Tag Archives: the hobby in all its glory and horror

Challenge Accepted

There I was, minding my own business, when a random Redditor on /r/rpg/ made me aware of the Character Creation Challenge. The TL;DR is that it’s a gamer take on the “New Year, New You” bullshit, wherein one creates and posts a new player character for every day of January.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while can probably see where this is going.

While I have maintained that level of output for a single system before (typically prepping pre-gens for convention LARPs), I think that for my first time out of the gate with this challenge, I’m going for a little more variance. Here are my self-imposed rules, which I reserve the right to violate at any time:

  • I’ll only create characters for games which I’ve run, played (play-by-post counts), playtested during development, or contributed to. Generally speaking, I’ll try to match editions, and will give preference to earlier editions, but I may need to bend this if I can’t otherwise comply with the next rule.
  • I must own a physical copy of the core rulebook.
  • I will use only material from the core book.
  • No recycling characters I’ve played (though I may recycle pre-gens I’ve written for other people if they sufficiently amuse me).
  • I’ll build each character according to rules as written. If random elements are mandatory, I’ll roll those out as written. If random elements are optional, I’ll use them to the greatest extent that makes sense.
  • Each day will feature a new game (except for one short series of deliberately-planned violations at the end of the month).

Let’s see what happens.

Favoritism

Last week’s post on go-to game systems got me thinking about the settings I love and why I love them.

My lifetime achievement award for an intricately-detailed, internally-consistent, hugely-expansive setting has rested with Blue Planet ever since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, a sci-fi frontier setting that supports a broad spectrum of campaign styles. Its fatal flaw, if there is one, is that it has no default campaign. Without a clear vision of “we’re playing to do these things,” it seems very easy for a campaign to drown in options. But hot damn, the options.

Shadowrun (at least through the end of the 3e run) is every bit as detailed as Blue Planet, and benefits from an immensely-greater number of supplements. The FASA authors and developers crafted a fantastic world that could range from noir to gonzo while remaining internally-consistent. Moreover, the setting writing is a joy to read. I’ll still go back to 1e sourcebooks just to watch the in-setting conversations reveal another slice of the world’s secrets.

For big ideas and sweeping four-color generalizations, I adore the original 7th Sea. My elevator pitch for it has always been “the coolest parts of early Renaissance Europe filtered through the lens of Disney’s The Three Musketeers.” Every nation its its own unique setting that supports a different style of play. Theah as a whole is somehow stitched together in a way that feels cohesive rather than the half-assed patchwork that could easily result from a less-skilled attempt at putting together a kitchen sink setting.

The setting in which I’d most want to be a player character is Trinity. It’s not quite utopian sci-fi – the setting has plenty of dark places and rough edges, and there are ample reminders that when we went out into the stars, the monsters we brought with us were just as bad as the ones we found. But the overall tone is hopeful. It’s a setting in which humanity is striving toward a common goal but not united, in which the world is better but has been through some really bad times within living memory, and in which PCs can fundamentally make a difference on scales from human to interstellar. (Plus, I was an intern at the Wolf while the initial development cycle was under way, so it’ll always have a place in my heart for its proximity even though I had zero involvement with it.)

The setting in which I’ve spent the most time immersed is a toss-up, but I’d have to say that Twilight: 2000 wins by a nose over the (Old) World of Darkness. I’ve spent at least an order of magnitude more time playing the WoD line. Most of my closest, longest-lasting friendships came out of those gaming groups. It’s the foundation of my body of freelance work. But T2k is the dark future of the ’80s that I found the most compelling when I was a young gamer, and I keep coming back to it over and over again. It offers me a broken world whose fires are still smoldering, where memory of the world-that-was is still alive, and in which there is a faint hope of stabilizing the downward slide and starting the generations-long recovery process. Taken to the extreme, it’s the gaming counterpart to the calling that is my second career, and the same urge to bring order from chaos is what draws me to both of them.

Like the Back of Someone Else’s Hand

This morning (that being the morning I’m writing this, not the morning of its scheduled posting), I was scrolling through the Pathfinder 2e subreddit over breakfast and ran across a post asking why readers prefer PF2 over rules-light systems. Several someones made the point which I would have made if I were going to comment: that different game systems are different tools for achieving different storytelling experiences and outcomes.

The comment thread that prompted this post, however, was this one, in which the OP expressed surprise that someone could be capable of running more than one game system without getting rules crossed up.

I had a bit of an “oh, sweet summer child” reaction to that. It never had occurred to me that this might be a problem. I’ve been collecting accumulating TTRPGs since my childhood in the early ’80s and studying and running them semi-regularly since the early ’90s. Each one still occupies a measurable amount of my brain. While I can’t claim to be able to run anything 100% off-book, the RPGs for which I could play or run tomorrow without much fumbling, unfamiliarity, or pre-session review are, off the top of my head:

  • 7th Sea (original)
  • Dungeons & Dragons (5e, 3e as a stretch)
  • Feng Shui (either edition)
  • Legend of the Five Rings (original through 4th)
  • Shadowrun (2e and 3e)
  • Spycraft (original and 2.0, including Stargate SG-1 as an intermediate member of that line)
  • Trinity (original)
  • Twilight: 2000 (v2.2 and v4)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade (original through Revised and 20th Anniversary)

At one time or another, I’ve spent enough time at the table for each of these to develop a decent familiarity with the mechanics. I can make a spontaneous rules call at the table and be fairly confident that my off-the-cuff decision will be consistent with the game as written. Of equal importance, I also know each of the settings (or genre assumptions, in the case of setting-less games like Spycraft) well enough to improvise plot and the world’s responses to the PCs’ actions.

In a pinch, I also could do passably-good GM work with the rest of the original World of Darkness (strongest in Wraith: The Oblivion, weakest in Changeling: The Dreaming), Dark Conspiracy, Earthdawn, Star Wars (WEG or FFG), and a good cross-section of the Powered by the Apocalypse family.