We still play d&d every week, or at least we try to. To be honest, we’ve missed more days than we played. And since I’m being honest, 5th edition is getting stale really fast. I think it’s because the main player expansion is done via subclass specialties, which means you can’t really ever introduce new things into the game, you just keep rehashing the same old stuff. So now you have clerics with arcane spells. Sorcerors can heal. And everyone has a shadow based subclass. But I digress.
I’ve been toying around with the idea of making a table top rpg every month as a way to stretch myself and explore some creative ideas I’ve been having. Plus, I think it would be pretty cool to make a game a month for a bit (at least until I get bored of it). So I thought I’d ressurect this old blog and start up a new series. I’ll probably do some more tech stuff too if I can get back in the habit of it.
Part of the problem in playing another game other than d&d (and we have tried many times) is that it’s hard to get players to learn different games. Those big game books have a lot of nuance in them, and they take a long time. So I figured the key was to make games that could be learned quickly, say a half hour or less. Character generation has to be extremely quick, and the game can’t have too many systems at play (preferably no more than 1, though I immediately broke that rule).
So my first game of the month is Margin of Error, a sci-fi survival game that plays a bit like Pulsar. We’re playing a 3 part adventure where the players are finally winning the lottery to leave earth on a terraforming vessel bound for Rigel Alpha VI. It isn’t long before they find out that not all is as it seems. You know, typical sci-fi adventure stuff.
If you’ve ever played games like Pulsar or We Need To Go Deeper, you’ll get the gist of it. You run around the ship from room to room trying to get fight, having too many things to do and not enough players to do them. I have struggled quite a bit with games that have vehicles in them. It always feels like either the vehicle conflicts with the players for their stats, or that the players are constantly wasting their actions, by making them “I load the gun. (next turn) I fire the gun.” My solution was to use two maps. The first map is a blocky representation of the ship and the second map is the actual ship battle map. In this way, they can move around the ship to different modules that have different actions.
But then I screwed up. Partially, that’s because the game evolved. The stats I have are might, finesse, guts, wits, and renown. I was never really happy with them. In retrospect, I should have made them might, finesse, focus, science, and engineering. That would encompass ship combat and away missions, and not fall into the “social stat” trap that renown is somewhat gravitating to. It also puts this system fairly in the cyberpunk + star trek realm, which I think is fair. It may be worth shedding some ansilary items for more in-theme ones like cybernetic implants and astrometrics modules and dropping the psionic stuff.
All in all, it was a fun one-session game and the players actually wanted to keep going despite already being 30 minutes over when we stopped. Next month, I have some ideas around a real horror game, one that isn’t survival based so much as it is actual horror.
