Saturday was Madison Games Day 3 but our first time checking out the event.

Britt and I drove up to Madison a little early to check out the new location of Misty Mountain Games and, of course, ended up buying a new game: Small World (a game review will have to wait for another post or possibly my next newsletter). Afterward, we drove over the the Madison Games Day venue to grab some lunch before the event only to find that they weren’t officially open yet. Happily, the staff let us in so that we could hang out and punch Small World before most of the other gamers arrived.

Madison Games Day turned out to be a pretty hoppin’ event. I didn’t do a head-count but I would say their were upwards of 40 or more gamers hanging out and playing various RPGs and boardgames from Noon until 10pm. Britt and I ended up playing a couple games of Small World, a game of Race for the Galaxy, and a little 8-player mini-session of Diaspora in addition to hanging out and chatting with Kathleen and Kat, both of whom had a limited amount of time so they mostly just stopped by to hang out with us for bit.

It was nice way to spend a Saturday. Next time, I’ll have to lure more friends into coming and staying longer.

Friday, on the spur of a moment, we went out to dinner with Ben, Melinda, and Nicole. Lately, we’d been lamenting not seeing much of Ben and Melinda lately so when Nicole organized a social dinner by email and Ben responded Britt hooked us in as well.

Our first mistake, really, was going out to eat on a Friday night in the Beloit area without a reservation. Dining out seems to be the thing to do around here on a Friday night (maybe it’s that way everywhere . . .) so we ended up waiting an hour and a half to get a table.

Should we have bailed and gone elsewhere? Maybe but the situation probably would have been the same.

Overall, I think we had a good time despite our excessive standing around and waiting. At least we were waiting with friends and much of the conversation that we would have had during dinner instead took place while we standing around. Everything is better when you’ve got friends with you.

Last weekend we attended an enjoyable dinner party at the home of another of Beloit College’s faculty. Unlike most, this one had a theme: Film Food. The party was a potluck and the idea was that everyone brought a dish that somehow related to a film.

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This upcoming Saturday I’m planning on driving up to Madison for Madison Games Day. Since I haven’t been able to make the previous two, I’m not sure how big a crowd to expect but I’m hoping to meet folks both new and already acquainted to hang out and play some games.

Personally, I’m planning on bringing a bag full of boardgames along with my copies of Diaspora and Microscope for some RPG/Story-gamey -ness to add to the mix.

If you’re in the area and you enjoy playing games, I hope to see you there!

Starblazer Adventures is the other FATE in space game currently out there. I haven’t read it, though I own the PDF, because the thing is over 600 pages long.

I mean, I’ve read good things about it but 600+ pages? Really? I don’t want to have to read that much material to run a RPG.

I’m sure I’ll pick at the PDF here and there to see if there is anything useful in it for other FATE games but I doubt it’s going to see a lot of use anytime soon.

This was a hectic week at work. It was the first week of classes at Beloit College for the Spring semester and a very busy week for selling textbooks. I doubt it surprises anyone that those two events are connected.

This week being especially hectic caused me to think about my somewhat obsessive need to schedule and my tendency to shy away from spontaneity. (more)

Now that the holiday season is over, Britt and I are contemplating the purchase of a Playstation 3. The amusing thing is that we’re thinking about getting one, mostly, for the ability to stream Netflix on our TV with the videogames and Blueray playability as secondary concerns.

Sure, we could get one of those Roku Players (?) that would let us stream Netflix but it seems silly to have a device dedicated to the function. My logic is that we’re eventually going to want a Blueray player and also that we occasionally like to play videogames, thus PS3 makes sense.

Also, I’ve been hearing good things about Dragon Age: Origins which has made me curious to check it out.

Of course, being us, we’re not in any huge hurry to acquire a new thing. Since the main function would be streaming Netflix and we’re still pretty happy with the selection of DVDs that we can get from the library system, we haven’t just run out and bought one.

I figure it will be before the end of the year, though.

When I prepare to GM a rpg serial I spend a lot of time thinking about not just the setting but also the major NPCs. When running an Amber game that goes double largely because there is a lot less setting to consider.

The problem (and it really isn’t one) that I see with Diaspora is that the cooperative setting creation at the beginning really requires a GM to be on their toes, able to fly by the seat of their pants. (Hmm, how can I mix in more metaphors?)

Of course, ideally, the players have already provided you with plenty of hooks during character creation for you to just grab a few and go.

I really need to find a group and some time to give Diaspora a run through.

I finished reading Diaspora not long ago and one of the interesting things that it does is take the idea of cooperative character creation at the table that was in Spirit of the Century and extend that to the setting too. Players each create a planetary system in the Cluster they will be using as their setting.

It’s interesting because it creates (or should) a high amount of investment in the game for the players. This is their setting, created together, and because of that they should be interested in exploring the game all the more.

This is the same reason that Microscope jumped out at us as a great setting building tool the first time we played it, too.

The (entirely theoretical) problem that I see with both systems is that there is a lot of possibility for things to go awry if everyone isn’t in the same zone when it comes to the feel of the game that they are looking for. Of course, a lot of this problem is solved socially. Everyone just stops what their doing and talks about what they want, in terms of feel, from the game. As long as all of the participants are reasonable and capable of compromise (and why wouldn’t they be if they are friends playing a game) then solving thing socially should work just fine.

The upshot is that I’ve been thinking about shared setting design vs the solo GM design recently so I’ll probably be talking about this more later. I’m liking the sharing, not least because it also takes some pressure off the GM, but there are still things to like about the solo route.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that there are a number of ways that you could Fudge Dice with different dice pool mechanics.

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FYI, I’m taking a break from the blog for the duration of the holidays.

I plan to return to regular posting after the first of the new year. Until then, I hope you all have a happy holidays, hang out with your friends and relatives, and play lots of fun games. (That’s my plan.)

Lately, I’ve been feeling . . . rambley. I keep starting blog posts that descend in to, not nonsense, but disjointed rambling.

So, I’m taking a break.

I plan to not think about blogging or bloggery for at least this weekend. Maybe I’ll feeling like posting something next week.

I haven’t played much Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green. In Ithaca, Ben Fierce ran a brief DG game for us during an Amber hiatus and that was a good time. More recently, I ran a three or four session game of Nemesis¹ with a DG spin for Britt and James. Overall, I think fondly of the investigator-into-weirdness type of roleplaying game so it should come as no surprise that I occasionally think about running a game like that.

I think that the attraction, for me, is the feel: claustrophobic, tense, and just weird. It helps that the concept works well with a wide range of group sizes, too. If I were to run another game like this in the future, I could see myself using Nemesis again or, possibly, a modified version of FATE (which I’ve been unsurprisingly fascinated² with lately).

If I went with FATE, and I were running this hypothetical game tomorrow, I would use Spirit of the Century as the basis. I would probably shave back the number of Aspects the characters got, give them fewer Fate Points, and no more than two or three Stunts. Given more time, I’d lean toward tweaking Diaspora, the latest FATE iteration game. As I’m still internalizing Diaspora, and haven’t had a chance to play it, I can’t say whether I’d change much mechanics-wise but, from my reading, it strikes me as a better fit.

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¹ That link will take you to the free and legal download of Nemesis. It uses ORE, as seen in Godlike, Wild Talents, and Reign but, you know, free.

² Yes, I do have a serious “new, shiny” problem, especially when it comes to games.

Over the weekend we went to Wixercon II.

Wixercon is a very small, by-invitation gaming convention in the northern wilds of Wisconsin. Britt and I were kindly invited by David Miessler-Kubanek, my Intro to Amber collaborator.

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One of the problems of running an Amber serial¹  is the need for escalation and ongoing adversity. This is a problem because Amberites are powerful bad-asses who will, eventually, deal with whatever you throw at them and because as soon as Amber/The Multiverse is no longer in jeopardy there really isn’t much reason for the PCs to continue to cooperate on a regular basis.

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