Monday Musing #12 🎲

Cool Ships, Hard Fights, Sharp choices and other Weird tales.

Good Monday, Gamers ☕

That cap though!!

It's been a week of Starfield and Armored Core 6 happening at my house! Max and I have both been playing Starfield. It's been good so far. It's an ARPG, nothing we haven't seen before—yet! I do love the short, strong narrative character generation. Pick a background, pick two (three?) traits. These all add to your underlying stats and skills. I went with Long-Hauler (Space Trucker), Kid's Life (Mom and Dad NPCs), Extrovert (energy management), and Neon City Rat (hometown). Interacting with my folks has been fun, figuring out my weapons style and, of course, where the rails are. It also has a nice leaderboard of stats. Out of eight game days, my character has slept two hours! Warning!! You can accidentally murder an NPC, and security comes looking for you. Then buildings, locations, and some options are locked down...or so I've heard!! Be careful out there!! I've watched Max play AC6. To be young and have time to play TWO new games simultaneously! It's pretty fantastic! The loadout options, the battle terrain, and the unfolding lore. It was like watching a show, watching him play.

Continuing my friend, Rich Rogers's SciFi OSR experiment, we played White Star RPG this week. Jet, my clone pilot, died last session, so I played his 'brother' Barrage, a mercenary clone trooper. A scoundrel of a Jedi and a blind droid pilot joined us. We took on a hazardous transport job from an old acquaintance of Barrage, which got him information on the goons that merc'd his brother Jet. As with Star Dogs, playing only one session is not enough. White Star has an order of magnitude more classes than Star Dogs, and they are pretty evocative. I need a few more sessions to know anything real. You catch those shenanigans on YouTube.

Cool, Hard, Sharp, Weird.

These are my favorite stats from Apocalypse World RPG. They are my go-to’s in early game hacking/design when I'm unsure what stats I need or don't need. These also get me out of the Str, Dex, Con paradigm, and I can always reach back and grab those if needed. I will run a series of Tomb Raider-inspired sessions for friends interested in RPGs but never played. They picked the genre, and after looking around, I figured, why am I not just using Cortex Prime for this?! Distinctions are new player-friendly, and specialties and signature assets aren't hard to grasp. For attributes: Cool, Tough, Sharp, and Strange, a genre variant of Cool, Hard, Sharp, and Weird. Tomb Raider ala Cortex Prime. I'm reading up TR lore, seeking inspiration for our sessions —I’m taking suggestions! I'll let you know how it all goes!

See you next week!