This month, Mike and Roger talk about games we don’t think we can run.
We mentioned: GURPS 4e Essentials and GURPS 4e Infinite Worlds at the Bundle of Holding, ending on 18 August. (And other offers coming, for which we don’t have links as I compile this.)
I played in an Ars Magica PBEM in the late 90s. After six months of emails, the group had moved from the Covenant hall to the top of a nearby hill - a total of maybe an hour of In Character play. That IC play was great, and I kept in touch with several of the other players for a long while, but in terms of actually progressing the game … The GM must have been pulling their hair out.
Avatar games - I played on (can’t remember which) back in the early 90s where the GM had started us all out according to their perceptions of us. Absolutely no chance of upsetting anyone there. Given we were told we were playing ourselves, I basically noped out of the adventure - it looked really dangerous. So I spent the play session locked up in an alien zoo as an exhibit. We didn’t play it again.
Mike mentioned that there’s an issue of ‘embarrassment’ around playing out love and sticky stuff in many gaming groups. I agree with him, but I do wonder if that’s a generational thing - especially pre and post Vampire the Masquerade.
Speaking as someone who, like many here, started playing D&D in school with my boy friends and it was largely a 1 character per person war-game, that shaped how I approached the game even now.
10+ years later, it was clear that Vampire and other WOD games (especially the LARP version, was far more attractive to women than stereotypical TTRPGs, and that games about intrapersonal drama were becoming as popular as the more stabbyfighting ahem tactical and strategic games were.
I listened to a recent episode of Orlanth Rex’s Gaming Vexes (this one I think Episode 51: Talking Tools (4) - Fiction Friction — Orlanth Rex’s Gaming Vexes — Overcast - but certainly one of the Talking Tools series) where they were discussing this exact thing and one of the contributors said that he had one gaming group that was predominantly female players in their 20’s and early 30’s and they had no problem at all with roleplaying sex, romance, and emotions.
We played a D&D avatar games in college using basically the same premise as the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. I ended up being a Thief. Suddenly, my friends and roommates stopped trusting me. I called them out on it.
Years ago, someone suggested playing an avatar game in which we were transported to another world. I said that they wouldn’t like me playing myself having a nervous breakdown and missing my wife. I know how I would react in the type of stressful situations that rpgs typically thrust upon the PCs, and it is not pretty.
Michael makes a good point about chairs in conventions. I would invite him to come to Grand Tribunal in Cheltenham in August 14th-16th so he could come and be cranky at Ars Magica players but I fear our community centre’s chairs are no better than the Freemasons.
I would love to try GURPS Transhuman Space again, but I tried running it once and it turned into accountancy in space. I have loved Traveller since childhood, but currently my play consists of one online game where we argue about lore a lot, and a very small in-person game where the GM has two players who love the game as much as he does.
Ars Magica - a lot of people try to run play by forum, play by email, etc. and given how many games collapse I suspect it’s a terrible format for most games. The only play by post games I’ve enjoyed have been relatively straightforward exploration games. If anyone has actually done any hard analysis of how forum games and the like succeed or fail, I’d like to read it.
Avatar games - any that aren’t JH Brennan’s Monster Horror Show are probably terrible He wrote that one as a light-hearted one for teenagers, and any other approach probably sucks for the reasons given by yourselves.
The failure mode I have met most often in play by forum games (mostly run by me) is bogging down in increasing levels of detail. Some day I shall try again.
Some of the things I sa back when I did a lot of play-by-post on rpol.net:
No one every said what they expected from the players. Do you approach it like a traditional live RPG, risking that things drag when ability rolls are needed? Do you approach it like group writing exercise where players have more agency but risk players getting in each others way? How does one play-by-forum?
Games that never made it far past the first scene because the GM assumed the players would do all the heavy lifting (I guess?).
Players who posted a lot (several paragraphs in a single post or just a lot of posts) versus players who posted less (perhaps a single post once a day). Getting a consistent, coherent cadence rarely happened.
I came very close to running The Yellow King, despite the difficulty of including any encounter that hadn’t been planned out long in advance, but one of the players fretted about another of the players having a nickname in questionable taste and played their X-card before we even began.
I’d love to play Ars Magica but that defeated me as it seems to have defeated many others.
I think the way to do ARS MAGICA is to do the core sessions either face to face or via chat and to expect a certain amount of off-line world building for the campaign: the working out of the months in the laboratory or the library without bringing it to the table. ‘Bluebooking’ as it is sometimes called.
It would require a GM who can take queries and work outside the needs of a regular session and yet stop the time tick getting away from the slowest players. It may be more work than I am capable of nowadays: even the best of us tend to keep session prep for most games down to a few hours just before the meeting. Our extensive experiences allows us to do things that way. Our great age forces to do it that way.
I like Ars Magica conceptually, but I’m at a loss of what the magus PCs do that isn’t just administrative or paperwork for the player. I need a bright glowing sign that says “Plot This Way” for me to get into it.
I think one of my mistakes in running AM was trying to establish new covenants. Some were built on the sites of covenants lost to Winter, but the player’s magi were always the ones in charge.
It would help plotting to have senior mages who could say unto them “Go here! Do this!”
