General RPG discussion - whatcha playin', foo?

Mike West

Seems we do have a load of games in progress here, some specific threads too, but I wanted to talk about the p&p RPGs in general - your experiences, favorite systems, characters you play, etc.

So, on every meeting there's always someone to start first. Lately, I mostly play Vampire: the Masquerade and Legend of the Five Rings. I've been dealing in VtM and Requiem for a few years now, but L5R is kind of a new experience to me. It may seem a strange choice at first, since I'm not a big Japanese culture geek, but after first two gaming sessions I must admit it's interesting. Why? Mainly because it's new. None of my typical "make a gunslinger/fast swordsman with a lot of attitude and get ready for some wisecrackin'" approach (for some contrast, the core of my VtM coterie consists of my friend's Shirley Holmes and my Ms. Rally Smartass). My L5R character is a ronin with pretty convoluted backstory I'd rather not disclose - he's not who he says he is, some people want to kill him and the last thing he needs is drawing unnecessary attention. Mechanically, it translated near-perfectly to Dark Secret and Major Sworn Enemy disadvantages, scoring the maximum of 10 bonus character points available (not for the purpose of tweaking the shit out of him, mind you). To the rest of the party, he's "just a ronin", but when the rumors about what he supposedly did under his real name reach them, the fun's gonna start for real.

Utsanomiko

I played a rather brief impromptu game of Mutants and Masterminds earlier this week.

I had mentioned it the previous week that I had been toying with the idea of a Power Rangers style game, where the players would be normal 20-somethings given the ability to transform into a super-charged fighting team with transforming weapons (the theme of which could change every few adventures at the interest of the group), and that M&M might be flexible enough to achieve it to my eventual satisfaction. Next thing I know one of them has made a supervillain and does not want to play anything Power-Rangers related, another wants to GM a M&M game and our Dark Heresy GM elected to play it instead of running DH as planned for that night (he ended up busy with other duties and didn't show). So I went along and rolled up a villain.

I'll say there's some charming elements of the game system, namely the points-buy and the rather robust combination of special powers and skills. I'm not a fan of the probability range of a d20, but we were playing at level 14, so it was mitigated a bit. I made my villain be a super-intelligent brain within a jar, within a psychic-blasting cyborg gorilla, in a flying robotic suit. With missiles. Without a set objective from the GM, my villain took the initiative by brainstorming a fiendish ransom plot, one that would hit close to home for millions of midwesterners and paralyze them with fear and despair:

We flew to Branson Missouri and threatened to blow it up.

The Strip, the theaters, the theme park, every tourist attraction leveled to the ground if we weren't given $100 million. The opposition to face us? 'The Prism Rangers'. We wiped them out easily due to their lack of coordination and then leveled the city anyway in a missile barrage.

I think I like impromptu Star Wars D6 a bit better.

Hahnsoo1

Currently, I'm alternating between Castle Falkenstein (I'm the referee/Host) and Earthdawn (GM'ed by a friend) on weekends. Neither system gets a lot of love around these parts, but I find both to be compelling and a lot of fun. Our Shadowrun 4th Ed campaign is on hiatus (two RPGs is enough, and we wanted to start playing Earthdawn), but that was our "main" system for the past year. We use Maptools and Ventrilo to play all of our sessions (since one of us lives in Washington, I live in California, and the rest live in Indiana), and while I do miss the dice rolling and pizza, it still is a great time.

Our Castle Falkenstein campaign is Victorian Age whimsy with a lot of anachronism. Our mechanic is trying to convert the Airship so that it also becomes a Submarine (through Science!). Our mages keep drawing spells that go wild because of an errant Joker card (CF uses Playing Cards instead of Dice). Two of our characters are named after Venture Brothers characters (and it works, because it's Castle Falkenstein... this is a world where Sherlock Holmes and Captain Nemo are real people). In one of our games, one of our characters led some French Foreign Legionnaires in a rousing chorus of the French national anthem. I haven't even mentioned the mechanical crab or the undead winged mechanical rat named Cogsworth. Yeah, it's weird and wonderful and a lot of fun.

Earthdawn is probably my favorite fantasy setting for an RPG, mostly because nearly everything in the system fits with the setting. It also has a lot of ideas that were later "appropriated" by other games. Exploding die rolls make for some incredible feats at times (which swings both ways... my weaponsmith character and the warrior nearly got disemboweled by a Bone Shambler who rolled two Armor-Defeating Hits and high damage rolls in the same round), and the only stereotypical character in our group is the Elven Archer (who apparently has developed a love of sausages after we met a "sausagesmith" adept in a recent adventure).

Thanatos

This is really way too general.