Monday Musings #11
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Monday Musings #11
Star Dogs, practice swings and DriveThru sales data
Good Monday, gamer 🛡️
I've got a couple of practice games in for 5E before scheduling it up on StartPlaying.games. I, too, get anxious about running games in general - even for folks I already know. Running practice sessions also highlights how and where future sessions might spend their time. It also lets me see the rough spots in applying mechanics, fiction, and, of course, player surprises. I'll run practice sessions, especially for one-shot scenarios.
Prepping the city of Neverwinter led me down the rabbit hole of Thay and a conversation I had long ago about running a Burning Wheel game set in Thay or around some wizards of Thay. I need to move on this.
I played Star Dogs in Rich Rogers's Star Wars as OSR experiment. He's running five OSR-ish Sci-Fi games re-skinned as Star Wars. I the time after Return of the Jedi and Before The Mandalorian —a nice sweet spot! I played a Clone Trooper Pilot with the bane "Poor Shot," which disadvantaged all my range attacks! In true OSR fashion, my Clone pilot died during a smuggling job. But his brother, another Clone, a mercenary, will be here next session to find out what happened to his brother!!
The Indie RPG Newsletter drops The Numbers for us this week! Good insights from DriveThru sales data.
I spent a good deal of the week working on Wizard Time! My current elevator pitch is: "It's a CRPG sandbox where you play a Vancian-inspired wizard in the last age of magic." I've played around with DragonRuby, Lua, and the Defold game engine. I decided to move on to using C++. The other frameworks were fun, and I might return to Defold for a few other projects. C++ I have decades of experience in C++ and can move quicker using it. The hurdle has been finding reference material made for programmers who aren't beginners. What tickles me is the dialog about game design infrastructure, which reminds me of our RPG hobby dialogs about game design and what is trad gaming vs. OSR.
See you next week!