Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Full Slate

Thursday night I played in a playtest of Tim Kirk's Derelict Delvers over IRC

Saturday I ran a playtest of Outremer.

Sunday morning I ran In Harm's Way: A Napoleonic Naval RPG over IRC.

Monday, I ran the first alpha playtest of Klaxon's Look! Up In The Sky!

Forgive me if I haven't been posting as much as normal! :D

DD is a neat pulpy space game based around exploring enormous Ancient artifacts. The current game arc revolves around trying to wrest control of an enormous kilometers long ship plunging into a heavily settled system from a Machine Empire suicide squad. Thursday's battle ended in an epic Beamblade battle between my character - a Fist of God, of the Sacrament of the Holy Flame - and a blue-skinned bioroid, while my character's partner was rescuing a seven foot tall alien princess type from torture.

Our Outremer game revolved around silencing a minstrel whose slyly malicious songs had been fueling sectarian violence in Damascus. More importantly, the party now believes the Old Man of the Mountains, the GrandMaster of Assassins, is returned form occultation, and is behind this, and the attempted kidnapping/murder of the daughter of the Prince of Galilee last week. The first half of the game was the party figuring out just before they left town that they *hadn't* caught and beaten up the minstrel already, and that he *hadn't* told us it was a personal thing between him and the Emir of Damascus. The minstrel had sung and implanted false memories into their heads, convincing them that it as all over and they should leave. The rest of the session was spent tracking him down and making sure he didn't sing again, with an elaborate ruse involving fortunetelling to capture him.

In our In Harm's Way: NN game, in the after-shock of the earthquake in Fort-de-France, the surgeon and surgeon's mate argued over whether to operate on the Governor of Martinique for a depressed skull fracture - a risky and long operation - or treat as many injured as possible. One of the ship's captains almost threw the surgeon's mate in the brig for mutiny before the surgeon agreeed to allow the mate to attempt the operation. The operation was a success, but five patients died in that time that might have lived. The process was fascinating, as both sides had valid arguments - the surgeon that more lives saved outweighed the single life of the governor, and the surgeon's mate that not all lives are equal in value, especially after such an emergency. A passionate conflict, sharply fought, with no blood shed except the operation itself. The commander of the expedition told the surgeon's mate afterward that if he had failed, he's have been flogged and drummed out of the service for disobeying orders. As it was, he should consider himself lucky.

Then L!UITS! slammed in. I ran the game even though Klax was up from Orlando. When we all created the city and the Association, we were all working towards a grim, gritty, and harsh setting - the Association was a gang, HQ'd in an abandoned subway station, with next to no money, and the opposition was the city government itself - rich, powerful, and also metahuman. Then the big dumb Nuke showed up in the first scene, and dumped six video surveillance cameras with ripped off wiring on the table. "They were just sitting there" he explained, deadpan, "No one was watching them." It turned into the funniest game I have ever run. We were howling all night as circumstance after circumstance piled up in the most absurd way possible. We weren't planning on a comedy game at all! it just happened! The game was great, with some rough spots - as expected ion the first run-through - but it's hard to separate the game itself from how much fun we had!

-clash

4 comments:

  1. I want to try L!UITS! I'm glad you are having fun in DD. I can't wait to wrap up the first arc.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I love DD! I am so glad you didn't go mechanically old school, Tim! It's got the flavor and style without the clunk. :D

    L!UITS! is, I think, going to really rock once Klax has some time. The Sentai theme is tightly woven into the game, unlike most supers games, and I think his idea of using computer gaming nomenclature for the separate paths is perfect.

    One thing that came out in the playtest is that the player characters may control their powers through unrelated skills - one character used Art to control her summoning/controlling powers, by drawing what she wanted to happen on a notebook. Another used Athletics to control Chi powers via body movement. This was not apparent from the text, and really added flavor to the game.

    -clash

    ReplyDelete
  3. Awesome.

    Oh, I'm still reading it by the way. I'm so behind. 1 note: I think healers should be slid in with buffers since "healing" is simply buffing the character too. (Or debuffing damage depending on how you look at it.)

    I know video games don't do that, but I'm surprised. It's roughly the same role just applied at a different point in time.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Actually, Klax originally had healing as a Buffer power, but then separated them, for three reasons:

    1. Buffers make you better than you were. Healers make you as good as you used to be.

    2. Buffer+Healer makes a very large, unwieldy Path. Separating them puts things on a more even footing.

    3. As you noted, Healers and Buffers are different in computer games, and putting them together loses one of the benefits of using a familiar nomenclature.

    I'll tell him your thought though! :D

    -clash

    ReplyDelete