Since Doppelgreener, Trogdor, and I are all in the same Saturday night group IRL, we often brainstorm stuff here, or dissect a session to understand Fate better.
I don't have anything planned right now; I haven't even been GMing in my own IRL group for the last month+, as I'm currently in the last week of five weeks of taking care of my dad on my own.
One of the reasons I'm so active on these chats is that it's something I can engage and disengage quickly and easily day or night.
GMing a chat game requires more of a constant presence than my typical "usually nearby" status.
RPGs are seriously low-profile where I am from. It's hard to find friends who want to try it, let alone meet people from around town who want to do it. I'm quite jealous of the table experiences I sometimes read about here on the site.
Mine is the only group I know of that plays something outside D&D/Pathfinder regularly, and I've had to personally find and introduce almost all those systems to my group.
Also the community's very pocketed. A lot of the gaming community is transient--military and contracted workers stationed here for just a few months or years.
I don't mind meeting strangers to start a gaming group. It's just that there is no easy way to connect with them. The only place I know of is a game retailer that hosts regular Magic The Gathering tournaments. And that's a totally different ballpark...
Our one Friendly Local Gaming Store supports itself on middle-schoolers buying Magic cards, and the owner hasn't heard of anything outside D&D and White Wolf (he's not a gamer himself, so only stocks what he's requested).
But the people I play some games with, games like "Seven Wonders". I feel they'd be good picks for an RPG. I just need to tickle them in just the right way >_>
Or Pilgrims of the Flying Temple--more obviously an RPG, but without a lot of the elements that make people lean away from the table at first (no dice, no stats, no expectation of acting out your actions or speaking in funny voices, etc).
Microscope is a game where you take turns adding events to a historical timeline.
You start with a very broad swathe of history like "The rise and fall of a machine empire" and defining its beginning and ending in general terms. Then you take turns adding events--from whole eras down to single scenes.
You can add things out of chronological order, so one turn might cast a previously-added but future event in a different light.
It's the only system I ever played prior to that, and thus the only one I felt comfortable with GMing. But we've been playing for just over a year now and the enthusiasm is notably less. So I'm thinking about taking a break and giving them the Fate system, hoping we don't completely fall apart as a gaming group.
What I fail to see from that description and what I've heard / read about Microscope, is how that can actually be fun. I guess my idea of RPG is more personal, controlling a character. When it gets too abstract or high-level "design", I'm not sure what rememorable moments will be.
mmm. Microscope has a different kind of experience goal, yeah.
You can create awesome settings which you then play more traditional games in, and the group is pre-invested in the world and doesn't need the GM to explain it and sell it.
But by itself, Microscope is about the experience of collaboration.
Each turn, one player gets to add a thing. They can't ask for help or suggestions, it's their own thing.
Humanity's survival, we learned, was only ensured when the virus mutated so it could infect them too.
(Also we started out thinking that there were dragons enslaved by humans at the start of this part of history, but then discovered it was actually the other way around.)
For me the fun of RPGs is not in having stories we can re-tell afterward. That's a bonus.
For me RPGs are about the experience of telling a story together with friends.
I think my mindset has shifted to the latter, mostly due to the fact I've been cooking up this enormous sandbox and I really wanted to see it come to fruition...
It was fun! I was good at it! My players loved exploring my worlds! ...it was a lot of work and I missed out on getting to experience my players' ideas as well as my own.
I think the real problem I have is that I keep pretending it's a sandbox, while in my head, I kind of want them to follow a certain epic story arc. And it's these contradicting factors that have been sabotaging my own game...
Toward the end of my run in D&D 3.5 I mastered the art of sandbox plotting.
I wove the threads of my planned story through the world so tightly that no matter where they went or what choices they made, they'd run into some part of the plot that would tug on other parts and make things move.
Heh. My first campaign, the party accidentally blew up the floating island my big bad villain was on, dropping him into a portal to another dimension and killing all but one of themselves, and dropping themselves into another part of the world entirely where my plot couldn't reach them.
Short Version:
Maybe P is overwhelmed by bookkeeping and it's distracting him from situational awareness. Help him make a mechanically very simple character without fiddly bits or conditionals to keep track of, so he can focus on making good choices rather than having good bookkeeping. Invite th...
I went back to my college town a couple months ago and ran games Roll For Shoes and Cthulhu Dark with him in them.
I think we differ vastly in persistence, then. I can't see myself pushing through with the current state of my Pathfinder campaign.
I feel guilty on many fronts though. I feel bad because I know at least one player really doesn't want to quit the current campaign.
Everyone has invested their time at the table, for over a year (although "only" 14 sessions or so, playing twice a month as planned is actually really hard for us to keep up).
I also feel bad because if we continue, I know at least one player who doesn't want to continue with it, as is. Either create a new character or call it quits altogether. And these people are friends of each other, I just wanna keep us together and have good fun at the table. I genuinely hope Fate can restore our faith in RPGs :P
Also, there is one person I really wish to include in the group, but quit the campaign after the second session. Because he accurately felt Pathfinder is just not his cup of tea. I think he'd do excellent in Fate (story-first), and I even see him as the GM (he's a typical story teller type of person)
I know one guy whose group decided to keep the same story and mostly the same characters, but just re-build from D&D mechanics to Fate mechanics because Fate better suited the sorts of stories they were already telling anyway.
@BESW During the climactic fight of the latest story-arc in my campaign, I actually felt like I was sabotaging my own game. They successfully threw a net over the battle-mage (who was several magnitudes stronger than them, they weren't supposed to fight him), effectively ruining every subsequent attempt for him to cast a spell (due to really bad concentration checks on my end of the screen). He dropped his wand too...
Then when a player adjacent to him wanted to pick up said wand, I made it really convoluted to do so, because I felt I needed to handle it through the rules...
First she had to make a combat maneuver to bullrush the battlemage out of his square, because that's where the wand dropped.
I started GMing because someone said I'd be good at it while I was reading a monologue from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to a group of friends.
But I just couldn't justify the fact that she wanted to crouch in her own square, and pick up a wand in the adjacent square. I ruled that her arms aren't long enough for that...
In hindsight I could've ruled that she could've done half-a-5-ft-step into the square with the battlemage (covered in a net!) grab it and go back as a move action and be done with it.
After the session I had a reflection on how I handled things and decided that maybe it's not a good idea to keep pushing the campaign forward as it's doing now...
And after a year of GMing in a very complex (in my honest opinion) system, I feel confident to GM in Fate, which I haven't even played yet, with a setting we will improvise at the table.
Like I said, I kept lieing to myself I was running a sandbox but I was absolutely dreading improvising so I tried to prepare for as many possible scenarios and "idiotic things my players could do this session" as possible. Some weeks it took me nearly 4 nights to prepare the next session....
In college I'd spend my summer and winter breaks prepping for the fall/spring campaigns, and I'd still spend at least twenty hours each week prepping for the upcoming session.
The basic premise is that everyone at the table plays a civilian or a werewolf, except for the story teller (who announces the phases).
And it's fun because you sit at a table and you have to literally close your eyes.
And if you're a werewolf, you get to open your eyes and select a target to be eaten that night. But you have to be careful not to make a sound or sudden movements because people next to you can detect you're awake.
When it becomes day, one person is eaten and the werewolves will impersonate a civilian (nobody knows who the wolves are, except the wolves themselves because they have seen each other during the night)
During the day, civilians select a person to be hung.
By most votes
This goes back and forth until the wolves are dead or all civilians are eaten.
Those are the basics, but the game can be enhanced with additional roles, like the Witch, who can wake up during the night, and chose to save someone from being eaten, or poison someone. Or the Cupid, who links two Lovers. If one Lover dies, the other dies too. (And the person playing the Cupid always picks two people who form the most non-sensical couple, so chuckles assured)
Not a true RPG, but it kind of breaks the ice for people who might be interested in that sort of stuff.
I'm having trouble coming up with videos of actual Fate gameplay. And with actual gameplay I mean table-top. There are many multi-hour videos on YouTube that feature 5 Skype faces and a lot of talking, but I kind of wanted to see table-top action (precisely for the physical organization of points and aspects question I had earlier).
Do you know where I could learn even more about how Fate is actually played?
And yes, convention plays are the type of videos I'm looking for. The Penny-Arcade videos had me laughing out loud, and got me psyched for Pathfinder in the first place.
Considering my players came from a big super-crunchy game, having that sort of "relief" may be nice, but I changed my mind about the whole "approaches instead of skills" thing, which is a bit too abstract for my liking
Core is a good balance, probably. Its skills are more comfortably familiar, and it can accommodate a wide variety of crunch levels within a single group.
These days I hack Core with some ARRPG concepts, but it's nothing really crucial.
(thanks for those sheets, i love the stunt concept in FAE, which is what i will use to explain stunts for Core, but follow the Core template to actually create them)
But given a certain situation, you could potentially re-do it multiple times in a scene. Did you mean to say to design them as such that you only can do it once per scene?
It'll average out to roughly 1 FP per scene over time, because the +2 is specific to a certain skill/action combo in a certain context.
If you use it exceptionally often, it's either too broad a context or you've manipulated the story to be able to use it more frequently.
In the former case, fiddle with it.
In the latter case--congratulations, you're engaged with the narrative and have probably created drama by ignoring your other options.
If you get a +2 to attack with the Shoot skill when using a pistol, or when fighting the Foot clan, you won't get to use it in scenes that don't involve shooting. If you're shooting the Foot clan in every scene... you've got drama.
Don't worry about it too much. Just be sure the players understand that tuning stunts is an ongoing process and if something seems like it's hogging the spotlight from others then maybe there'll be some conversation about how to make that not happen.
I'm gonna lay another potential "problem" of mine on you, so that I can pick your experience-filled brain.
There is this player who played with us for the first 2 sessions of Pathfinder, then decided this is not his cup of tea. It's the guy who thought he would be into RPGs, then found out he wasn't. But I think that he could be into RPGs, if it's the right kind. I'm thinking about re-introducing him when I launch the Fate game.
His girlfriend is currently still playing with me in the PF campaign, and she has already 'primed' him for Fate. She said his interest piqued when she mentioned to him "maybe you could even do the GMing" (since he is the storyteller type of person).
How would I go about launching this Fate game? Should I sit with this dude, prepare the first session and let him GM the first session (with me as a 'rules backup'). Or should I let him be a player the first session, then switch roles the next session? How do I handle the fact one character gets dropped and another steps in? (I don't want to 'take over' an existing character).
