GPNW: Saturday Edition
Jul. 11th, 2011 11:02 amSaturday
1) Dungeon World: Friday evening I cajoled Adam into running DW during this slot, and I'm very glad that I did. Our Fighter/Thief/Cleric/Wizard party was on a mission from the local baron to track down a wayward tax collector. Little did we know that we would encounter insidious cultists of the ancient snake god! The game started a little slow as we got our feet under us (and gradually woke up fully, I think), but by midway through the personalities of the characters had fleshed themselves out nicely. Our human cleric was faithful to the god of Labor, and wasn't too picky about who everyone else worship, he just wanted to make darn sure they worshiped somebody. The halfling thief was our gregarious, friendly peacemaker, constantly trying to wheedle his way into a profit. The elven wizard was constantly analyzing, looking for weak and strong points, and making sure every base was covered before a move was made. My elven fighter was a veteran of the Great Orc Wars, seeing shadowy threats around every corner and itching to stick her spear into them sooner rather than later.
Dungeon World does a great job of building on the framework of Apocalypse World while branching out as its own thing. It retains a great classic D&D feel, while ditching a lot of the constraints of D&D (in particular the lack of player-generated content and the rigid wargame-style combat). There were definitely bits that took getting used to; in particular, Spout Lore was tricky for us at times, in that we were trying to use it to wheedle information out of the GM, when it was really intended for us to provide information to the GM. I wish we'd had another 30-60 minutes to play (or pushed to get to the point we ended at sooner so that we good move past it), but it was still satisfying, and I enjoyed it a lot.
2) Japanese TRPG Sampler: Andy Kitkowski brought a smorgasbord of "in the process of being translated" tabletop rpgs from Japan and gave us some little tastes of each. It wasn't really a gaming session, more of a seminar with examples and brief audience exercises, but I very much enjoyed the previews of all these games. In particular, I'm very excited to see Ryuutama (a feel-good "natural fantasy" game that comes across as a sort of Spice & Wolf style story engine in a Miyazaki setting) and Shinobigami (rival ninja clans fight monsters and have crazy emotional fallouts with one another in a modern setting).
3) Ghost/Echo: Adam was going to run Technoir in this slot, but he got delayed elsewhere, so Matthew Klein, Dale, and I hung out and eventually decide to give G/E a try. It went amazingly well. We played it in a GMless style, tossing the ball around for scene setting and antagonism, referring to the roll tables and name/place lists frequently. For whatever reason, the three of us were just very synced up creatively, and we created a fantastic game that was a potent combination of Inception, The Matrix, Neuromancer, and City of Lost Children which had us hopping through levels of reality fighting digital ghosts and enemy agents.
4) Technoir: Adam rescheduled our missed game here. I'd been wanting to try Technoir for a while, having read a couple versions of the beta and contributed to its Kickstarter because I love the cyberpunk genre. It was fun, but we had some mixed results. As expected, the Transmission and plot map pieces (which borrow heavily from Fiasco setup and Sorcerer-style relationship mapping) were golden, creating a quick and intricate web of interactions. However, we found (as others have) that the resolution system lacked the teeth we wanted it to have. I find the adjective-adding system neat, but conflicts feel like they're just about rolling dice until the GM decides that it's been going on long enough that the NPCs should give. It's really difficult (really, almost impossible) to decisively win anything.
As far as our actual play went, our characters were a freelance guerrilla journalist hacker, a ladder-climing pharmaco rep razorgirl, and a Luddite corrupt cop. The core of our conspiracy was a hacker dissident named Alice3, who had been jailed for unknown reasons shortly after a suspicious murder and clean-up took place. Technoir is really meant to be an ongoing game, and we only played long enough to follow a bunch of threads together to unveil the shape of the events that were occuring; we didn't actually get to do anything about it. Still, I'm happy to have gotten to play it. Thanks, Adam!