Category: Gaming

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.

RPGaDay 2019

Heh.

Seriously, though, our group tended to not get lost during our adventures, in any game system we played.

I attribute that more to our GMing than whatever we did for mapping.

RPGaDay 2019

In the last three (including current) D&D 5E campaigns that I’ve played, I’ve played a character with a noble background.

Thing is I’ve never really played it up, always focusing on the combat and other physical attributes of the character.

For this current campaign I decided to take “Noble: Knight” for my character’s background, instead of “Position of Privilege”.  So now I have three retainers who follow me around and do stuff for me.

I even picked up some miniatures to represent them.

I named them Kelex, Boothby, and Harcourt.

I’ll let you figure out who’s who.  I’m not sure what to do with the serving girl.