actual play
KapCon 2010 – Day 1
KapCon is over again for another year, and it’s proving a hard task to process back into the real world. I had another great Con with more fantastic moments than I can fit in here. › Continue reading
Dominion – I finally played this too!
Thanks to the friendly folk at Budget Board Games Singapore, I managed to finally get copy of Dominion a few weeks back. If you’re not a board game person, you’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s been one of the hottest games on the scene for the last few years. Again, wikipedia has all the history but it won the Spiel des Jahres this year (the ‘Oscars’ of board games) which basically makes it this year’s best board game. › Continue reading
Ars Magica – back on the wagon
Yeehaa! First gaming session in some time last night and it was a game I’ve wanted to play ever since I heard about it: Ars Magica.
(In the interests of fairness, I should point out that there was no wagons in the game, despite the headline and the ‘yeehaa’)
I’m not going to go into a blow by blow account of the session, but I do have a few things to say. › Continue reading
But Nobody Loses an Eye… aka, How I was re-introduced to LARPing
A few weeks ago, I spent about 3 hours in a local pre-school pretending to be a 5 year old. Normally this sort of behaviour would see me carted off to some sort of institution. However it was all in the name of utterly sane LARPing. An oxymoron? Possibly, but regardless it was stupidly good fun.
My last LARP experience was a couple of years ago at the annual KapCon LARP. I didn’t have a great amount for fun, seeing as I had no idea what to do and my character goals seemed very hard to actually achieve. So I was put off LARP somewhat, and decided it wasn’t for me.
However a friend of mine has recently spearheaded the establishment of a NZLARP chapter down here in Wellington, and the first game on the schedule was a fun 3 hour game called “But Nobody Loses an Eye”. The set up is simple. All of the characters are 5 year olds at a birthday party. It’s meant to be fun, silly and high energy and it certainly delivered.
I was Sally, the highly competitive almost marbles champion, who at 5 and a 1/4 was convinced that today was the day she was going to knock her arch-nemisis Roland off his marble champion perch. I had a bunch of other goals but that one, along with trying to convince Evelyn to take me to the Super Sparkle Princess Ice Show, where the two I focused on the most.
However having lost my marbles (in the literal sense) before the game even started it seemed that beating Roland was going to be tough. However I stuck at it and while narrowly missed out on the Ice Show I did manage to reclaim the marbles and I think convince a lot of the other kids that Roland was too much of a scardy cat to face me on the field of war!
I’ve been thinking a lot about why this LARP seemed to work for me and I’ve decided that it’s the small scale of it. The goals were clear, and seemed very achievable. There weren’t too many characters to get confused with and I was able to just channel my inner 5 year old. Though I have to admit that I don’t remember 5 being that tiring!
Will LARP now become a regular part of my gaming life? I don’t think so. But I will no longer dismiss it out of hand if the format is similar to this one.
Previously on Fall
Even though we’ve been playing in my Buffy RPG game pretty regularly I’ve been shocking at writting up the actual play reports. Luckily however, my co-player Jenni has been very good at keeping everything up and running on that front. So if you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to head on over to her blog to read up on the last 3 episodes. Expect an actual play report of episode 10 “Full House” later today.
Episode 7: Change the Channel
Episode 8: This is your brain on drugs
Episode 9: You can’t make an Omelette
Making Germans Light Up – a Power Grid actual play
With one of my recent gaming group having left for six months, my friend Duncan arriving back in Australia after 4 years and a delayed departure of me and mine for Singapore, we decided to get down and dirty with some games last night. Duncan’s a board game person and so we busted out one of Duncan’s German contraptions: Power Grid. › Continue reading
A Day of Games
Despite the recent lull in blogging things have been pretty busy on the geeking front, not least of which was my desicion to run a small, one day RPG con a couple of months ago. The reasons for this were two fold.
- There are heaps of fantastic small print games out there that I wanted to have an oppertunity to play.
- I thought that the Wellington gaming scene would respond well to an event mid year.
So I stole an idea from New Zealand’s biggest RPG con, KapCon (which is held every January), and based my Day of Games on the Games on Demand room. The deal here is that there are a group of facilitators who each agree to run certain games that they’re really excited about and then people come, vote on which games seem cool and go play. Sounds easy right?
Well as I found out this supposidly easy concept needs (not surprisingly) more organisation that I thought it would. Choosing a date in mid-May which was roughly half way between KapCon and the one of the other main RPG events in Wellington, ConFusion which is held in August was easy. As was picking the old faithful, Turnbull House for a venue. I pimped my idea on the NZRag boards to get people to come and run games and even made fliers to go into the FLGS. I kind of forgot to set up a Facebook event until a few days before but dispite that lapse the day arrived an we had a pretty good turn out, even a guy who was from the US and travelling around NZ. After some discussion I decided to do a slightly different time table. Rather than the traditional 3 hour slot I split the day into two 4 hour slots and four 2 hour slots. This way if you wanted to play in a game that required more set up you’d still get time to play.
This was kind of where my grand idea fell down a little. I had a big white board and session times/lengths all worked out, but I felt there was too much standing around waiting and discussing what would happen next. Also a number of the GMs didn’t get to play in games that they wanted to due to having to run games. So I’ve been thinking about how to smooth out those waits and give everyone the oppertunity to play if they wanted to. So here is what I’m going to do next year, assuming there is interest:
- Get a clear list of games from each GM so other GMs can indicate what they’d also like to play in.
- Set up the whole day’s timetable to begin with so if people finish their session they know where to go next and time isn’t eaten up in the short sessions with arranging things.
In terms of my own Day of Games experience it was good. I ran an awesome game of 3: 16 for three Americans who really got into their roles as Space Marines. Then I “ran” an utterly terrible session of Capes (a game I’d never read, played in or even come across before) which I thought would be an easy supers pick game but confused me and all of the players with it’s unusual conflict mechanic. However I did really like the way characters were generated. Finally I brought out Hot War and actually got to run through game creation. This was my most satisfying game of the day and made me want to play in a multi-session game of this even more.
All in all it was a good day and the comments from others made me think that it could continue to grow in the furture. So I’m thinking that Day of Games will be around for another year yet.
The Chronicles of Araeden
Further to my last post about ASIFRP house creation I’ve made a campaign page in the Campaign Files section. I’ll be adding details about the history of the world and other titbits as I come up with them. You can find it here.
House creation in A Song of Ice and Fire roleplaying
A few weeks ago my long running gaming group sat down with the new Green Ronin A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying rules to make a House and characters. I had read the rules, but not actually put them into play yet so was really looking forward to how this very collaborative part of the game panned out.
To start with the World this house is going to inhabit is not George R R Martin’s Westeros. I’d decided a while ago that as two of the players hadn’t read the books and as I wanted them to have as much freedom as they wanted to mess up the world that I’d make my own setting, which borrows very heavily from George R R Martin’s masterwork. So I filled the players in a little on what to expect, and then we lept straight in with total random rolls to let the dice decide the history of the House.
Fall – Episode 6: “Worst day ever”
I think it would be fair to say that this episode of Fall was one of the more emotionally charged sessions of roleplaying I’ve ever done. There was a fantastic amount of character development and interaction and I really felt that as a group of players we were really meshing. At one point I was really getting pushed to the edges of my gaming comfort zone and I loved every second. But enough of this waxing lyrical about the game, here is what happened. This is a long one, so I’ve hidden it behind a cut.