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July 12, 2006
Some gaming comments
Categories: Words
After many fits and starts, it looks like I've finally found a group of folks to game with. A former grad student, his roomate, and my old high school friend, Jason, (who now lives in Tega Cay) and I have had two successful sessions so far. I hope to add a player or two, but everything currently working out with the smaller group.
We've been playing in a hombrew world I've been sporadically working on for awhile. The world is Old West meets Arabian Adventures meets Stephen King. There is gunpowder and magic and goblins and dwarves; a lot of the world is still mirky, but my players are helping to fill in the gaps.
Our first two sessions were played using the Risus rules. I reallyt like Risus for a lot of reasons -- the simplicity, mainly. It makes character creation easy (a big help for NPC's) and lets story and concept dictate abilities, instead of the other way around. I have found, however, that it's difficult for a lot of people (myself included) to translate cliches into abilities. Either cliches are abilities (one player had "Sneaky" at three dice) or don't go far enough in actually describing what the character can or cannot do. I've also gotten a little frustrated by combat. The ebb and flow of Risus combat is different from D&D. With "damage" potentially dealt on defense and offense, combat feels very different. There is also the narrative emphasis versus the supporting mechanics. Although a player can describe any action, there is one mechanic for resolving every action. I'm finding this a bit unsatisfying. I know different mechanics for resolving different types of actions make the game more complex, but they also make the different actions feel different, at least to me.
That's why we are going to switch to a D20 system that's basicly Grim Tales. While complex, I think it will allow the different abilites of the characters to feel different and give us more of a mechanical framework for conflcit resolution.
Posted by Nakia at July 12, 2006 09:16 AM