The Gaming Den

So in 1 to 3 months, my usual gaming group is going to be losing a member to impending fatherhood. This presents a number of logistical challenges, but the one I want help with here is the fact that I'm probably going to be the one tapped to run a replacement game for the SR4 game he's currently running in our biweekly alteration.

The game will likely have 3-5 players, the ones I know about are:

• A player who is more familiar with every system in existence than most of the people here. He's good at cloaking his system mastery in compelling dramatic backstory and otherwise hogging the spotlight, at least when he isn't blotto on PBR.
• One "gamer girlfriend" type, who enjoys gaming, but really isn't that into system mastery, and is mainly familiar with 4e.
• (maybe)Her husband who is a long-time gamer, but somewhat lapsed due to the demands of multiple jobs and a family. He's basically a genre fiend, and while he's capable of impressive min-max, his time is severely limited (plus he runs the game this alternates with)
• Another guy I used to game with back before some of you were born, but really don't know that well currently.

Now last time I ran for this group, I did a minimal prep, hackish, slashish 4e game with a vague "massive invasion" backstory and a poorly defined world. This worked alright for the group, but had the major issue that I was not at all inspired to run it - it felt like I was phoning it in, and running the game was a damn chore. I'd rather not repeat that and want to put together something I would enjoy running.

So here're my current thoughts, mainly writing them down to have a record and think through things, but comments and suggestions are welcome:

• Fully develop the ideas listed on my "green porn setting" thread into a playable D&D world, and then run a D&D game set therein. PROS Engages my passion for world building, can run in 4e (which is probably the most familiar system to the group as a whole). CONS: A really heavy amount of upfront work needed before game could even start and my time is limited; fair-to-decent this would get into uncomfortable squick levels with some of the players involved.
• Run a mage-guild game with a setup very loosely based on the Fairy Tail Anime. All PCs are the members of a wizard's guild. People hire them to hunt monsters, lift curses and so forth. Within the guild there are teams of questors. There are other legit wizard guilds. Rivalries are a big deal, and you can have rivalries between members of a team, between teams within a guild and also between guilds. In addition to legit wizard guilds, there are also banned "Dark Guilds" full of Asus EEevil wizards. In this setting, real wizards fight by punching each other in the face a lot, often with Street-Fighter esque "Dragon Fire Punches" and "Beast Arm Transformations" but it's still punching and distinctly *not* turning Lester into Newt. PROS: This is easy to run as a mission-based game with a central guildhall and fun NPC rival foils. CONS: As everyone is a "wizard" and D&D wizards are crazy versatile and not differentiated, this needs to run in a heavily hacked 3e variant where everyone gets something like Fire Mage, White Mage or Snowscaper instead of like Barbarian, Rogue, or Druid. Otherwise it has to run in HERO or in something where I would need to do a bunch of system tweaks upfront.
• Run a world-hopping game with a setup vaguely similar to the Tsuaba Chronicle anime. The PCs have some sort of overarching collection quest that drives the campaign, they also have a dimensional travel plot device, that each PC traded their most valued possession/trait/achievement for access to.
  In each adventure arc, they arrive in a world where a piece of the rod of Eleventy Nine Parts has somehow caused things to go awry, so they need to fix whatever the trouble is, recover the Mcguffin piece and then move on to the next world. PROS: I really like the automatic backstory of "You traded what you valued most to be on this quest. Now tell us what it was and why you were so motivated as to trade it away for this?" I also find the idea of genre-bending world hopping appealing. Can probably run in any system, with any tweaks being applied for specific worlds (you're in Pokemon, here're my hasty rules for Pokeballs) CONS: This setup pretty much neccessitates keeping worlds small and monster-of-the weeky. Collection quest arcs have been way overdone.
• Put together AWoD Pittsburgh. PROS: Many players familiar with WoD concepts from the early days, I get to engage in researched and truth-is-stranger world-building. CONS: Current SR4 system game makes me want to avoid systems derived from those mechanics, unsure if some of players could grok mechanics.

I also have a feeling that parts from two or more of these idears could be combined into something more compelling, so any feedback is welcome.

If you can't decide on any long term plans, I would suggest doing theme sessions. My group had a blast with that over the summer.

IME if the predicted timeframe is 1-3 months, you can probably assume it's going to be at the short end or even less, as the guy starts phoning it in and/or others want to try something else. Assume you've got 3 weeks or something. Are any of these campaigns one you won't have set up at the end of those 3 weeks?

Well that first post ate up a full 105% of my currently available weekday game prep time. So at a limit around 800 off-the-cuff no edit, no-statblock words a day plus a bit more on weekends (when I'm not involved with family with the holidays approaching or current games), it's unlikely that I have time to do the sort of extensive pre-game prep I have done for my better games in the past and 3 weeks looks like very unlikely. The good news is that the actual due date on the kid is just over 2 months away and the holidays do funny things to gaming schedules anyway, so I probably don't need to be fully ready to go until at least January, but I do need to pick a direction and be able to talk up the game and let people make at least initial chargen choices by early to mid december.

So to sumup, my concerns are

• Game must engage me as MC
• Game must require limited amount of preparation
• Game should run in 4e or a system easy for the non-system mastery players to grok / or that I know well enough to explain things quickly mid-session.

I would go for the Green Porn thing, because I want to see that project go forward.

-Username17

How do you get blotto on PBR? That's like getting hammered on Perrier.

JigokuBosatsu wrote:How do you get blotto on PBR? That's like getting hammered on Perrier.

Boil PBR, collect alcohol fumes in distillation column, drink resulting pure ethanol product.

Oh, right.

FrankTrollman wrote:I would go for the Green Porn thing, because I want to see that project go forward.

-Username17

Here here!

And if you want ethanol just drink Everclear, although you might not like the redeye and hangover the next day. I don't touch the stuff (anymore)

JigokuBosatsu wrote:How do you get blotto on PBR?

CONSUME MASS QUANTITIES!


And based on Frank's nudge, I have been working towards the Green Porn setting for the past week. Unfortunately, when asked what they would most like to play, I got two very enthusiastic votes for "STAR WARS!" - which is not even on the list of systems I am familiar enough with to run (West End or d20 version)

People can give you the lowdown on various Star Wars gaming systems. Unfortunately, I find that people who use exclamation marks after the words "Star Wars" tend to be people who know what the T'landa Til and Sulituans are, and re genuinely weirded out when Mister Cavern doesn't have a spot for crap like that in his game. Which means unfortunately that even familiarity with the Star Wars game you are playing is insufficient to actually run an acceptable Star Wars campaign for these people.

-Username17