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September RPG Book Club: Monsters and other Childish Things
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<blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 4466194" data-attributes="member: 2810"><p>I ran a MaOCT one-shot last Friday at LI Gameday. Overall it went pretty well -- I had some really awesome players that did a superb job of channeling their inner 13-year-old. I knew I was in for a fun evening when, as the story opened with the kids in their tree fort, one of them climbed atop it and declared himself 'King of the Tree Fort'. The others, in a fine display of revolutionary fervor, shook the tree fort until he fell off. The would-be King took a swing at one of the rebels, who retaliated with a comment about his mother, resulting in tears and recriminations. The rest of the game (and the gameday!) were filled with aspersions cast about the moral character of Cory's mom! Whether or not this says something about the emotional maturity of the average EN/CM player, I'll not hazard a guess <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue :p" data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Some thoughts about the gameplay:</p><p></p><p>1. The character sheets look simple, but are essential. The interplay of damage between monster and child means that numbers are changing all the time, and it can be really hard to keep track of. This is double so for the GM; with six kids and their monsters arrayed against six other kids and their monsters, you have more things to deal with than probably 99% of D&D games. The complexity wasn't apparent to me from just reading the book.</p><p></p><p>2. Character creation can be difficult to grasp. Normally with a one-shot I'd have pregenned the characters, but for several reasons, I wanted my players to be able to make their own characters. First, with a more traditional RPG setting, it's pretty easy to pregen archetypes that players can grasp immediately. MaOCT, though, is very much about the personality of the characters, and I thought it would be harder for the players to roleplay their character if it were just a pre-printed sheet. Second, the monster creation is free-form, and I wanted to see what the [-]twisted little minds[/-] creative players would come up with. </p><p></p><p>As this was the only game we were playing that night, and had an open-ended time frame, I thought it worth the time spent to make characters. Many of the players (and I confess, myself as well) had a hard time grasping monster creation. The guidelines in the book are a little weak, and would have benefitted from a more structured format, I think. Also, at first look, it would seem possible to create some really broken (or really gimped) monsters. For future one-shots, I intend to ask the players ahead of time to give me a physical description of their monster, and I'll create it and stat it out accordingly ahead of time.</p><p></p><p>Combat takes a long time, it seemed. A lot of this can be attributed to the combination of unfamiliarity and the effective number of combatants we had to deal with, but even so it seems to go a little slow. The 'One' system that MaOCT uses can be *very* random, and given monsters with lots of 'Tough', some of the fights seemed to drag out quite a bit.</p><p></p><p>I'll be running this again at NC Gameday, so this was invaluable experience, and quite a bit of fun as well.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Rodrigo Istalindir, post: 4466194, member: 2810"] I ran a MaOCT one-shot last Friday at LI Gameday. Overall it went pretty well -- I had some really awesome players that did a superb job of channeling their inner 13-year-old. I knew I was in for a fun evening when, as the story opened with the kids in their tree fort, one of them climbed atop it and declared himself 'King of the Tree Fort'. The others, in a fine display of revolutionary fervor, shook the tree fort until he fell off. The would-be King took a swing at one of the rebels, who retaliated with a comment about his mother, resulting in tears and recriminations. The rest of the game (and the gameday!) were filled with aspersions cast about the moral character of Cory's mom! Whether or not this says something about the emotional maturity of the average EN/CM player, I'll not hazard a guess :p. Some thoughts about the gameplay: 1. The character sheets look simple, but are essential. The interplay of damage between monster and child means that numbers are changing all the time, and it can be really hard to keep track of. This is double so for the GM; with six kids and their monsters arrayed against six other kids and their monsters, you have more things to deal with than probably 99% of D&D games. The complexity wasn't apparent to me from just reading the book. 2. Character creation can be difficult to grasp. Normally with a one-shot I'd have pregenned the characters, but for several reasons, I wanted my players to be able to make their own characters. First, with a more traditional RPG setting, it's pretty easy to pregen archetypes that players can grasp immediately. MaOCT, though, is very much about the personality of the characters, and I thought it would be harder for the players to roleplay their character if it were just a pre-printed sheet. Second, the monster creation is free-form, and I wanted to see what the [-]twisted little minds[/-] creative players would come up with. As this was the only game we were playing that night, and had an open-ended time frame, I thought it worth the time spent to make characters. Many of the players (and I confess, myself as well) had a hard time grasping monster creation. The guidelines in the book are a little weak, and would have benefitted from a more structured format, I think. Also, at first look, it would seem possible to create some really broken (or really gimped) monsters. For future one-shots, I intend to ask the players ahead of time to give me a physical description of their monster, and I'll create it and stat it out accordingly ahead of time. Combat takes a long time, it seemed. A lot of this can be attributed to the combination of unfamiliarity and the effective number of combatants we had to deal with, but even so it seems to go a little slow. The 'One' system that MaOCT uses can be *very* random, and given monsters with lots of 'Tough', some of the fights seemed to drag out quite a bit. I'll be running this again at NC Gameday, so this was invaluable experience, and quite a bit of fun as well. [/QUOTE]
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