with four other characters, told in the same amount of time.

I don’t really play long campaigns any more. There’s just too much to throw together, too much cruft to craft. And there are too many good games out there I’d love to play. Back in my high school and college days, it was absolutely fine to run a game from level 1 on up to 20, or have a game that lasted two years. But as a GM, trying to get that done now that I have a family, work, and the remnants of my gaming group spread across the continent, it’s too much of an effort to maintain a long-running roleplaying game campaign. ((I’ll eventually put the Low Prep, No Prep talk I gave at the first GM Conference online, where I went into trying to manage time outside the game.))

adventure-pathsPlaying in a campaign is easier: you really just have to show up and play. During this time of running short campaigns, my wife and I were in a Pathfinder game that ran every other weekend for two years, but that was nothing like the weekly games of our undergraduate years. That Pathfinder game was from one of the Adventure Paths which meant all the heavy lifting was done for the GM: he just needed to add his own flavor to the mixed metaphor. Back in the days of AD&D2 or WEG Star Wars, we created our own stuff, maybe playing the occasional published adventure. I don’t think I could run a long game in a complex game like Pathfinder without the aid of an Adventure Path to guide me along. Prep time is just a killer.

Brisco-castSo, longest campaign. I simply have to go back to the days of college when we played each weekend for a few hours, marching our way through a pseudo-medieval magical fantasy realm for a year or two or the big magically-infused cyberpunk game that had seven players and I made The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. canonical to the campaign. But in the past fifteen years? A Dresden Files game that ran for eight months. A Blue Planet game that ran for about five. The Pathfinder game that only met every two weeks. Nine game sessions of Primetime Adventures. Lady Blackbird with six or seven sessions. Six sessions of Apocalypse World. The Lacuna one-shot. The time for the grand, long campaign was back then. Gotta prep for now.