Post by Deleted on Nov 1, 2020 6:19:10 GMT -6
I haven't been involved in an actual game for about a year now. I got completely burnt out on the local D&D scene and decided to back off and find out what my actual passion in gaming was. Lately, besides studying and discussing OD&D as a concept and a set of rules, I've been interested in the burgeoning FKR movement (the phrase having been coined on these very boards by Michael Mornard some time ago) and have been exploring ways I could run a game using these principles.
Last night a Discord buddy of mine had to cancel his weekly Saturday Night D&D game (they do voice chat generally) and I suggested to him that if that time slot was still free for him and he had nothing he'd rather do, I could referee him in an impromptu session. I told him to pick a genre and character, and give me a brief description including a strength and a weakness. He chose to be a plumber named Bob in "the far future after vegan super scientists collapsed society". Okay, cool. We're going gonzo Fallout-flavored post-apocalypse. I can play along with that, especially for a one shot or micro-campaign. Right away he gave me some imagination ammunition by listing his weakness as "deathly afraid of children." It just so happened that it was All Hallow's Eve in the game world and children roamed the streets, which got Bob to duck into a back alley and hiding in the sewers under town. Great. I had a sewer dungeon premade already. Five minutes into the session and we're dungeon crawling already.
We only played for about an hour and decided to "pause" at a certain point, but he made some progress. His big lug wrench made quick work of a giant, horribly mutated cockroach and he found a treasure map in a bottle. I informed him that there's a brightly lit portion of the sewers under Brownstone (powered by makeshift generators) that are still sometimes trafficked by drug addicts and maintenance workers, and a darkened "forbidden zone" that's a good place to get yourself killed and possibly find valuable relics from before industrial collapse. He didn't quite take the bait on that one and decided his immediate goal was to traverse the familiar paths and pop up under his own shack to avoid running into any children. He does intend to follow the map to the x near the river at a later date.
Overall this was a brief but fun and informative session for me and for the player. I was adjudicating uncertain moments like the brief cockroach battle using a 2d6 dice roll, but this didn't factor into the conversation. It was a HUD-free experience for the player. The treasure in the bottle was rolled on one of my random encounter tables for the post-apocalyptic genre, which I handled using Delta's suggestion to roll for encounters once every fifteen minutes in real time. The bottle was the only time the dice decided there was an encounter. I'll be running more in this style, probably a continuation of this story and world, in about a week. That'll give me time to flesh out the sandbox a bit. It's too soon to say I objectively prefer this style to a more codified approach to gaming but it was very refreshing to focus almost exclusively on the fiction while still having a basic mechanic to adjudicate uncertainties. I'm not sure how this system would handle fantasy elements like magic, but for a slightly more grounded genre it's fine so far.
To be continued later
Last night a Discord buddy of mine had to cancel his weekly Saturday Night D&D game (they do voice chat generally) and I suggested to him that if that time slot was still free for him and he had nothing he'd rather do, I could referee him in an impromptu session. I told him to pick a genre and character, and give me a brief description including a strength and a weakness. He chose to be a plumber named Bob in "the far future after vegan super scientists collapsed society". Okay, cool. We're going gonzo Fallout-flavored post-apocalypse. I can play along with that, especially for a one shot or micro-campaign. Right away he gave me some imagination ammunition by listing his weakness as "deathly afraid of children." It just so happened that it was All Hallow's Eve in the game world and children roamed the streets, which got Bob to duck into a back alley and hiding in the sewers under town. Great. I had a sewer dungeon premade already. Five minutes into the session and we're dungeon crawling already.
We only played for about an hour and decided to "pause" at a certain point, but he made some progress. His big lug wrench made quick work of a giant, horribly mutated cockroach and he found a treasure map in a bottle. I informed him that there's a brightly lit portion of the sewers under Brownstone (powered by makeshift generators) that are still sometimes trafficked by drug addicts and maintenance workers, and a darkened "forbidden zone" that's a good place to get yourself killed and possibly find valuable relics from before industrial collapse. He didn't quite take the bait on that one and decided his immediate goal was to traverse the familiar paths and pop up under his own shack to avoid running into any children. He does intend to follow the map to the x near the river at a later date.
Overall this was a brief but fun and informative session for me and for the player. I was adjudicating uncertain moments like the brief cockroach battle using a 2d6 dice roll, but this didn't factor into the conversation. It was a HUD-free experience for the player. The treasure in the bottle was rolled on one of my random encounter tables for the post-apocalyptic genre, which I handled using Delta's suggestion to roll for encounters once every fifteen minutes in real time. The bottle was the only time the dice decided there was an encounter. I'll be running more in this style, probably a continuation of this story and world, in about a week. That'll give me time to flesh out the sandbox a bit. It's too soon to say I objectively prefer this style to a more codified approach to gaming but it was very refreshing to focus almost exclusively on the fiction while still having a basic mechanic to adjudicate uncertainties. I'm not sure how this system would handle fantasy elements like magic, but for a slightly more grounded genre it's fine so far.
To be continued later