#RPGaDAY 8th, 9th, 10th and11th

So this is my third instalment of #RPGaDAY. Most of the questions this week seem to be about different systems so it will be hard to relate them Rolemaster.

8th What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?

This depends on how you read the question. I think RM is a good candidate for this. One of the cool things about RM character sheets (booklets?) is that they hold just about everything you need to play. This is especially true if you include combat tables and spell lists in the character sheets. Bolt on things like Combat Minion and you get a game that you can get into and start playing very quickly. If you need to create characters in that 2hrs then having the first session exclusively dedicated to character creation will get all the characters made with time to spare. So my answer is RMC.

9th What is a good RPG to play for about 10 sessions?

This time I don’t think RM fits the bill. As a rule of thumb is seems that most GMs are levelling characters up every 3 sessions or so. In a mini campaign of 10 sessions that would advance the characters three or 4 levels. There is not really that much difference between a 1st and a 4th level character. At those lowest levels fighters are king and even the pure spell users have little more than shock bolt. Looking at the time, some players take forever to level up their characters so levelling up 3 times in 10 sessions takes a fairly big chunk out of your available playing time. So RM is not a good option for this particular format.

What does work well (shameless plug!) is my own game 3Deep. The game is set up for emulate TV series and episodes. With that in mine you can easily turn a 10 session mini campaign into 10 related one shot adventures and the whole into a ‘season’. Character creation is fast (roll five stats, pick a culture, spend 7 skill points and then flesh out the backstory) and there are no levels, experience is handled by improving stats and/or skills. While I am blowing my own trumpet the latest version of 3Deep will be available to buy from RPGnow and Drivethru from next week!

 

10th Where do you go for RPG reviews?

For me, my favourite RPG blog is http://www.stargazersworld.com/ which gives me a mix of reviews, news and opinion. they have a small team of bloggers and interestingly they like to experiment. Right now the blog is experimenting with being sponsored by Patreon.

11th Which ‘dead’ game would you like to see reborn?

Do games die? If that were true then there would be no RM2 players. The game is going on for 40 years old and has not had a new book published in decades and yet it is still probably the most popular version of RM there has ever been with many actives groups. Even in my previous answers I harked back to Car Wars with is a game from my youth. I honestly do not believe games die as long as people want to play them.

4 Replies to “#RPGaDAY 8th, 9th, 10th and11th”

  1. The closest I could come to the definition of a “dead” game would probably one that no longer has commercial material published for it. With the OGL, there are a lot of games that wouldn’t qualify as dead in that case due to third party publishers. The only ones that would rally qualify would be games like MERP – and even then people still play them and create new material. They simply can’t sell such material.

    ICONS, which is based on Fate, was designed to be used as a pick up game that you could start, play, and end pretty quickly. Perhaps even in one session.

    1. The only bugbear with FATE based games is the dice. I know it is easy enough to count 1,2 as a – and 5,6 as a + but it is not just as slick as having the correct dice. It just spoils the game experience. If you are launching into an impromptu game then not having FATE dice is a pity.

      1. Despite being based on FATE, ICONS doesn’t use FATE/Fudge dice, only d6s. It doesn’t even mention FATE dice. That’s possibly because it was designed to be a pick up game.

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