Author: Chris S.

RPGaDay 2019

Last day of this exercise, and like all of our past RPG campaigns, I don’t know how to end it.

As far as I’m concerned, all of our past campaigns are still ongoing, since we never formally ended any of them.

I had mentioned an ending to our West End Games Star Wars campaign, where my bounty hunter turned the rest of the party over to the Empire and collected the bounty.  But who’s to say that that was the last story to be told?  Maybe they escaped.  Maybe it was a setup to get into a maximum security facility to free another Rebel operative.

Heh, I just made that last one up.  Too bad we never played it out.

On that note, I hope all of your future gaming sessions are memorable ones.

Because in the end, that’s what we’ll carry with us.

RPGaDay 2019

Connections between characters can be a tricky thing to create when first starting a new RPG campaign.

In the FASA Star Trek system, we were simply assigned to a ship and that’s that.

In FASA Doctor Who, the Time Lord picked up his companions.

In D&D it was usually a meetup in a pub.

In superhero RPGs it sometimes turned out like the tryout scene in Mystery Men.

In Star Wars it’s usually an underground Rebel meeting or mission.

In our latest D&D 5e campaign the 3 PCs simple met up in town at a local tavern, along with my NPC sidekick bear.  A couple of us belong to the same backstory organization (Order of the Gauntlet).

RPGaDay 2019

RPG evolution timeline:

• The Fantasy Trip (Metagaming’s Melee/Wizard)
• Star Trek The Role Playing Game (FASA)

And then it gets fuzzy, because we jumped into Top Secret, Doctor Who, Palladium FRP, DC Heroes, Ghostbusters, Top Secret S.I., Star Wars RPG, and then dabbled in Twilight 2000, Traveller 2300, Gangbusters, Paranoia, Boot Hill, James Bond, Men in Black, and The Babylon Project.

I may have forgotten a couple or a few.

And this was all in the 20th century.

Role playing games were off the radar during the first decade of the 21st century, though we may have played Top Secret S.I. with 1:6 scale action figures as our miniatures.

After that, gaming in general simply fell by the wayside, until we started a monthly meetup back in 2012.  And then we included RPGs into the rotation, which eventually caused us to schedule a second monthly meetup for non-RPGs.

Which turned into Gloomhaven sessions.

In the past 5-6 years we’ve played:

• Dungeons and Dragons 5e
• Star Wars (Fantasy Flight Games)
• Hyperlanes
• Mutants and Masterminds
• Mighty Protectors (Villains and Vigilantes v.3)
• Traveller

And currently we’re in another D&D 5e campaign.

RPGaDay 2019

I love gaming.

‘Nuff said.

RPGaDay 2019

Our group was more apt to have a cliffhanger than actual suspense.  We rarely finished a scenario in one session, regardless of how late into the night/early morning we’d play.

One that sticks out was FASA’s “A Doomsday like Any Other”, a sequel to “The Doomsday Machine”.

Upon trying the ‘Kirk maneuver’ (i.e. blow up a ship from the inside of the maw), the crew found that we failed, and the GM stopped the adventure at that point.

Cliffhanger.

Suspense would be not revealing the result until the next session.

RPGaDay 2019

The one problem I have as a gamer is the number of ideas that have fallen by the wayside because of lack of time to really do anything with these ideas.

We had huge plans to introduce a full on galactic war with our late ’80s FASA Trek campaign.  Three of us spent a couple of hours in the back room of the old Gamemasters on Geary Blvd.   I even hung up my copy of the Star Trek maps on the magnetic board in order to visualize where the war would take place.

This was supposed to be in conjunction with a ground forces module that never came to be from FASA.

There were grand ideas for all of our systems that we played in, past and present.

I still get ideas now, but these are put on hold/permanent hiatus because of the ever-changing wants and needs of our current gaming group.

We’ve changed RPG systems so quickly due to lack of material or simply loss of interest (in my case) of playing/running a system.

And now we’re back to D&D.

RPGaDay 2019

Man, these are getting tougher.

Calamity could be what described as what happens before the big to-do that finishes up a scenario.

• The villain attacks.
• The town is about to be destroyed.
• The planet is about to explode.
• The volcano is about to erupt.

It’s what make the games worth playing, I suppose.

RPGaDay 2019

Any time our group finished a scenario felt like a triumph.

Most of the time each of the characters had a moment to shine in every session we played, so it felt like a combined success whenever we finished.

So yeah.  Triumph.  Woohoo!

RPGaDay 2019

There may have been a few times when my gaming group was genuinely surprised by something in an adventure.

• The reveal of an unexpected villain or enemy.
• The arrival of ‘the cavalry’.
• The simple face that we survived an encounter that didn’t seem survivable.

Specifics?

• One Doctor Who adventure revealed the Cybermen as the villains, to the surprise of our group.
• Things weren’t going well for our merchant crew in FASA Star Trek during a space battle, so Glenn said to me, “roll your luck,” and I started to say something about my trader captain, and then he said, “no, roll YOUR luck,” meaning my personal alter ego Star Fleet captain’s luck, which was rather high, and the odds shifted in our favor when the USS Excalibur arrived on the scene.
• see above example.  Or most if not all of our Gloomhaven sessions.

Good times.