rpg nattering
Jun. 9th, 2013 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishSo this was going to be a general "what i've been up to for the past week or so" post but then it got taken over by RPG stuff. I guess the rest of what I've been up to will be coming later.
Ashen Stars has stopped working for me on the grounds that it takes a heck of a lot of pregame prep time if you're not running an existing scenario. I still love the universe (as do my players), I still love the half of the system that deals with investigative abilities, I'm still willing to grit my teeth and deal with the general abilities system. I'm just not willing to put in the effort to craft an entire scenario every couple of weeks. And I am seriously not confident in my ability to improvise a coherent story on that small a scale. So I've been casting around for something else.
A couple of months ago I stumbled across a Kickstarter campaign for Lords of Gossamer and Shadow,a new RPG using the rules for Amber Diceless. It's a fair question as to whether Amber or Changeling was my first great RPG love affair, but either way there was never any real question as to whether I was going to jump on this. The final draft of the edited manuscript arrived in my inbox while I was in the States, and I've read it through once or twice. I talked everyone else into playing it, and we did the attribute auction and other character creation stuff last week.
The rules are great. Mostly this is because it's a direct port of the Amber Diceless rules which were pretty great to start with. Where they've deviated it's almost universally an improvement. The ability to walk between worlds now costs 10 character points (of your initial allotment of 100) instead of 'at least 50', meaning you have more flexibility in where your points go; some of the rules for artifact creation have been cleaned up a bit; creating Domains ('Shadows') is much easier. Sorcery is a hot mess but it was a hot mess in the original and in the source material, so I can't really complain about that.
The background, on the other hand, is thin. Partly this is an unfair comparison: Amber had 1500 pages of background material, after all. (Or 700 if you're a First Series Purist, which I am if I'm running a game.) On the other hand, Amber has around a score of named NPCs. LG&S has ... eight, three of whom are wholly antagonistic. LG&S also lacks major locations in general. In my experience with Amber, personal Shadows tend to be hidey-holes, and much of the action takes place in Amber itself, or in some other equally important place. LG&S's equivalent of Amber is the Grand Stair, which is ill-suited to being a nexus of intrigue on the grounds that you can't just take it over.
This would be okay if I had something useful to work with in terms of the major Powers ... but I don't. Instead I have vague descriptions of them as essentially Order, Chaos, and whatever the hell the Grand Stair is. I think my complaint is that I have a snapshot; I don't have a history. I don't have any sense of how all the bits interlock, and so I don't have anything to extrapolate from.
Luckily I have a couple of months to figure it out. We're temporarily losing one player to her job until late August. So I've also been flailing around looking for something else.
Several weeks ago I read Brokenhearted, a blog post by Amy Sutedja about a really powerful role-playing experience. She'd been playing Monsterhearts. I was pretty much blown away by her post, so I picked up a PDF of the game.
Holy wow. I want to play this game SO MUCH. I mean, I'd be happy to run it, but seriously, this looks to be the framework for EXACTLY the kind of game I want to play. It is what White Wolf games wanted to be, except there was no gaming vocabulary for that in 1991. (And then they spent a dozen years layering on cruft to appeal to number-crunchy supplement-buying mass-market gamers.)
Unfortunately one of my players vetoed it. So instead I'm spending the next couple of months running Apocalypse World, a Mad-Max-type game that's the originator of the system that Monsterhearts uses. It'll be interesting enough. I think I need to reread Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon for some setting/plot ideas.
(As a side note, I'm getting a stronger and stronger suspicion that what I want out of a game and what this particular player wants do not line up well at all. Will see how the LG&S game goes.)
Ashen Stars has stopped working for me on the grounds that it takes a heck of a lot of pregame prep time if you're not running an existing scenario. I still love the universe (as do my players), I still love the half of the system that deals with investigative abilities, I'm still willing to grit my teeth and deal with the general abilities system. I'm just not willing to put in the effort to craft an entire scenario every couple of weeks. And I am seriously not confident in my ability to improvise a coherent story on that small a scale. So I've been casting around for something else.
A couple of months ago I stumbled across a Kickstarter campaign for Lords of Gossamer and Shadow,a new RPG using the rules for Amber Diceless. It's a fair question as to whether Amber or Changeling was my first great RPG love affair, but either way there was never any real question as to whether I was going to jump on this. The final draft of the edited manuscript arrived in my inbox while I was in the States, and I've read it through once or twice. I talked everyone else into playing it, and we did the attribute auction and other character creation stuff last week.
The rules are great. Mostly this is because it's a direct port of the Amber Diceless rules which were pretty great to start with. Where they've deviated it's almost universally an improvement. The ability to walk between worlds now costs 10 character points (of your initial allotment of 100) instead of 'at least 50', meaning you have more flexibility in where your points go; some of the rules for artifact creation have been cleaned up a bit; creating Domains ('Shadows') is much easier. Sorcery is a hot mess but it was a hot mess in the original and in the source material, so I can't really complain about that.
The background, on the other hand, is thin. Partly this is an unfair comparison: Amber had 1500 pages of background material, after all. (Or 700 if you're a First Series Purist, which I am if I'm running a game.) On the other hand, Amber has around a score of named NPCs. LG&S has ... eight, three of whom are wholly antagonistic. LG&S also lacks major locations in general. In my experience with Amber, personal Shadows tend to be hidey-holes, and much of the action takes place in Amber itself, or in some other equally important place. LG&S's equivalent of Amber is the Grand Stair, which is ill-suited to being a nexus of intrigue on the grounds that you can't just take it over.
This would be okay if I had something useful to work with in terms of the major Powers ... but I don't. Instead I have vague descriptions of them as essentially Order, Chaos, and whatever the hell the Grand Stair is. I think my complaint is that I have a snapshot; I don't have a history. I don't have any sense of how all the bits interlock, and so I don't have anything to extrapolate from.
Luckily I have a couple of months to figure it out. We're temporarily losing one player to her job until late August. So I've also been flailing around looking for something else.
Several weeks ago I read Brokenhearted, a blog post by Amy Sutedja about a really powerful role-playing experience. She'd been playing Monsterhearts. I was pretty much blown away by her post, so I picked up a PDF of the game.
Holy wow. I want to play this game SO MUCH. I mean, I'd be happy to run it, but seriously, this looks to be the framework for EXACTLY the kind of game I want to play. It is what White Wolf games wanted to be, except there was no gaming vocabulary for that in 1991. (And then they spent a dozen years layering on cruft to appeal to number-crunchy supplement-buying mass-market gamers.)
Unfortunately one of my players vetoed it. So instead I'm spending the next couple of months running Apocalypse World, a Mad-Max-type game that's the originator of the system that Monsterhearts uses. It'll be interesting enough. I think I need to reread Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon for some setting/plot ideas.
(As a side note, I'm getting a stronger and stronger suspicion that what I want out of a game and what this particular player wants do not line up well at all. Will see how the LG&S game goes.)
no subject
Date: 2013-06-12 05:45 pm (UTC)I picked up DW last week as well; I was expecting my one player to prefer it. He sounded more interested in AW, though. From reading through about a third of it, it seems pretty nifty, and possibly even more to my liking than 13th Age.