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I had a GM who was devilishly clever at playing tactical chess with us but more importantly had this giant gameworld and a massive history and culture laid out. When we started the game he gave us a choice of several time periods to play in, each slightly before/during major world events. We the PCs could influence them and change things from the 'canon' history, but that history was always ticking away in the background of what we were doing. It meant that time spent traveling or healing mattered, because you couldn't just lollygag around the countryside until you were higher level or stumbled over the right clue. It was also a 'hard' campaign where money and support were scarce and many setting elements were variously aligned against us. We knew this would be the case going in. This was probably one of the only fun adversarial GM games I've ever been in, but while the GM was very much playing against us and trying to kill us and all that, he was playing by his own rules for his creation. He also liked it when we tried to be clever versus just doing what the rules specified (ie "attack things") and talking to enemy factions was usually an option. All of those things would annoy me if handled poorly. Tabletop campaigns don't generally trigger my completionist habits the way computer games might so the time limit (which we never actually knew exactly, just that it was there) added tension rather than being an inevitable ticker down to us failing, the adversarial tactics were fun but not the GM trying to show himself as our superior, and the detailed world had pieces that interacted with each other in the background and this showed up in the game itself--it was part of the mystery we were solving. There were in fact valid IC reasons why the larger players in the setting weren't looking at what we were looking at and why they had other things to worry about. Which is to say it was a pretty good game, though alas in a heavily-houseruled 3E. I wouldn't want to play that way all the time, but it was fun for that campaign.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:01
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Kemper Boyd posted:I wrote another thing for GamerXP about history, violence and some elfgames too: http://www.gamer-xp.com/a-grim-of-thrones-rpgs-and-horrible-history/ This is a good short essay on the errors of grimdark things--I am fine with them existing as mythologized fiction much in the way I am fine with romanticized medievalism in other fantasy stories, but it irks me when people claim they are superior because of 'realism'.
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Dec 18, 2014 01:31
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I guess it's kind of hard to sort 'shovelware' as quick cash-in low effort product from 'heartbreakerish' stuff that somebody really thought was a good idea and did badly. Though it's hard to really call anything *World truly shovelware, given the size of the audience. FATE has attracted a bit more actual shoveling, since it has a higher profile and stuffing 'FATE Conversion' in as a stretch goal at least seems easy. EM has found a prime example below. occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 20:13
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FMguru posted:It was a one-man show, and that one man showed that enthusiasm for gaming and sound business sense are wholly non-correlated. Daedalus's implosion left a ton of unpaid bills, and a lot of people would like to get a piece of him if he even pokes his head up again. It's also true in other sort of niche hobbies, like various indie music scenes and all levels of pro wrestling--nerds who love their thing but aren't very business-savvy/may also be kinda criminal. I think it's just the smallness of the enterprises where one (or few) personalities have no checks.
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Dec 23, 2014 00:20
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