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

[Arken]

IMO making any Horror genre game actually scary or haunting is difficult but brilliant if managed. It's especailly difficult to try and make something frightening and chilling while having game stats entering into things all over the place, so i think that takes skill. So i agree about Ravenloft...

 

[EarthsShadow]

Where did you find out about the new Exalted books coming out? I have wanted to play a Lunar for a long time. About time I have to add.

I am going to through Demon into the mix, even though it isn't out yet from WW.

If it is like any other WW game, it will be hard to run but if possible, fun to play. Oh yeah, also add Mummy into it. Great setting, but I feel that unless your knowledge of Egypt is really great, hard to pull off.

 

[ranix65]

I know because I check up on the WW Homepage and the Exalted Compendium. They've stated already(White Wolf, that is), that Lunar comes out in Late October/November.

 

[shadow]

IMHO anything that is story heavy hard to GM properly. Moreover, it also takes the right group of players to get into the "mood". The beauty of D&D is that it is generic enough to be run as a dungeon crawl or a deep immersion storytelling game. I love the Fading Suns setting, but its hard to GM since you have to digest a lot background material and history. It's also hard to get the tone right.
The group you play with is also important. You can't portray horror, angst, etc if your players aren't in to it. I've always wanted to DM Ravenloft's Nightmare Lands but I don't know of any groups around that could properly get into it. I can't even imagine doing Call of Cthulu. I can imagine players laughing at the thought of the characters going insane by simply reading a book. ("Let's get this straight, my character's flipped out after reading some smelly old book? Yeah right!)

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Re: WEG Star wars

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.

Au contraire! It finally gained the space opera feel that it was SORELY lacking.

When people play Star Wars, they want to play characters as capable, fun, and cool as those we see in the movies. They want to be Luke, Leia, Han, Obi Wan, or Anakin (or Yoda, Vader, or Mace Windoo... but then again, only a munchkin would want to play one of them )

In the original d6 system, attaining the levels of power that these NPC's had was nearly impossible at the rate that PC's gained character points. I played a Star Wars campaign for nearly a year, and by the end, even our Jedi (who was an extremely powerful character) was only as skilled as Luke as of EPISODE 4!!!! How pathetic... compared to these demigods, the PC's were never even a match. Not to mention the piles of dice that it took to roll an attack or use advanced force powers, especially when you pile on modifiers. Combats became extremely bogged down in minutae, and although the adventures tried hard to be true to the space opera tradition, the stuff the PC's were doing never seemed to be nearly as important as what the characters in the movies were doing (even though I still like to hold up Operation: Elrood and the Dark Stryder campaign as paradigms for excellent, epic module design. I wish more D&D modules were built like these beauties- and I wish that WotC would get a clue. Tempest Feud was a disappointment in comparison.)

Now comes Star Wars d20. The original release was a bit weak, but wow was I impressed by the Revised edition. Just to see what the system could do, I kicked off a little campaign, letting all my PC's make eighth level characters and cut loose. Three players made Jedi, and one made a bounty hunter... and I ran them through the best whiz-bang action game I'd ever seen. It was Star Wars in it's PUREST FORM. They saved an empress, slaughtered hordes of drugged-up shock troopers, battled some Sith trainees, flew speeders through an urban maze, one character went over to the dark side, and they spent force points like cash on Christmas eve. It was awsome. d6 was never flexible enough to allow that. rolling a d20 and adding a modifier is much handier than rolling 12 d6's to compute a lightsaber attack, and having a Character level made scaling the challenges a whole hell of a lot easier.

Star Wars d20 is better than d6 in many ways, and much more suitable to getting at the action flavor of the movies than the original. It's not perfect- I still don't like the vehicle and starship combat rules- but it handles Jedi, force powers, personal combat, and skill use with much more elegance than the original.

My next campaign, however, is going to be a bit of a departure from the Star Wars norm- imagine if Lucas hired Neil Gaiman to write his script and David Lynch to direct... this ain't yo mama's Star Wars, that's for sure...

 

[EarthsShadow]

As for Star Wars, the reason why the d6 version simulated the feel of Star Wars (for me that is) is because I was allowed the choice to dodge, parry, and simulate that by a die roll. I will probably adapt M&M Damage Resistance roll to my future d20 star wars games and see how that goes. I think the feel of star wars will be better that way.

Not getting completely off topic...Anyone ever try Shatterzone? Good universe, clunky with the card deck in my opinion, hard to get people used to the deck system.

 

[Arclight]

I'm surprised at all the Paranoia responses. In my experience the game practically GMs itself (especially the first session).

The adventure you choose to run doesn't even matter. All first time Paranoia players are having too much fun killing one another to even notice whether or not you're a good GM or if the adventure is interesting. They're all too busy reloading!

And if any player does appear bored or - heaven forbid - starts to critique the game or your GMing skills you simply KILL THEM.

Player: "Gah?! Why did the Computer kill me?!"

GM: "You were being belligerent."

Player: "I WAS NOT!!!"

GM: "There you go again. BLAM BLAM BLAM!"


See? Easy!

 

[hong]

That's great if you're all a buch of master role-players. But every group I've been has had at least one guy who showed up just for the combat ( ::cough:: usually me ::cough:: ).

I knew there was a reason I liked you.

Well, BESIDES the killaZ Planescape parodies you did. I'm sorry to say it took me months to twig that you were THAT Becker.


Hong "buttkicker/tactician" Ooi

 

[SteelDraco]

I'd seperate this into two groups of games - those that need an excellent GM, and those that need both an excellent GM and an excellent group of players.

The first group is all about knowledge. Some games require a depth and breadth of understanding that is far above the norm for RPGs, or they just fall flat. This is mostly due to involved worlds and campaign information. I'd place Call of Cthulhu, Blue Planet, and all superhero games in this category.

CoC requires you to have a deep understanding of the Mythos before you can even start to get a campaign off the ground. It's a very nice, simple system, but if you can't get the mood of Lovecraft's works going, it's just a bad game of D&D where the characters can't defend themselves. Sure, you can run a one-shot with just a basic grasp of the setting, but to do a solid campaign requires that you've read and retained quite a bit of setting, and that you can convey the mood of that setting to your players. That's a hard thing to do, and not all GMs are up to it.

Blue Planet is just... odd. It's a very hard sci-fi game, which is not something most people are used to in gaming. The setting is very interesting and detailed, but I've never really thought of a campaign there that I would want to run for more than about a half-dozen sessions. You could play GEO Marshalls, but that loses flavor when you realize you're just in a flooded Wild West movie. You could play miners, just trying to survive, but is that enough to sustain an interesting campaign? The best one I've thought of was a Native game, where you could do stuff with both the wars between the corps (what are they called in that setting?) and the aborigines. There's a considerable amount of interesting stuff going on in the game, but I'm just not sure how a GM would make a campaign out of it. Furthermore, the rules (first edition, anyway - I haven't looked at the 2nd edition stuff) are REALLY harsh. This fits with the gritty frontier-ness of the game, but I'm not sure it would be that much fun to play. If I were to run a game of Blue Planet, I'd likely use Alternity for the rules.

I've never seen or heard of a good supers game where the GM wasn't a comic book nut. You have to be, I think, to do the genre justice. Not only that, but you have to be damn good at pacing and setting a mood, or the game just collapses. I tried running a GURPS Supers game once, and this is what happened to us. It was fun for about a month, but then everything just fell apart.

Then there are games that require a good GM AND a good group. I'd put all White Wolf games here, particularly Mage and Werewolf (though I'll admit I've not read Wraith or Changeling). In Mage, you need both players who can use the spontaneous magic rules effectively, and a GM who can control his players. This is really hard to do in a setting where the fabric of reality is about as pliable as saran wrap. For Werewolf, you need players who can get in the mood of the game. I really LOVE Werewolf, but have never seen a game of it that I would actually enjoy. Every game I've seen has just been a bunch of hack-n-slash killing sprees, and that's not what the game is about. I'd run a game of it, but I'm not sure I could do it justice. I want to be in a good Werewolf campaign before I try and run my own, 'cause I don't want to screw it up.

All horror-based games require a good GM and a good group, as well. The GM is responsible for setting the mood of the game, but the group is CRITICAL in letting the GM do that. Too many times I've seen horror games ruined by the players not helping the GM create the mood. Crack one joke in the middle of an immersive horror game, and the whole thing just comes crashing down, the tension shattered. If the group isn't into it, even the best GM isn't going to get a good horror game going.

Then, of course, there are the games that were never intended to actually be RUN. I'd put quite a few GURPS books in here (off the top of my head, Goblins, Illuminati University, Discworld, and Y2K). Human Occupied Landfill (HoL) and Og (the caveman game) fit here as well. They're fun reads, and that's pretty much it.

 

[EarthsShadow]

We forgot RIFTS. Great setting, supremely unbalanced and very hard to get players to make characters, and hard to really GM it properly because of the unbalancing involved.