Played Uncharted Worlds -- the PbtA hack to do space opera -- on Thursday night. Thursday nights are an open gaming night, at a gaming store. There's a crowd of regulars, and we get new people, too.
I managed to have fun on Thursday, but there were challenges. I've spent some time trying to figure out what parts of that were caused by a Problem Player, and which parts may've been the system.
Without further weasel words, here's my thoughts:
-- The origin + 2 career + equipment + workspace takes too damn long. Chargen is part of the game, so is done in person. I've done some lonely fun building putting together playbooks for this game since Thursday, and wouldn't ever want to do this at the table.
-- The game suffers from a lack of Hx/strings/SOMETHING that binds the characters together.
-- While a space opera hack, there's no obvious support for magical characters: second foundationers, jedis, even Troi and Spock!
-- I really like that the table decides what size ship to have.
-- Given that I want fewer, and more meaningful, decisions during chargen, I'd probably be happier with Star Wars World. Add a playbook or two to cover magic types who aren't space wizards, maybe another type of shipboard officer, and we could be in business.
-- Playbooks would also have made it easier for us to know what was up with the problem player: he wanted to be an asskicker, and that wasn't apparent to us until he flame throwered a prisoner. In SWW, he could have picked up the Trooper and it would be clear what he wants. In Dungeon World, the fighter. In Apocalypse World, the gunlugger.
-- We spent an hour and a half on chargen -- of our 3 hour game time -- and weren't finished. We didn't get to Factions basically at all.
Basically, all other children of the apocalypse have virtues that I'm not seeing here. I think the attempt to be broad in scope is a noble one, but this isn't the game for me.
And, let me be clear, this may be the game for you. Its a bit more complicated than most PbtA, and while for me that's a bug, for you it may be a feature.
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Trying to do character-creation on Thursday night gaming has pushed me hard toward pre-gens. In a convention 3-hour slot, everyone comes in having been thinking for the past half hour about what sort of game they're going to play ... with that prep-time you can, if you must, generate characters. It's still better, for a con, to pre-gen for them, but you don't have to.
ReplyDeleteThursday night, everyone comes from their day of work, or having sushi, or whatever. The choice of game is pretty chaotic, and asking them to then jump straight in to creating genre-sensible fiction without any warmup of play is just too much, in my opinion.
Tony Lower-Basch How about playbooks, like MH?
ReplyDeleteI think playbooks are a good jump start, but I've seen slow-downs, even so, once you get past the multiple-choice sections.
ReplyDeleteThink about, for instance, wrestling. People select their moves and adjust their attributes pretty much instantaneously ... then they have a lot of trouble building the network of Heat connections from one wrestler to another. And frankly, when I played, those connections appeared to be pretty much ignored in play, because they couldn't fit with what people started inventing once they were warmed up.
You've seen more of this than I have. What do you think?
Tony Lower-Basch I think that is more a problem of us than WWW -- I don't actually know the wrestling genre that well. I'm not sure any of us watch wrestling.
ReplyDeleteFor genres we know better -- whether that's demonstrated by Urban Shadows, Dungeon World, or even Monsterhearts -- I think we do a better job of keeping the fiction and game aligned right.
The other problem -- and this affects all our games -- goes to the nature of our Thursdays: We have a rotating cast, on no particular schedule. So, for WWW, I have the characters redo Heat each session, which gets further away from what's happened to the characters. If I had the same cast each week, it'd be different.
Fiasco remains one of the best for our sort of gameplay -- fast setup that generates an unstable mixture, and the act of creating the relationships generates the characters. More or less, anyway.
Getting that out of PbtA -- or any game designed for longer term play -- is really hard.
I definitely think it's about the real-world setting more than anything in the games themselves. Spending a few hours getting into the mood of Chuubo's, and making awesome characters that we'd love for months worth of sessions, would be a great deal if we then got the benefit of that over months worth of sessions. But you can be sure I'll be bringing pre-gens next time I try to run it on Thursday.
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch Yeah, the Thursday night slot is definitely limited and hard to fill. Figuring out the right games for it is -- or how to get games to finagle into the slot -- is part of the challenge.
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