Once More, Into the Random Thoughs

I haven’t been very productive. I’m still stressing over various things and some nothings too. On the plus side, the changes in my work situation are making it easier for me to get more gaming in, and will hopefully let my gaming group do more and more productive gaming. Schedule clashes have been making our game sessions way too short to get to much of anything meaty, and in D&D in particular we’ve been having trouble getting through more than one encounter per session.

Liberty
The other day I ran the “Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden” scenario from Maid RPG. It was… mixed. There were two essential problems.

First, the players were in some cases drastically at odds with each other as to the tone the game should take. Two were pushing to make it exceedingly dark, one wanted love and justice to prevail over all, one was shooting for Maid RPG insanity more suitable for a random event driven game, and one was somewhere in the middle. The pre-created character backgrounds were partly at fault, as they range from a naive girl who misses her maid friends to a death row inmate who wonders why she was being punished for murdering some maids. It’s basically meant to be heroic anime cheese with an absurd premise, somewhere around Love Hina or Project A-ko, and having a GRIMDARK Alternative Black didn’t quite work with the adventure as written.

Second, it’s basically a mini-campaign worth of material. We tried to cram everything into three hours, and it felt much too rushed, railroaded, and deus ex machina-y. I could have easily expanded it into three or more sessions worth, and having the Alternative Maids journeying from the falling Osaka Geofront to Tokyo Central for the final confrontation has room for all kinds of interesting subplots which would help give the whole thing the epic feel it’s intended for.

Endgame
I’m going to Endgame Oakland‘s minicon this Saturday. I’m looking forward to playing Mouse Guard and In A Wicked Age, especially since I’ve been getting all kinds of ideas from both for Slime Story.

Carnage
I’ll be playing 3:16 with my regular gaming group on Sunday. A friend of mine is doing up space marine miniatures for us to use, and most everyone seems pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing. I already have the first session planned out, insofar as the GM needs to plan stuff out for the game.

We may finally try out The Mountain Witch some time after that.

Slime Story
I’m starting to really love this game, even thought it’s not even playable yet. It’s got my favorite bits of my favorite games, plus some nifty new stuff, plus a setting I find fascinating in its possibilities.

This thread has me wanting to add rules for “achievements“; it would certainly fit the MMO parody angle. I have to think about this more. It could be really awesome as something integral to the game, if I can make it work right.

4 thoughts on “Once More, Into the Random Thoughs”

I personally can’t see how the achievements would work as straight “The book says Do X, Get this achievement” things. It would mostly consist of players going in the book and just doing those things in game to get the achievements.

Now if they were custom made for particular adventures to encourage certain styles, experimentation or growth and provided some kind of bonus that was set in the book (meaning the GM has to make a context and use it)
maybe forcing a PC to have only a limited amount of these “achievement badges” in use, might work.

Well, it’d be more a GM-side version of the Keys from The Shadow of Yesterday/Solar System (XP for specific in-game stuff), probably with some stuff built-in, and some considerable leeway for the GM/group to customize depending on what the game is about and where it takes place.

The thread I linked to has a crapload of neat ideas about the whole concept.

Some of the idea of achievements in the first place is that they’re a trope of OCD MMO behavior. Having your players wanting to get the achievements ‘just because they can’ is quite fitting to the idea in the first place. It would become a carrot you can then use to get the players to do what you want them to.