Boot Hill on Grognardia

[Finarvyn]

I just happened to run into a Boot Hill retrospective on Grognardia and decided to comment there. Then I thought I'd come back here and share my comment, not because it's so insightful but because it gives highlights of my own Boot Hill experiences.

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I don't think you could call our campaigns "sustained" but BOOT HILL was one of those games we'd dust off when we had a whole bunch of folks who wanted to play because we could have such massive shootouts.

A few highlights of our games:

* Most of our sessions involved some sort of bank robbery.

* My favorite character was Marshall Jim Scott, whose primary job was to foil said bank robberies. The Marshall was as fast as greased lightin' but had a hard time hitting what he aimed at.

* We would often pause in the action to play a few hands of poker when the party hit the salloon.

* The finale of the adventure was often a huge shootout, either in Main Street or in Kevin's Bar and Grille.

* Most of those shootouts somehow involved excessive use of TNT. Often the user of said explosive took more damage than the folks he was trying to hurt with it.

* We had a rule that if your character died, and you could run into the kitchen to roll up a new one, and if the shootout wasn't done yet, you were allowed to re-enter the battle at some point determined by the Referee.

* In all my years of playing BOOT HILL, Marshall Jim Scott never died. Not once. :-)

[cadriel]

Sorry not to be more constructive here, but I read the title of "Bot Hill" and immediately pictured a robot western RPG. Can we make this happen? :-)

[Finarvyn]

Corrected. :-)

[coffee]

Ohhh, Bot Hill! Sounds like a good excuse to dust off Risus, to me...


www222.pair.com/sjohn/risus.htm

[kesher]

* We had a rule that if your character died, and you could run into the kitchen to roll up a new one, and if the shootout wasn't done yet, you were allowed to re-enter the battle at some point determined by the Referee.

That is priceless!

[Finarvyn]

We were pretty casual about the rules back then. Heck, still are now!

[Deleted]

Feb 11, 2011 20:03:05 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

We were pretty casual about the rules back then. Heck, still are now!

I hate to dig up such an old post, but with the subject matter I am hoping to get a free pass.

Boot Hill (2e) is probably my favorite of the old school RPGs (even if it was more of a war game). Over the years I have collected digital copies of each edition of the game (plus a boat load of supplements; modules, Dragon write ups, etc.) - and I still find 2e rather amazing.

Still, I was never able to convince anyone to play an actual campaign. To be honest, I never tried that hard, as we had enough fun setting up skirmish scenarios such as 'The Magnificent Seven vs. 100 Mexican Bandits' or 'Butch and Sundance vs. The Bolivian Army'.

I'm not sure if it all boils down to nostalgia, but I don't believe I ever had as much fun playing RPG-type games as I did playing Boot Hill.

[flightcommander]

Bot Hill sounds awesome! Kinda like a combination of Droids and En Garde!



;D

I never actually played Boot Hill but wish I'd had an opportunity. One of my first issues of Dragon had an article about dinosaurs in Boot Hill which I thought was awesome.

My gaming group in high school developed similar skirmish-based rpg but it was based on a sort of near-future sci-fi dystopia inspired by Blade Runner, Clockwork Orange and mid 80's hardcore punk. I so wish I still had a copy of the rules.

[Finarvyn]

No problem about dredging up old threads. We're pretty cool about it here.

Boot Hill is one of those games that can be a lot of fun if you have the right type of players, and there aren't many rules to know. There was a fold-out page that had most of the charts you need and it was only a couple of pages total. Like most of the TSR games of that era, if you are constantly looking up rules you're doing it wrong.

[thorswulf]

Bot Hill.... Didn't Paranoia have a module like that? Hmmm.... Start everybody off with average scores (Basic Robot Frame), thengive them some extra percentage points to boost some of the scores. And have a chart where they have careers (programming) listed with where those oints should go....