Quick! Let’s catch up to today’s #RPGaDAY post, but we’re still back in time on the 16th of the month where we answer the question “which RPG do you enjoy using as is?”
In other words: which game is perfect right out of the box? No house rules. No nothin’.
Back when we played in the Arizona group, one of the guys there was all about how you play games strictly as written, because “it’s a contract you make the game”, which is was wrong. See, we’d hack the crap out of a game if there was something not working for us there. Like Fan Mail from Primetime Adventures — we’d start using that in nearly every game to reward fun at the table. The more rules, the more the chance at hacking to make the game work better at our table.
…which makes me want to look at smaller games for the answer to this question. I think I’m winding up over at Lady Blackbird with such a simple system there’s so much room for creativity that if there was some sort of hack that came into play, I think the game would be fine with it. But we pretty much ran that one straight with the smallish rule set.
Previously on #RPGaDAY…
Last year, we discussed keeping track of NPCs, where I talked about using index cards. In my ongoing D&D game, I’m using a word document and have a wiki for the players to use, but nobody uses the wiki and the word doc is too unwieldy.
In 2015, the topic was “The Longest Game Session You’ve Played”, where I went on about an afternoon-long game from my teenage years with one GM and probably a dozen players going through a dungeon and splitting up and then one half of the characters decided to go and kill the other half. Zany crazy kid gaming.
In 2014, the topic was “A Game You Wish You Owned”. There, I discussed a game based on Crimson Skies:
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… I still kind of want that one.
