Fortune And Glory

RPGaDay 2019

Stuff I have plenty of:

• dice
• miniatures
• unplayed RPG systems
• imagination

RPGaDay 2019

The one game I liked playing the most was FASA’s Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, prior to the release of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The one main reason was that we were making our own contributions to the Star Trek mythos, meaningful to us and us alone.

The one character I played that I liked the most was Mackenzie Decker, captain of the Photon Duck.

The one adventure that I loved running was Gornbusters, an original adventure that I wrote myself.

The one adventure that I enjoyed playing was A Doomsday Like Any Other, a sequel to one of my all-time favorite Original Series episodes.

RPGaDay 2019

I’ve had quite a few dreams about RPGs, both in and out of character.

There was one dream about a gaming session when one of the players went berserk and started killing everyone around the table with a sword from the game we were playing.

There was another about commanding a starship as it was attacked and destroyed by Klingons.

The most disturbing was a nuclear war dream after a night of playing the Supremacy board game instead of role-playing games.  That one shook me for a few days afterwards.

RPGaDay 2019

Our one attempt at playing the Paranoia RPG was memorable only for the fact that the GM kept killing us as we tried to go through a door.

Seriously.  That’s all I remember from that gaming session.

RPGaDay 2019

Including an NPC in a party usually means having that NPC act as a guide for the PCs, in case they stray too far from the adventure path.

Not that it works all the time.  If ever.

Rarely did our parties stray far from a story line, and in most cases we the GMs managed to improvise our way back to the main story.

So the NPCs we created ended up being an extra target for the bad guys, or an additional attack for the players.

The best name I came up with for an NPC?

Nikki Paula Chambers.  Ex-Starfleet security, IIRC, and based on Shelley Long from Cheers.  But with combat proficiency.

RPGaDay 2019

In most if not all of our campaigns/scenarios, any ‘mystery’ aspect to a session was generally explained to us by the GM at the end of the adventure.

We simply were not geared toward problem solving/deduction.

There may have been exceptions, but memory fails me at the moment.

RPGaDay 2019

The one time I really played up a “friendship” in an RPG scenario was during a FASA Trek adventure, where an NPC was an old friend of one of the PCs, and through the course of the story this friend gets killed.

To emphasize how close this NPC was to the PC, I had a scene out of Top Gun where the PC had to clear out his dead friend’s quarters, and he came across the same type of photo that Maverick found of him and Goose.

The players actually muttered ‘Aw, man!’ when I described that scene.

Good times.

RPGaDay 2019

In the earlier days of gaming, my group would simply attack anything and everything we encountered.

This never changed, even as recently as the D&D campaign that we had at work.

But now I see the value of reading the room, or examining the situation, even questioning NPCs instead of killing them immediately.

Oh, how differently encounters could have gone, back in the day.

RPGaDay 2019

There isn’t an instance of a critical hit/fumble that really stands out from my gaming past.

Though I know it’s happened, in both cases.

I once rolled a natural 20 before a game session, as a test roll for a new d20.  I don’t believe it ever rolled a 20 after that.

And I know I’ve rolled a natural 1 as recently as our last couple of RPG sessions.  Maybe a natural 20 was in the mix as well.