NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8625746" data-attributes="member: 70468">Some people are just very used to a certain style of game (whatever has dominated their experience, which is usually trad D&D), and they have trouble shifting how they need to play other types of games. I think that is just as much true for doing Story Now as it is shifting from trad D&D to OSR. I’ve seen this with my group when we tried OSE and ran a Scum and Villainy campaign.In the former, my players almost seemed to get it, but the wheels came off completely when they abandoned their excellent plan against some ghouls and tried to fight them straight up (narrator: this was a bad idea). That left a really sour taste in their mouths of the system, and I’ve had to work around it with our switch to WWN and my subsequent homebrew system. We’ve had a decent number of sessions since then (10+) but very, very little combat. I still worry that they’re going to do something ill-advised and learn that combat can still be very painful if they’re not careful. That almost happened last session when they decided to fight a banshee, but, fortunately for them, the converted banshee in advanced OSE is terrible (would use the ones from the Rules Cyclopedia next time, which is actually legitimately scary).In our Scum and Villainy game, the GM wanted with a gameplay loop like Shadowrun that was easy to prep. Consequently, our missions were bookended by meetings with our client (i.e., a Mr Johnson) who would give us the job and then the reward at the end. It took some conversation with [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] and [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] to realize we were getting drifted pretty hard away from the system’s intent (trad or possibly even neotrad). The other players weren’t quite into advocating hard for their characters either. They tended to treat it more like they were playing D&D and trying to avoid ever maxing their stress and incurring traumas. One of them mentioned to me that he wasn’t really into playing his character like driving a stolen car (as the GM had suggested we were supposed to do). However, I was.Before we had to stop, I was starting to push back against the Mr Johnson structure. In our last session, I declared we were just going to go steal some Space Drugs for our pilot (because he’d said he wanted some). The GM admitted after the session that took him by surprise, but he was able to adapt his prep (you’re not supposed to really prep for Scum and Villainy beyond your faction clocks, as far as I’m aware). It was a pretty good session, and it easily had the most consequential outcome of any of the sessions we played. We got the loot (though, to my annoyance, he still worked a Mr Johnson structure in there), but our ship was impounded. Also, my character totally failed at his downtime activities and went on a sabbatical, so I switched to our alcoholic ship’s doctor who spent most of her time passed out in one of our storage compartments. Awesome!And then we had to take a break because one of our players wasn’t able to play anymore. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😭" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f62d.png" title="Loudly crying face    :sob:" data-shortname=":sob:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /></blockquote>

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