Hi! This wasn't written on the day in question; I'm backfilling here. Because I didn't start writing these until the 16th, but I decided to give it a whirl anyway.
Expect these to be a bit more brief than usual. We good? Good.
Let's blog, homies.
RPGADAY 2017 DAY 8: WHAT is a good rpg to play for sessions of two hours or less?
A couple qualifiers on this: while I know that a lot of the gaming scene has kids, and plays for short stretches on weeknights, my local group basically won't get out of bed for anything less than a five-to-six hour game, and weekend sessions are assumed to be closer to eight. I ran a game - the Star Wars-powered Mass Effect game referenced in #1 - and aside from the odd holiday or illness cancellation, it ran rain or shine for two-and-a-half years, on alternating Saturdays. That game started at 2:00 PM, and I have myself a hard cutoff point of 2 AM at which point I would not GM anymore.
It was a lot of fun, though often exhausting.
In university, however, my group was often strapped for time. So most of my thoughts should be interpreted with whatever additional context is needed there.
Anyway. Here's a couple!
It was a lot of fun, though often exhausting.
In university, however, my group was often strapped for time. So most of my thoughts should be interpreted with whatever additional context is needed there.
Anyway. Here's a couple!
 |
| Probably not surprising |
Fate games; Core and Otherwise
I've found Fate to have kind of an inverse learning curve. If someone hasn't really played tabletop RPGs before, it's incredibly easy to pick up, runs smooth, and has very little lead-up time before players feel proficient. And if someone has played a lot of traditional tabletop RPGs - D&D and the like - it can be something of a hurdle to get over.
But that's just until you've figured out how to play. Once you do, Fate's loose "scene" structure really lends itself to packing some serious content into a short time frame. Core, variants like Nova Praxis, or Diaspora, or Core-powered games like the excellent Tianxia, it's all pretty well-suited to short games. As I believe was its intent - Spirit of the Century was in many ways developed to work well for gamers with short time slots to play in. As was our next entrant:
 |
| They ain't gentle worlds, that's for sure. |
Savage Worlds
I already sang a bit of its praises yesterday1, so there's no need to repeat myself here; let's just say that I ran a game in a pizza shop once2, and after placing our order, we ran a pretty successful dungeon crawl by the time that we'd finished. People's character sheets went on 3x5 index cards, and I used my star wars maps and tokens that I had in my backpack for reasons3. If you want to combine procedural gameplay and short time frames, there's nothing else like it.
 |
| Caption included! |
Feng Shui (1 or 2)
Look, it's ridiculous. And fun, and awesome, and empowering, and... look, if you enjoy Hong Kong-style action films, I've never seen anything do a better job of capturing their feel in an RPG. Its inherent setting is silly, but can be worked with. I also ran a 3-game run of Mass Effect: Citadel Confidential, in which the players were C-Sec officers, doing hardboiled detective stuff. It didn't take much adapting to get to work, and GOOD GOLLY MISS MOLLY is it fun to play and run. FS2 takes this even farther with its awesome laminated pregens (Kickstarter money well spent, I think), which work a little bit like PbtA playbooks. They're great for short-term games; pick someone who looks awesome, because they're probably awesome, and proceed to John Woo all over things.
Pretty rad.
Killing Time
Admittedly, this type of short, punchy game is something I've been missing since moving to the land of the deep immersion simulationists4; not that my local group wouldn't even be down for this kind of thing on occasion, but it's certainly not the default. Perhaps I'll try to get something going again.
And if I do, I guess I just gave myself some decent recommendations. But I'd happily accept any more; fire off in the comments if there's something you think I missed.
Game on!
~Killstring
* * *
1 - Yesterday meaning the 21st when I wrote this on the 22nd, not in my backlog publishing. So yesterday... from the future!2 - The most excellent Rascal House in downtown Cleveland, back when they were attached to Peabody's. We had a little corner we used, and one of the managers was a big Pathfinder fan, so they were pretty cool with us geeking it up. It was also our #1 post-game stop, as when the student center closed, they'd be open for a goodly long time yet. :) Gods, I miss their feta and artichoke pizza.
3 - Good reasons!
4 - Michigan, I guess?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to discuss your thoughts! Discourse is important, but please keep it civil.
Things that are not civil: bigotry or hate speech, personal attacks and general trolling.
Things that are civil: pretty much anything else!