This month, Roger and Mike look at the Yellow King Roleplaying Game, worry about being the only one who has a problem with this, and consider an Ars Magica play-by-forum game.
We mentioned the Yellow King RPG, Dreamhounds of Paris, Torg, some pages from Absinthe in Carcosa, Dungeon World, Roger’s Firefly game, Leverage, I See the Joker, and Ars Magica.
We have a tip jar (please tell us how
you’d like to be acknowledged on the show).
Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.
Mike’s Firefly captain will be relieved to know that my PC completely and utterly believed her spiel at his job interview that he was being hired by a fine upstanding crew who just needed a bit of muscle for when they encountered reavers and bandits. He’ll be shocked to discover the general level of larceny, mayhem and lax moral codes on board! 
I too, tend to play the party conscience a lot. Even in games where I’m supposed to be a hard bitten gang member I sometimes find myself going “Er, hang on a minute…” or “WTF?” at fellow PCs’ casual mayhem. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m struggling a bit to run Vampire 5e. Being the good guys and saving the universe isn’t really what lots of people play Vampire for…
I was in a playtest of the Forged in the Dark version of A | State which appeals much more than Blades in the Dark, because your gang is trying to smash the corrupt system and make the city a better place.
When I’m playing a criminal, I tend to drift towards the practical criminal: “how does this advance our goal of retiring to a nice villa in Spain” rather than “I don’t like the look of him, let’s get him”.
Excellent episode enjoyed it a lot
I was very intrigued by your descriptions of the Yellow King. I don’t think I would ever have bought it but I do want to try gumshoe sometime. I’ve also never really explored occult roleplay.
I dropped out of the vampire game that you are playing because I couldn’t process playing such an immoral stroke amoral creature
Having played with Mike very occasionally at conventions I have to agree he does tend to play the lawful good character. Loved it every time, by the way.
However I think it’s very good that somebody does that otherwise where is the counterpoint for those who play the immoral characters.
What else can be interesting is when there are two lawful good characters but their own moral codes don’t agree with each other.
I tend to play chaotic good characters and sometimes very lawful characters even lawful evil.
I have adopted the D&D alignment system for this post even though I think it’s crap for an RPG because it does make a very good short hand, doesn’t it?
I look forward to the next episode thank you Mike and Roger.
Finally got around to listen to the episode.
I too often find myself playing the rational, non-criminal PC among the chaos monkeys and ne’er-do-wells. I also play my fair share of weirdos, but they are normally not the type who look for trouble or cause trouble for the other PCs.
Perhaps all the people who find themselves doing this should get together and really confuse some GM…
The King in Yellow - my group ran the first part, and we loved 1895 Paris but our GM found the cards difficult to manage, and as players we found the modified GUMSHOE mechanics meant you very quickly ran out of points and just started failing at everything, cueing the GM to hand you more cards. Some cards are hard to get rid of, and 3 physical cards = death, 3 psychological cards = permanent insanity.
We had a break after suicidally attempting to stop Cassilda and her sister. We come back after a few months and play part 2. The modified world war is interesting, but less enjoyable then Paris.
We aimed to come back and do part 3, but coronavirus got in the way. Also, the tensions of online roleplaying meant one of our group quit and decided to play in someone else’s Runequest game rather than keep clashing with the rest of us so much.
