What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

It depends what Starwars is to you. Light sabers, ewoks, Tatooine are all things. You can run any kind of story with these things in it but for us that doens't make it star wars. Age of Rebellion doesn't change the rules that much, its really just a setting switch to the military conflict. Our issue is, there are only so many smuggler runs and heists we can do before it starts to feel like we are really playing a Firefly game with star wars trappings. This isn't necessarily bad but its not really for us. For me, each of the star wars films, games and comics i've watched, played, read is about a struggle against a galactic threat, with a heavy good vs evil theme. We've found this sort of experience difficult to get out of Edge of the Empire.

Finished off my Mutant Future campaign. This was probably the best game i've ran despite my now dislike of the system. I like combat short and violent. Player characters and most mid level monsters are going to have more than 20-30hp and most common weapons do between d4 and d10 damage if they hit, meaning combat can turn into a slug fest that lasts hours. Theres also no crit system and my players like describing awesome moves with my having no way to reward them if they roll well. Solution, i found ways of getting them stupid hightech old world weapons. One character, Al Sharif the desert nomad (full name Alan Sharif) got a fusion gun that dealt 7d6 + radiation damage per hit. This was probably a bit too good and combat sort of got unbalanced, but in a very fun way. He spent lots of time shouting "Muad'dib" and raising it over his head before felling a guard tower or a load of mutants riding a T-rex. One city built around a metal whale ( a beached nuclear sub) was destroyed in a nuclear blast, one pc wrestled a dinosaur, and the players achieved their quest of seeking out the oracle computer, with one player being sacrificed to the computers recycling vats as tribute. In all a good game.

We continued our Dark Heresy campaign too. My character nearly got wasted twice in one session, first by a autocannon round, and then by an alien dog bite. Had to use two fate points to survive. Did some awesome mind control tricks though.

My group just finished up our third session with Edge of the Empire and I have to say as GM that I really am enjoying the system. I love that FFG focused on delivering a system that puts the focus on telling a good story and minimizes the amount of bookkeeping involved with tracking skills, NPC stats, wounds, etc. There is enough game system there to keep most gamers happy though since they can build characters to match pretty much any concept they can dream up.

This is also the first game I've encountered that allows for mixed results when tossing the dice. Actions can result in success but still introduce obstacles or setbacks and the reverse is also true. You can fail on the task you were trying to accomplish but might gain some unforeseen boost on the same roll. For example, one of the hero PCs flubbed his skill check to toss a grenade into an enemy speeder; which in most games, that would be that. Not with EotE though. He also rolled enough advantage to force the head bounty hunter in the enemy speeder to drop his rifle as the pilot scrambled to angle the speeder away from the grenade. I love that! Interpreting more than one aspect of a die roll has challenged my players to think about the story and system as a whole and get more into narrating the action and not worry so much about counting wounds and special damage conditions.

Shadowrun 5th edition. DAMN this game is complicated and still suffers from the fistful of dice problem. It seems cool to roll 27 D6 to resolve a check until you are asked to do it a dozen or so times.

I'm getting ready to run A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying: A Game of Thrones edition. Whew, that's an impressive title and fits with the equally impressive source material. I read the novels about a decade ago and largely remember the details, which is saying something about the quality of the stories. I recently started watching the HBO series to refresh myself and to satisfy my curiosity as to how the series matches up with the books. For the most part it seems to be very literal in the transaltion with some minor quibbles, such as making Khal Drogo a border-line rapist. Not cool.

Back to the game. I am digging the system and can't wait to put the players through the quickstart adventure offered up by Green Ronin. It looks simple enough and gives plenty of opportunities to test out the system which seems simple and deadly. That's good for me as I am past tired of tracking levels and dozens of hit points. Give me intrigues and combats that end just as quickly as they began so we can get back to the narrative.

Another really cool element that's different about the game is that what ties all the players together is the notion that they all serve a noble house. This gives them a built in motivation to work together right out of the gate and should help everyone get past the awkward first encounter or two that inevitably leads to the party picking up a quest to go collect loot. The rules even support a highly detailed process that allows the group to flesh out relevant attributes for a noble house such as its influence, lands, and military strength; all of which are key to the theme and stories from the novels.

Social interaction is given some actual meat to flesh out social conflicts for those groups that wish to have more than banter back and forth between the GM and the players. That has a place in RPG's but come on, most of us are not eloquent speakers or masters of debate. I haven't come across many RPGs that provide much more than a list of social skills and some fluff on how to use them but this system sinks its teeth into it and makes political machinations as important, if not more so, than the ability to swing a sword. Again, this is fitting and keeps with the Game of Thrones theme.

Certainly looking forward to trying this one out, and if it flops I've at least had fun catching up with Westeros via the HBO series.

Does anyone have any experience with this game and have any tips or insight into the system you care to share?

I've thought about buying the Green Ronin version... I'm guessing that I could get people into it, unlike many roleplaying games. I'd be curious if anyone has played it too.

Played Dogs In The Vineyard a couple of times. I forgot how fun this was. Such an interesting game; it gives the PCs all the power and lets them deal with it. Power sucks when you actually care about the people you're exercising it over, and they all look to you to sort out the messy complications of actual peoples' problems.

Played Green Ronins Song of Ice and Fire today for the first time. We played some prewritten adventure about a wedding that ended up going entirely off the script.

My initial thoughts on the game is that it does a reasonable job of allowing you to create AGOT fan fiction as long as the playgroup is happy to do the heavy lifting. We had three players, the 14yr old son of the main lord (me), the brother of the lord and the master of arms. WE got to do some cool fluffy stuff like create a house shield of arms and land holdings etc. The game itself i have mixed views on at current. The dice pool and stats system is a fair balance between detail and simplicity. Counting up all the pips on the dice can be a little tiresome though. The combat system was only used once for a duel, and it seemed like the gurps system to me, and pretty crash and bash. Our guy hammered some minor noble on account of him having a valerian steel sword and some good dice rolls. He killed him in two rounds with out taking a scratch. The intrigue system rules were never used, although they were described to me at one point. I don't know whether they add a great deal or not. I tried to poison my younger brother and then framed the mother of the bride at the wedding for it, which then lead to the other two players annexing the new house on treason charges and a trial by duel. All of this was roleplayed out with a few skill checks here and there, and it worked ok. The main issue was that because our characters were very different and due to the scenario situation, we were rarely in the same room, or scene playing the same game but doing different things and then having to remind ourselves not to have meta conversations when we were in different areas. D&D, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu all present situations where it is logical for a party of complementary characters to work together on a problem in one locale. That isn't a necessity here unless the players choose to really enforce it. I think it worked well in this oneshot with a very loose script. In a more complex game i think the GM will depend a lot on the players playing ball and following the scenarios view of where the game should head. Either that or the GM must be very good at improv. Equally due to the nature of the story, unless you are all going to play nights watch, or city guards, or some sort of setup where you have similar rolls i'd recommend lower player counts (2-4) as if you have lots of players doing things in different parts of the city or castle things will get complex fast.


Also i've been designing probably the most interesting DCC dungeon i've worked on todate. The doc is here docs.google.com/document/d/1afFEsOa0RSeV...tcY/edit?usp=sharing . feel free to make suggestions or steal ideas.

Green Lantern wrote: I wasn't aware of a BSG game. Care to share some details, Rliyen? What's the system like and do you guys enjoy it?

The system is a die step system. The die ranges from d2 to d12+12. You have six attributes that also use the die steps (d2-d12+d12). You can buy Assets (perks) and Complications (negatives to buy more perks). Obviously, higher is better. The rules are dirt simple, with most of them being: "roll Attribute+Skill/subskill (if you have it) and beat x difficulty."

It really does capture the spirit of the series but, alas, the editing of the book is atrocious. It's apparent by grammatical errors, math errors, and rules left in that were clearly designed for an earlier version that have no bearing in the rulebook in its current form.

Also, they stratify damage ratios between personal/planetary vehicles/spacecraft by using the 10 factor. (10 of personal = 1 Planetary vehicle damage = not a scratch on a spacecraft). It's all fine and well until you actually have Vipers attacking a Cylon spacecraft or Raiders attacking a Colonial vessel. Granted, they make the difficulty to hit a vehicle of that size easy (hitting the broad side of a barn easy), but unless you make an Exceptional Success (7+ over the needed total to hit), the ship's armor will soak that shit up, which really doesn't make a lot of sense.

Other than that, the players love the game. In the last episode, people were flipping their shit due to a Cylon pulse weapon messing with their heads. They saw Cylons/people left behind that weren't there; saw other people as Cylons and started shooting at each other; some of them hallucinated reviving on a Resurrection Ship; and one had a Being John Malkovich moment. I think I've added enough confusion and uncertainty as to who's human and who's a Cylon with that.

And from there, it's just going to get worse.

Haven't role-played in about a year. After the last session (a Star Wars game) I swore I would never role-play again. It was terrible.

RPGs are so hit-and-miss.

Yet, here I am browsing eBay for rpgs...

This seems to always happen. Every year or other year, I get the urge to role-play. Just for a few sessions. Not much. Not a long campaign. But, damn, there's just something about role-playing that no other game can touch.

So, I think I'm about to drop two old TSR box sets _back_ into my collection. Simply to buy a module or two every other year or so to run. Something with no prep on my part. If I run it, the game has a decent change of being fun for all (I like to think).

Just rambling...as I buy some rulesets for a second or third time...

Jeff White wrote: Haven't role-played in about a year. After the last session (a Star Wars game) I swore I would never role-play again. It was terrible.

Give us the DEETS!

One gm, two players. We were bounty hunter duo, sort of going for a light hearted feel, where my pc was the straight man/rodian (I played him off the driver from Drive).

It was a three session deal where the gm would give us different bounties to choose from. Thing is though, when it came down to it, none of it really mattered. We traveled to a 'moon near a planet' or 'in a spaceport'. It was all so bland and non-descriptive, we coulda been playing anything.

I knew the gm was winging it, and there's nothing wrong with that, as we've all done it from time to time. However, the gm had bought into some rpg idea where the whole session could be winged as he was 'giving the players the game we wanted' so to speak. So there was nothing ever really fleshed out. Sure we could do anything, but the game lacked any sort of color or life that it all felt worthless. big waste of time.

The gm had about 2 months to prep, but again has pretty much gone into some free form rpg philosophy. He didn't even really know the rules for combat. I should've known something like this was going to go down. In previous emails, he had talked about 'be able to run games with a coin for resolution'. ugh!

Me, I like a structure game to play within. Confines of some nature create the game. This was just real bad collaborative storytelling... real bad...There was no reason for me to read the rulebook, create a character proper, sketch him up, etc.

Oh man, I would have been irritated too in that situation. The GM should have had the decency to tell you guys he was hand-waving the rules and saved everyone some cash since buying into books and materials was pointless. I'm all for getting to the table ASAP but some preparation goes a long way. I've dabbled in the collaborative story telling model but still find it's helpful to have a loose plot and some information on locations and characters on standby.

Oh, if he would have told us ahead of time, I would have passed.

As it was, he'd been pushing the Star Wars Saga system for awhile, so we (the two players) picked up a used rulebook on the cheap and passed it around. The understanding was that we were playing Star Wars Saga. There was little, if any, actually lifted from the Saga rules.

Go back to the first post in this thread...I already have a dubious relationship with rpgs. I do understand they're about as nerdy as it gets, and I'm waaaaaay in the closet with them. However, I do like to play in a few sessions from time to time. This style of game is my worst fear with rpgs...nothing but collaborative storytelling. I don't mind doing that with the kids, but I feel cheeseball doing it with adults. I need _some_ sort of game on the table.





Still might buy an rpg this afternoon

i hear you. Most of my friends prefer the collaborative storytelling side, which i don't mind but i prefer something where character death is genuine and it takes some skill to avoid.

RPGs are for me, the best when they fire on all cylinders but can often stall out.

My recommendation is to stick with games with a tight game structure, plenty of modules, and games that reach in and give you flavour from their own rules.

pick up a copy of Swords and Wizardry, or Basic Fantasy Roleplay, or DnD basic and get some of the earlier modules, or read Bruce Lynchs blog tenfootpole.org/ironspike/ and pick up some modules he suggests and run them. I play quite a bit of Dungeon Crawl Classics and it has some pretty solid published modules too. You also get to roll on lots of entertaining charts and influence play and give you descriptions to read.

other things that could work; Traveller could work. You can pick up some of the old judges guild modules on the cheap and the little black books too. Tunnels and Trolls if you can't be assed to learn DnD, its simpler and you can run DnD modules and just convert the monster stats on the fly. The only other game i can think of with a ton of published modules and a sound 'game' structure is Call of Cthulhu. Paranoia does have some published modules too. Also, if you are happy with a short dungeon crawl. Post here a description of what you want about a month before you expect to run it. I could write a short dungeoncrawl to your specifications.