Friday: Ran my IDC game two days early, so that Jackie could be around. All went well, as the group “broke” the module quite nicely and fittingly, and we got to use a couple of fun FATE mechanics to good effect.
Jackie, alas, did not get an opportunity to blow things up. Though she did a great Leap out of the darkness and take down the guard with a crushing blow to the larynx bit.
Still another session away from finishing this module, though.
Saturday: Ironically, no gaming. Ironic because it was Worldwide 30th Anniversary of D&D Geek-Out Day, or something like that.
Sunday: Generated characters for Doyce’s Dogs in the Vinyard game. This seems like a tremendously fun setting, and the character generation was enjoyable (some great tropes to play with in a “Grimy and gritty paladins of the Old West, or maybe a fictionalized Utah” setting). The conflict resolution mechanic seems sound, but lengthy (some of which will, of course, come more naturally with practice, but I’m concerned it will still dominate roleplay overly much).
I look forward to some actual Walking into town and seein’ what’s what play.
First!
*this is so much fun*
One of the things that is so much fun about IDC/Spycart/FATE is the after action reports, in which you tell us how we managed to brake the Module.
I think we managed to do in every one of them so far. That will be part of the fun when you run your own Module, and to what level of detail you are going to go to to make sure we can’t brake it.
Well, you folks are always effective at braking the module, if by that you mean slowing it down and turning a 6-hour table game into a 30-hour set of sessions.
If you mean breaking the module — well, 9 times out of 10, that’s the module’s fault. 🙂 Hopefully I’ll be better at railroading anticipating your options and planning accordingly when I roll my own.
Your comments on DitV’s dice mechanic are interesting, in that I think it’s just us butting up against a “fortune at the beginning” system when we’re used to Fortune at the End (d20 and pretty much everything before about ’95), or Fortune in the Middle (Fate, Sorcerer, lots of stuff).
The end result is the same: you have something you want to accomplish, the dice roll and tell you how well that’s going to work. The unfamiliar constraint comes from the bidding: “I’m bidding crap, so I should describe something pretty ineffectual at this point.” versus “I’m making a HUGE bid, so I’m going to describe something really forceful.” Then a bit of tactics and story-movement comes in when you try to improve your situation escalate by incorporating more elements of your character into the scene.
Constraint: I like that word. You know what you want and you know what kind of firepower (your dice) you’ve got to back it up — create the result within those boundaries. Constraint can be a very powerful, focusing thing (speaking as a NaNoWriMo flashback comes over me :), done right.
(Actually, that’s alot of how Heroquest works, so we’ll have lots of opportunities to get our heads around this concept 🙂
Which, personally, I like a lot better than “I came up with something really cool sounding, but I missed after I did all that work.” (d20)
Honestly, Sorcerer works essentially the same way (get basic dice, but get more dice for tactical choices etc.), except that the order of things (Describe something that will get you more dice, then roll, then let the results of everyone’s roll interpret what finally resulted) is hard to get one’s head around — DOUBLY complicated by the simple fact that I want to play about five sessions in quick succession to really help the flow bake into my brain.
… which, back on topic, DitV doesn’t seem to require. I get it *now*, that is — it just requires a session or two get smooth.
This discussion continues over here.