Okay, been a lot longer than I'd intended between updates (seems to be a habitual thing). Fair warning, this is going to be a long post without a whole lot of crunchy content.
So quick update, gaming-wise I seem to be suffering from a plethora of gaming opportunities. Yeah, I know, woe is me, amirite? ;)
Don't recall if I talked about on this blog or not, but last summer a local friend of mine decided to take her third crack at being a GM, after her first two efforts went less than swimmingly. Her first effort was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer one-shot, being inspired by the Roll4It series Layla the Vampire Slayer (Season 1 is solid, Season 2 was middling at best for me; I'll include a link at the bottom of this post to the YouTube playlist if you want to check it out) which went okay and was fun, but was a little rough as nobody really knew the system all that well, so combat was a bit of a slog. Her second effort was running the WotC Saga Edition campaign Dawn of Defiance under FFG's Star Wars system, but her mistakes were having us all start at Knight Level and having a couple of players that are a struggle for experienced GMs to handle given their personalities and eagerness to go completely off the rails of what a GM has planned at the drop of a hat, both of which are bad things for a newbie GM still cutting their teeth to deal with, and the campaign came to a screeching halt after only four sessions. Third attempt was the charm, as she ran an original campaign mostly with players that were both new to the FFG system and new to RPGs in general; I was asked to help everyone make their characters as I knew the system but also wouldn't be super-pushy in terms of how they should build those characters, and while some sub-optimal choices were made, it all worked out and the players had a lot of fun before the campaign closed with a near TPK at the hands of no less than Darth Vader.
Well, her husband had an idea for a new Star Wars campaign, having learned from mistakes he made in trying to run prior campaigns, and assembled a new group (and deliberately not inviting those two problem players that caused his wife's Dawn of Defiance campaign to crash and burn), with a primary focus of us being spacers on the fringe, with a slight cant towards archaeological ventures due to one PC being an Explorer/Archaeologist. We're still in the early stages of the campaign (only about six sessions in), but it's been pretty fun and certainly has a Firefly vibe to it, with the PCs being something of an impromptu if occasionally dysfunctional family. Award for the quirkiest character in the group is undoubtedly the astromech Tech/Modder, who instead of being the classic R2-series is an even smaller model based upon artwork from the defunct mobile game Star Wars: Uprising, while most badass is the Twi'lek Hired Gun/Enforcer, who can be charming and intimidating with equal aplomb while mixing it up quite well in combat. So far the GM's mostly been running canned adventures with a few tweaks, but it's been working out for us.
For the Saturday Discord group, I wrapped up the penultimate arc of my Force and Destiny campaign, with the final session having the PCs finally square off against the Chiss Inquisitor that's been stalking them from behind the scenes and that half the PCs were terrified of facing. And to be honest, even after buffing the guy up a bit, the PCs didn't have nearly as much trouble with him, though part of that may have been my dice were not rolling all that well for him, and even with the Enhanced Nemesis rules he was still getting wailed on by the party. I know there's going to be at least one more encounter between them, but I'll need to reconsider how I approach it. Given that half the group will be at GamerNationCon 6 in a little over a month's time, we've opted to instead run some one-offs, with this Saturday (hopefully) being our first major venture into Savage Rifts. Now, to be clear I've always found the initial concept of Rifts Earth to be interesting, just that it was sadly paired with one of the most unplayable RPG systems on the planet and very quickly succumbed to radically escalating power creep, to the point that if you tried to play a class from the core book, you were hilariously outgunned by characters made using classes from the latest splats. Still, with Savage Worlds being a far more refined system and being well and truly playable, I'm curious to see how this one-shot will play out. If it goes well, we might be playing it as the pick-up system of choice for one of our recurring GMs. After that, we're doing an Age of Rebellion adventure that will eventually lead into a new AoR campaign, after the GM of our prior AoR campaign finally admitted that she had no interest or desire to pick up the old campaign. And following the AoR adventure, I'll hopefully be running an adventure (or two) using the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. I have to say, I'm liking WFRP4e, especially in how the difficulties were tweaked so that starting PCs aren't a bunch of bumbling incomps and that combats don't drag out due to the extensive whiff factor that 1e and 2e suffered from. I've got a bunch of pre-gens for my players that I rolled up using the character creation rules, and they're an interesting bunch.
I also recently decided that it was within my budget to buy a gaming console that was made this decade, and bought myself a PlayStation4, as my PlayStation2 Slim finally gave up the ghost (was having trouble reading discs and wouldn't read PS1 or PS2 memory cards). Granted, this means that most of my PlayStation library of PS1 and PS2 games I can't play anymore, but to be honest it'd been years since I'd played most of them, and frankly I'm in no hurry to play most of them again. I did buy Kingdom Hearts 3 and Spider-Man along with my new system, and did digital purchases of a few other games, notably Final Fantasy 7 and the Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 pack. I've only played a bit of KH3, but sadly the game's just not grabbing me the way first two KH console games did, and instead have been spending time playing FF7 (just got out of Midgar and into the world map) and KH1 (just arrived at Atlantis), and having fun doing so. I'd played FF7 when it came out (and had the big shocker scene spoiled by some twit) and had fun, but never really did a second complete play through. We'll see if I can make it all the way through this time, given it's been well over a decade since I lasted made the attempt. And Kingdom Hearts 1.5 is just a fun title without having what I feel are the needlessly flashy combat gimmicks that KH3 seems intent to shove down my throat. Haven't delved into Spider-Man yet, but going to try and change that over the course of the weekend.
The most recent bit of gaming news is another of my local gaming friends got a bunch of us together earlier in the year to take the old Street Fighter RPG by White Wolf out for a spin. The game is something of an old shame for the so-called "serious" White Wolf fans, as due to the nature of the source material (especially in recent years), the SFRPG is admittedly goofy, and I feel it works for the best if you embrace the goofiness and just go with it. We've only played two sessions, but they've been fun, with me playing an ex-street kid shotoclone and another player running a snooty-yet-winsome upper-class kick chick, and an alternating third player (first session had a comedic Jiu-Jitsu Hong Kong ex-cop while second one had a ghetto-fab hip-hop dance battler who was painfully stereotypical). We've finally been able to get schedules worked out enough to try playing on a more regular basis, starting with this coming Sunday, so we'll see how it works out. I kind of hope the ex-cop returns, and frankly am not the least bit sad the dance-fighter won't be making a return, but we'll see. Fair to say the GM has incorporated some house rules in character creation and advancement, allowing us to start out a lot more competent than a typical beginning SFRPG character would be. For instance, my shotoclone has watered-down versions of the Dragon Punch/Shoryuken and Hadoken attacks that I'd normally would probably not see for quite some time due to how expensive character advancement in White Wolf games are and how stingy they can be with XP awards. I have to say I'm looking forward to this, as it promises to be generally light-hearted series with our disparate team of fighters traveling the globe, having adventures and competing in various underground tournaments. There's also been some hints of sparkage between the shotoclone and the kick chick, especially given their very different backgrounds, and the lady playing said kick chick is a long-time friend that I've gamed with several times before and have had our characters in those past campaigns get into relationships, so we'll see if the UST between our latest characters ever resolves or not.
While the books are near-impossible to get, a group of fans did put together a "20th Anniversary" version compiling data from the line into one resource (sans of the stat blocks of the World Warriors or other NPCs) which can be freely downloaded. It's worth checking out, and while the combat system takes some definite getting used to (after all, the Storyteller system was not intended to be used for combat given White Wolf's disdain for combat at the time, and man does it show!), it's a fun and quirky system that if nothing else is good for one-offs of a non-serious nature.
So, that's about it for now. I'm going to get back to playing me some videogames, and see about navigating Atlantis without getting too annoyed at what I remember being frustrating controls.
Linkage
Roll4It's Layla the Vampire Slayer YouTube Playlist (Seasons 1 and 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlus4T4FXi0&list=PLefFB0SBo4P7dpxfJep-kMTK-ZlqhfIvo
Street Fighter RPG 20th Anniversary Edition
https://sfrpg.neocities.org/sf20.html
The G-File, a fan supplement for SFRPG covering fighters and moves outside of Street Fighter II
http://sfrpg.com/g-file/
