HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
(reposted - this post used to have two additional paragraphs, but I lost them with the server crash).
When I think gaming, the first games that come to mind now are the ones I've spent a lot of time playing with Denise over the years. Foremost of course is Vampire, the game I brought her back into gaming with. Vampire consumed a huge amount of my gaming time for years - detailing extensive plots and slowly unravelling them for my players. If anything, this is the game that I can't run anymore no matter how much I love it, because I just don't have the time to develop the unliving, ever-changing setting that both my players have come to expect, and that I love to run.
But the games that I seem to next with Denise are the ones that weren't successful. There were some way back in the day, but one that stands out is Top Secret. Top Secret was one of my first RPGs after D&D (well, after D&D and Star Frontiers). We played a lot of TS back in High School and the arcane mechanics of the game amuse me greatly and were influential on how I created stats in my own AssassinX RPG. However, when I launched a new Top Secret game a few years ago with Greg and Denise, it wasn't exactly a success, and goes down forever in my collection of RPGs I won't run for Denise again.
I guess what I enjoy about the game at the mechanical level is the assumption that all characters in the game have the skills to be a spy - your ability at each skill is calculated by averaging two or more stats to get a skill level. For games with a focus on a specific genre or game style, these seems close to an optimal design choice - in a game about shooting people, you don't have characters who are penalized for never having picked up a gun before. The other thing I enjoy at the mechanical level is the obsession for detail. Each firearm in the game has different accuracy, range penalties, and so on, the detail of combat cut down to single-second combat rounds - the benefit (?) of using a percentile system is being able to assign a difference of a single percentile or two here and there. On the other hand, the system crashes to a halt in two places - melee combat (which uses a strange chart of attack style vs defensive style and determines a letter-coded result which in turn indicates a random damage roll to be made) and social interaction (where if you gang up on someone in a social situation, or offer a bribe, you are guaranteed to 'win').
I don't know if my obsession over this game is a result of me looking back on a few years of Top Secret in my youth through the rose-coloured glasses of hindsight. Either way, I have a hefty collection of classic Top Secret books and modules that will never see the light of active gaming again in the foreseeable future.
Back in the day, we of course bought the second edtion of Top Secret - Top Secret S.I. - and them promptly dropped it and went back to running the original edition. I even went out and bought some of the old TS products I was missing in the mid 90's to complete my collection, knowing full well that I would be unlikely to use them.
An interesting footnote to classic Top Secret is Haven: City of Violence, which uses a trimmed down and simplified system that is obviously directly taken from Top Secret, except reducing the range of results from percentiles to 20 - even the bizarre matrix-based melee combat system made the cut. But I'll ramble on about Haven on another day.
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About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
When I think gaming, the first games that come to mind now are the ones I've spent a lot of time playing with Denise over the years. Foremost of course is Vampire, the game I brought her back into gaming with. Vampire consumed a huge amount of my gaming time for years - detailing extensive plots and slowly unravelling them for my players. If anything, this is the game that I can't run anymore no matter how much I love it, because I just don't have the time to develop the unliving, ever-changing setting that both my players have come to expect, and that I love to run.
But the games that I seem to next with Denise are the ones that weren't successful. There were some way back in the day, but one that stands out is Top Secret. Top Secret was one of my first RPGs after D&D (well, after D&D and Star Frontiers). We played a lot of TS back in High School and the arcane mechanics of the game amuse me greatly and were influential on how I created stats in my own AssassinX RPG. However, when I launched a new Top Secret game a few years ago with Greg and Denise, it wasn't exactly a success, and goes down forever in my collection of RPGs I won't run for Denise again.
I guess what I enjoy about the game at the mechanical level is the assumption that all characters in the game have the skills to be a spy - your ability at each skill is calculated by averaging two or more stats to get a skill level. For games with a focus on a specific genre or game style, these seems close to an optimal design choice - in a game about shooting people, you don't have characters who are penalized for never having picked up a gun before. The other thing I enjoy at the mechanical level is the obsession for detail. Each firearm in the game has different accuracy, range penalties, and so on, the detail of combat cut down to single-second combat rounds - the benefit (?) of using a percentile system is being able to assign a difference of a single percentile or two here and there. On the other hand, the system crashes to a halt in two places - melee combat (which uses a strange chart of attack style vs defensive style and determines a letter-coded result which in turn indicates a random damage roll to be made) and social interaction (where if you gang up on someone in a social situation, or offer a bribe, you are guaranteed to 'win').
I don't know if my obsession over this game is a result of me looking back on a few years of Top Secret in my youth through the rose-coloured glasses of hindsight. Either way, I have a hefty collection of classic Top Secret books and modules that will never see the light of active gaming again in the foreseeable future.
Back in the day, we of course bought the second edtion of Top Secret - Top Secret S.I. - and them promptly dropped it and went back to running the original edition. I even went out and bought some of the old TS products I was missing in the mid 90's to complete my collection, knowing full well that I would be unlikely to use them.
An interesting footnote to classic Top Secret is Haven: City of Violence, which uses a trimmed down and simplified system that is obviously directly taken from Top Secret, except reducing the range of results from percentiles to 20 - even the bizarre matrix-based melee combat system made the cut. But I'll ramble on about Haven on another day.
---
About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
