Another
twofer today.
New RPGs
tend to come my way when Robin Farndon excitedly posts something about a
Kickstarter campaign. I also see announcements from Onyx Path since backing the
fascinating but virtually unplayable Mummy reboot(1), but for the most part
that's a matter of curiosity.
 |
| This image is relevant to so much in this post. |
Okay, I
backed the game about anthropomorphic cats, but it's a game about anthropomorphic cats(3).
In broader
terms, I get my news on game releases from social media, either because someone
(not always Robin, sometimes it's Eleanor Hingley(4)) has taken a shine to
something, or is pointing out a Lovecraftian thing to one of the serious Lovecraft
completists on my friends list, or because Grant Howitt is releasing something
new, blast his enviable blend of creativity and productivity(5).
So, before I
get lost in my own footnotes(6), on to the second question.
As is well
recorded in this blog, I don't get to game anything like as much as I would
like. In the past year, the bulk of what I've managed to play has been the
winding down of my online Fate game, Operatives of CROSSBOW, which suffered
immensely from something I commented on on Ellie's blog the other day, and in
an earlier post about letting other people design your character, which is the
ill fit between the spontaneous, near-anarchic back and forth of Fate's core
mechanics and the necessary formality that makes online video conferencing so
much better for steering committee meetings than casual chat once you involve
more than two people. The fundamental problem with CROSSBOW was embodied in the
way the players declared their action. Seven in ten times, they would begin
'can I...?' The core concept of Fate is that yes you can, if you tell us how.
Well, that
and I think one of my players had been burned once too often by GMs insisting
that anything not explicitly mentioned during the planning session – like torches,
lockpicks, a spy's pistol, or a hacker's laptop - wasn't there at all.
"All
right, so can we get one of these?"
"Do you
have an aspect called 'I'm a Spy' on your sheet(7)? Then keep going; I'll tell
you when you need to spend a Fate point to have something."
"Cool.
What about one of these?"
I'm not judging my players here. Learned
behaviours are hard to escape, is my point, and especially when you add the
social constraint of that screen and only have a fuzzy webcam image to judge
other people's responses by when they're not speaking. There is simply no way
that remote gaming of this sort will ever truly stand in for proper
tabletopping; at least until immersive telepresencing becomes a thing.
 |
| This is basically the online gaming table and I wants it. |
The only
other game I've played any of is, as I mentioned last time, Tails of Equestria, with which we are
introducing my daughter to roleplaying (well, that and Empire,) and that has
barely got going thanks to our schedules.
(1) It joins
old-school White Wolf's Wraith in the
centre of a Venn diagram of 'fascinating mechanical conceit', 'mega-high
concept' and 'there are maybe three conceivable combinations of people who could
play this without it going off the fucking chain(2).'
(2) Not that
I'm saying 'off the chain' is a necessarily bad play style, but it doesn't seem
to be what they're going for as a default.
(3) I'm
still a little disappointed that they went with Monarchies of Mau instead of presenting the cats as a communist collective
under the guiding paw of Chairman Miaow, but I suppose a working game setting was higher on their list of
priorities than a one-off pun.
(4) Very occasionally
someone else, but like... 80% from that one household. 90% if you count the
cats.
(5) Because
envy, rather than because I want him to stop producing, although if he could
slow down I might be able to afford to back more of his stuff. Or if I hadn't slipped
and backed the cats thing. Oh, Kickstarter regret! Such grief you bring me!
(6)
Seriously, they'll be in small type once I upload this, but right now they take
up pretty much the same space as the text.
(7) Yes they
did, pretty much for this reason.
No comments:
Post a Comment