Good Monday Adventurers,
My admission of cranky reluctance to play Under Hollow Hills resonated and started scattered conversations about the interwebs. Some words about Old Gamers and the Streamers from JD are timely. You should know I take the "No Thank You Bite" approach to games. I'll play any game I haven't before at least once, so I have an experience. Then I can decide to play more or not. I was also cranky about the Masks RPG game about young superheroes. It's an excellent game of that genre -but I still don't like young superheroes.
I've been listening to the Dark Future Dice Podcast, and they're playing Cyberpunk 2020. They are funny and easy to listen to. For me, they sound like a real table I've played at, and I am digging the 'real-time' reactions from those 'players-being-players' moments.
While painting minis for a new game of Five Leagues from the Borderlands, I watched They Cloned Tyrone on Netflix. SO SUBVERSIVE!! Losts of hidden actors in there, John Boyega and Teyonah Parris put in solid performances. It’s hood Delta Green. Go watch it!
Perusing and GM prep
I'm about to dig into Homeworld RPG from Modiphius and Twilight Imperium RPG: Embers of the Imperium RPGs. I've got a hankering for something sci-fi, I've been playing Traveller with the Actual Play cast on Twitch, but I'm not sure what yet. At first look, Homeworld seems pretty epic in scale as you play the crew of a Kushan fleet ship with lots of adventure options. I enjoyed FFG’s Edge of the Empire, so I'm super curious about Twilight Imperium RPG from Edge Studios. There you play a member of the Keleres, which reads like a galactic agency tasked to investigate BIG threats -but they're poorly resourced. I know the TI setting from the various board game editions, and there is SO much there to play with. I have high hopes for this game. I'll let you know how it goes once I get it to the table.
My GM prep work is mostly D&D 5E for games I'll run on Start Playing. My biggest hurdle with the game is from the 3rd edition forward as a GM running the game RAW; you know when everyone will level up because you did the math for all the balanced encounters. I don't care for that; it kills the surprise for me as the GM-player. Well...I think Milestones is my solution, two-fold! First, for open tables games where the players are not likely to be the same, XP tracking is gone, and that could have been a nightmare. You achieved the milestone, or you didn't. Second, so many options for using milestones! I like the achievements board approach:
First Timer: After your first session - Level Up!!
Find Renault's Crown - Level Up!!
Negotiate peace between the Merchant houses - Level Up!!
Take down the Circle, an assassin cult - Level Up!!
And bonus point. I won't need to balance encounters or maths them out, especially for running a sandbox campaign. There is still GM prep work here, but I feel it's the right kind of work -placing Renault's crown and setting the agendas of the Merchant houses and the Circle. These all scale easily for last-minute adjustments —because players gonna player.
Also... the city of Neverwinter looks suspiciously like Pavis...
Catch ya in a week!
That’s how I’ve done 5e XP for years now! XP sucks and I hate it.