The awesomeness of our games

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chrismmp
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The awesomeness of our games

Post by chrismmp »

Hey folks. I just want to hear about what you're playing and what's making it awesome. If you post please let me know if it's ok to talk about it on the show.

I'm actually playing a lot of games right now:
  • Spelljammed on Stream with the FM Gamers
  • Scum and Villainy every other Wednesday with a bunch of awesome MMP folks
  • AL Eberron, the Oracle of War in a public space at a local game store every Thursday
  • Home Eberron game at my place every other Friday. It's been going on for over a year and things have been quite intense as of late with storyline ramping up and threats making their moves
  • The Black Corner playtest on every other Sunday morning at Panera with some other awesome MMP folks and show hosts.
  • Savage Worlds Eberron every other Sunday with my partner, my roommate, and GMGerrymander running for us
So there's something awesome that's different about each of these games.
  • Spelljammed is my chance to be a performer and I love preforming.
  • Scum and Villainy is a chance to play a game with one of my favorite people and dearest friends Drew Smith.
  • Al Eberron is a chance to play with new people and run games in a public space which I promised myself I'd do more of.
  • My home Eberron game is a chance for me to flex some of my creative muscles by taking a campaign that was written and improvise heavily on it.
  • The Black Corner playtest is me playing a game that I designed and am quite proud of.
  • The Savage Worlds Eberron game is a chance to play as a player in a game with my Partner of 12 years. It's been quite a lot of fun.
There are lots of other reasons these games are awesome but the ones I listed are the ones that come to mind first. What are the games you're playing and why are they awesome.
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GMGERRYMANDER
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Re: The awesomeness of our games

Post by GMGERRYMANDER »

My list is similar to [mention]chrismmp[/mention] , mostly because we are in some of the same games together. (Though not as co-players....)

Most of my games are every other week.

Scum and Villany with GM Chris, plus [mention]OldManLogan[/mention] Old Man Logan, Drew Smith, and the amazing Weregator.
- This one is awesome because I get to play in an online game with players (Drew and Gator) that I wouldn't normally play with. Plus, the story driven adventures and less-than-heroic setting lets us play as grey heroes. Chris is GMing right now, but Drew ran a PBTA game before this that was just as cool and had similar themes. Both are really talented GMS with a good sense of story and how to play on everyone;s strengths and weakness.


DCC, Long Live the Queen, The Sprawl, and whatever else [mention]dnaphil[/mention] runs for us in mini story arcs. Right now it's DCC. With OldManLogan, Dust Devil, and Gilgore, and Jim.
-First, the awesomeness is the Phil as a GM thing. Which is always fun. In addition, these are what Phil calls his "Beer and Pretzel" games and I'm getting a chance to try a bunch of different systems. DCC, especially the funnel, is a blast. Especially with a table of metalheads. Long Live the Queen was a great exercise in courtly drama and gender roles. (Though I admit I didn't enjoy the FATE part of this as much. I hope we get to try this in ONE). The Sprawl was a fun Cyberpunk-y setting that scratched my 80s itch. The players are all good at teamwork and creating situations for each other to shine. And we lean heavily into the failure and how it is interesting.

D&D Eberron with GM Chris again. I love this because I'm seeing fun ways to use D&D5E and examples of how to twist plots to include character hooks. The leading questions are amazing. Plus we stopped a major international Kerfuffle with romance and kissing. And we also went to the Realm of Madness and returned with trophies, so there is something for everyone. With OldManLogan, Jen, Dave, and THE Mark. (Who Misdirected Mark is named after).
-The player group is a different dynamic than DCC and Scum and Villany. This group plays more on the heroic side, definitely white hats, despite our assumed intentions. These heroes can be counted on to do what is right. Which I don't get in a lot of other games these days. Plus, Chris leans heavily into the interpersonal relationships the PCs have developed, making the setting into a "living" world. We CARE about the neighborhood and want to protect it.

Blue Rose with GM Jen Adcock. Romance adventure with lots of plot delving. (This season our characters are no longer Teens, so there has actually been some romance...though I'm still waiting to find a decent partner.) With Dust Devil, Shaun, Mageakyla, and the Obriens.
-This is a very different group of players (who play in Mageakyla's Savage Victorian Fantasy game on the off weeks when I am in the DD5E Eberron game). They play HEAVY on the exploration, roleplaying, and humor. Blue Rose is a pretty story-based setting to begin with, which plays well with the character designs. Plus, we are playing characters who are minor celebrities with some influence, so its fun to be in a game where you have some authority AND responsibility to drive the characters.

Savage Eberron (using Kristian Serranno's rules). I'm running a variation on the original Eberron Modules (Forgotten Forge, Secrets of the Last War, Whispers of the Vampires Blade, Voyage of the Golden Dragon, Grasp of the Emerald Claw) heavily modified to include more RP encounters and character-driven interludes. With Chris, Jen, Bridget, Shaun, Tim, and Greg. (Mageakyla and her husband were also playing, but retail schedules have made that difficult. But there are spots for them when they are ready to return.)
-This game fulfills so many of my GMing fetishes. The core playing group plays in character to a "T". The inter-character conversations, on everything from explaining metaphors to the Warjacks to the politics of the world to Clarissa's distrust of large organizations always lead to great roleplaying. And having several players who actively draw the other players into conversations makes for a great set of scenarios. Plus, this group likes to think outside the box and creative problem solving has been a regular thing.

Monthly Savage Sunday games including a Rippers Campaign. (Two stores, one in Buffalo and one in Rochester, run a once a month Savage Worlds event where you have 2-4 tables in 1-2 slots running one shots and campaigns in Savage Worlds. All of the campaigns are open to everyone. So we get people dropping in and out. One of the strengths of Savage Worlds is that starting characters and very experienced characters can be in the same adventure together without much problem. We get a lot of fun adventures, from standard settings like Deadlands and Rippers, to conversions of other games like Pathfinder and Warhammer Fantasy, to media inspired games like Ghostbusters, Men In Black, My Little Pony, Hellboy, Girl Genius, Star Wars, Stargate, Star Trek, and even original worlds and scenarios. So, we get to play a ton of cool worlds and see how the SW engine works for more than "Punch an Guy in the Face".)
-I have to admit, the Rippers campaign has been frustrating (its a Plot Point game, so not much creativity and a lot of 90s-era plotting and pacing) so I might not stick with that one. Though it has given me several topic ideas for Pandas...

But a lot of the one shots give me a chance to play with a variety of players: some I know, some who are new. And getting to play Ponies one month and Suicide Squad style villains the next is a nice change of pace.

That's my present schedule. Scum and Villany, DCC, and D&D Eberron all line up in one week while Blue Rose and Savage Eberron are on the off weeks.

And of course there are the occasional one-shots and playtests.
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Jared Rascher
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Re: The awesomeness of our games

Post by Jared Rascher »

[Definitely Okay to Discuss on the Show]

I'm having a lot of fun with my current games. Right now, I've got two games where I'm the game moderator, on alternating Fridays and Sundays, and one where I'm a player (on the other Sunday), and we also have a monthly Saturday game. The Saturday game is usually one-shots or short story arcs.

Tales of the Old Margreve, D&D 5th Edition

The Tales of the Old Margreve adventure anthology is set in an ancient forest, with the stories having a strong Eastern European horror feel to them. What's been great about this is that my group immediately went for a theme, where three of them made Bearfolk characters, and one made a halfling named Scarlett. For all of the creepy horror elements, the Bearfolk are all pretty innocent, and everyone has created reasons to care about villagers, especially children, so motivating them to investigate the evil things going on has been really easy.

I also love the contrast between the humorously naive Bearfolk against the horror elements of the story. The halfling being the savvy one has been great. There is a general theme of the fey versus eldritch horror, which has been great to play with and make a bit more evident.

Star Trek Adventures

This is a relatively new campaign. We have two players that are big Trek fans, one that is a big DS9 fan but isn't super deep into everything, and one that only really has tangential knowledge. We have been having a lot of fun with this game so far, with multiple members of the crew having suffered traumas in the past, and with a lot of the trauma keying from Wolf 359. The traumas chosen for the group really help to align with the themes I wanted to play up, which is the contrast between Starfleet's peaceful mission versus the tension against militarization, especially in the face of the threat from the Dominion.

It's been interesting relearning my pacing for this game, because in a Star Trek game, I really do need the group to be able to plan and come up with solutions with enough detail to feel "Trek," so instead of dropping action on them to spur the plot forward, what I would drop in instead is a new complication to their solutions that may angle the resolution, but isn't always a new threat, per se.

We've got a Betazoid first officer, a cyborg chief of security, a Klingon science officer, and a human engineer that died and had an experimental procedure done to upload her personality into an android, and her promotion to chief engineer was based on posthumous honors which became tricky to "reverse" based on Starfleet not having any regulations dealing with uploaded, temporarily dead crewpeople.

No one in the group wanted to play the Captain, so they got an Andorian captain that would have preferred a military posting. They have recently learned their captain is a Changeling, but they can't prove it yet. We also had a fun session resolution where each of the PCs had to testify about a mission that went wrong, providing a deposition for an admiral about a failed attempt to negotiate with Orion pirates.

This one has been a lot of fun, but it is a little more challenging for me, after running more action-oriented games for a while.

Eberron 5th Edition D&D

I'm a player in this game, and I'm playing an Orc Bard with the Anthropologist background. I was thrilled to get an opportunity to play an orc that wasn't limited to being a mentally deficient brute. Our group recently had to leave Sharn because the Changeling and my Orc burned our up front credentials to get into a location, and we had to cut a deal with the Boromar clan to get a ticket on the Lightning Rail after helping with some rival criminals. But it's okay, because right before we left Sharn, I managed to get that strange relic that I was deciphering back from the pawn shop, so I've got that going for me.

One Shots

A lot of our one-shots end up being Fate or PBTA games, but we have done a wide range of games. Our most recent one-shots were Pasión de las Pasiones and Masks. I am thrilled that my group does a good job of playing into tropes while also expanded them. For example, in our Pasión de las Pasiones game, the Employee character was in a love triangle with The Beauty and The Boss, with both the Employee and the Beauty being women.

I have wanted to get Masks to the table for a while, but two of my regular one-shot players aren't big comic book fans. When they decided to give it a shot, they loved playing into the teen tropes, and interacting with the adults in the story. Because of the way the first interaction played out with the AEGIS agent watching over the team, he went from hard-ass agent to part-time youth pastor that feels guilty about young superheroes risking their lives, trying really hard to facilitate them as much as possible while keeping them safe. We also had a Scion whose father was in a hovering super-prison that gave me the unfortunate opportunity to use my Bane from Dark Knight Rises voice for all of their interactions. It was a much bigger hit than we all expected.
Rolistespod
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Re: The awesomeness of our games

Post by Rolistespod »

I've been playing a lot of things lately.

First I was invited by my first ever TTRPG GM to join his table for a campaign. This campaign is called L'Heritage Greenberg/Greenberg Legacy. It was a campaign published first in the late 90s in the TTRPG magazine Casus Belli. It has since then been republished for another system "Chroniques Oubliées Contemporain" (apparently the same core as the one used for the announced Gotham RPG) and adapted to be set in 2016 instead of the 1990s.

Sadly, that table wasn't for me, and, as an adept of "Play Better Games", I left it after four sessions. According to the GM, "things were supposed to get really started". However, what I had realized is that my tastes have moved away from their style of play. Maybe in hindsight, it wasn't my thing either in the past.

Anyway onwards to more joyous games...

I joined a session run by Ursidice of one of his one-page gales. The game was "Supernormal" in which we played Canadian superheroes on a day off to a wedding and a synchronized swimming competition. My character was "Street Urchin". You can picture a sort of Wolverine in terms of powers but instead of claws out of his fist, stings were coming out from my whole body.

I joined Dasha from London RPG Community to play the first game she ever designed "Into the Yoncéverse". In this game, you play a group "Beyoncé" coming from different universes summoned by Blue Ivy to find Beyoncé "Prime" who has disappeared. I played "Beyoncé Survivor" who was from a Mad Max Fury Road style universe. It was great fun.

Sidenote: Grant Howitt told me on Café Rolistes that he also played this game. His character was " Beyoncé Gnomes". [mention]Senda[/mention], I think you'd love that game.

I joined a little group of French players who I knew for a while online. Turns out we had a lot of fun playing together. It's very refreshing to play not only with new people but players who want to try many indie TTTRPGs.

We started with "Becoming: A Game of Heroism and Sacrifice" which was very interesting.

You need four players, one plays the Hero while the three others take turns at playing three different Fates with different roles. We used the "Exodus" spaceship playset. I'd really like to play it again as the Hero.

The big discovery for me that evening though that evening was the platform we used to play "Miro Whiteboard Visual Collaboration Tool".

I was over the moon about it because it was the Graal that I needed to run my own game "Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying".

Since I found out about Miro, I've run the game for 20 people already. The feedback has been quite positive so I moved into purchasing art for it. I launched a Twitter account, made some announcements and I am hopeful to even run it at Origins Online (following the good advice from Jason Pitre).

Tonight, I joined a session of "Romance of the Perilous Land: A Roleplaying Game of British Folklore" run by the author Scott Malthouse himself.

So yeah. I've been having quite a lot of games lately. :D

Sidenote: My wife is also playing D&D 5e twice per week with London RPG Community and a group from work.
Rolistespod
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Re: The awesomeness of our games

Post by Rolistespod »

Oh, I forgot that I also played Ghostbusters D6 as part of Online Grogmeet and Sonja & Conan vs The Ninjas by Guillaume Jentey (who will be my guest on Café Rolistes this Friday)
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