Games that are fun, but need a one-in-a-million GM

[WanderingMonster]

Changeling -- Great game. Not all that hard to run as long as you grasp the concept of folklore v. children's stories.

Wraith -- Impossible to play. I've tried. It just didn't work. That said, it was a brilliant setting.

Continuum -- seems to be a lot of interest. Some should set up a PBEM. Seems it would work well that way. I'd play!

 

[Eosin the Red]

Chalk another one up to MAGE. It has an inverse rating --- the better the players the harder the game is one the GM. Other playerss can be left so very far behind.

 

[Havoc]

Mage too! Not only some players had an hard time to improvise spells, but only one grasped what the mage 'paradigm' was.

However, the campaign my players remind most fondly of is my Amber campaign (run with the Amber DRPG rules) and I liked it too It lasted for nearly two years of weekly play plus the occasional marathon week-end. Due to popular demand I try to resurected but failed miserably: no more universe shattering secret to uncover, no more extreme artifact to try out.
Anyway, for the price of two rule books, that was an extremely fun-per-dollar ratio!

 

[Zappo]

Vampire the Dark Ages - Everyone thinks it's Vampire: D&D -- hardly

Yeah, and the Redemption videogame didn't do much to dispel that idea.

 

[EarthsShadow]

Chalk another X for Mage, Changling, Wraith and Werewolf for me...I liked all of them, but finding a group of players who was capable of understanding them without comparing them to DnD was a nightmare, and once we tried any of them, it wasn't my failing as a GM with the games, it was a failing of the players to understand the system and the game worlds.

Never played Amber, or Continuum, but after looking at the website for Continuum, I won't even try with that one. Looks very hard and would require good players willing to put some effort into them.

I guess, in my personal experiences, no matter what game we played, or ran, everyone I know (not assuming anything of any of you who read this) compares every other game made to Dungeons and Dragons, and its a real shame because there are some truly wonderful games out there...but if its not DnD, or for that matter, d20, then most players just don't care, and they don't want to try. And it doesn't matter how good or talented they are.

A bummer really...

Anyone try Exalted yet??? That's another one that is hard to get people into, although its easier than most of the WoD games.

 

[Rel]

Fascinating thread.

I have run a few highly successful Mage campaigns over the years. It is a really neat, but really demanding system for both the GM and the players. I will offer a piece of advice to those who try: It is much easier to run a solo campaign with Mage than it is to run a group.

I did run a group of 4 through a lengthy campaign that had lots of really neat twists and turns but it was a LOT of work for me.

I have never played Wraith or Changeling, but I've read both and with the help of a couple of friends, I've run what could best be described as a "rules-lite one shot Changeling LARP" that was tremendous fun. A year later, one of the guys in my gaming group did the same thing based on Wraith and I got to participate. It was a really fun evening (close to Halloween) but I'd hate to have to try and run a weekly game of it.

I'd also agree that Star Wars is tough to run if you want to try and stick with the Space Opera feel of the movies. I've done it but I found that it was much easier for me if the games were short, "mini-campaigns" of 2-4 sessions rather than a full blown campaign like I prefer to run with D&D.

 

[EarthsShadow]

WEG Star wars

I found this game rather easy actually, but I was the biggest fans of the movies and we didn't pay to much attention to the rules, which there wasn't much to them actually.

But I did discover that for a deeper meaning game, SW is definately not it. I think that with the d20 version, SW kinda lost the space opera feel to it. But that's me.

 

[Oracular Vision]

Well, there isn't a DM per se, but Gnomic is a very difficult game, unless you are playing with evil genuises...

http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/Gnomic/rules.0.html

 

[Celebrim]

It's funny, we seem to be in close agreement, and alot of the same names just keep coming up, but there is one I just don't get.

WEG's SW? Hard to run? Am I the only one here that hasn't had this experience or have I just had the good fortune of knowing alot of really good SW refs?

 

[Jimmy Olsen]

It's funny, we seem to be in close agreement, and alot of the same names just keep coming up, but there is one I just don't get.

WEG's SW? Hard to run? Am I the only one here that hasn't had this experience or have I just had the good fortune of knowing alot of really good SW refs?

Naw, I love WEGs SW... dislike the D20 version, but love the WEG version. Never really had a problem running it, either, as long as the players don't try to create characters like "Uh... my character is Lance, and he lived on Tatoine, until he found out he had jedi powers..." and "Umm... I'm Tal Gala, I'm a correlian bounty hunter with a YT-1300 (did I get the designation right? Been a while since I was a die-hard SW fan), and a blaster pistol"

Which, sadly, tends to happen alot.