So, a mixed bag of games today.
Started today with a very early morning game of my Burning Wheel event. It was…fair. Played with Bret Gillan, Carly Knight, Ralph Mazza, Stephen Holowczyk, and Keith Stetson. A good table! But I didn’t run it especially well. I’ve been thinking about why it’s so hard for me to successfully execute the game as a one shot, because I’ve been really pleased with my other one shot games at this convention. Dunno. Many theories.
My midday game was Jason Pitre’s Sig, which is his homage to Planescape via his Sparks engine. Didn’t know anything about either Sparks nor Planescape! And to be honest, I kind of went in expecting to not really dig it. Dunno why, completely irrational, but it turns out it was pretty fun. The game does some interesting things around trope-y celebration. It’s also a capital-S Storygame, and it runs best when everyone’s familiar with strong framing, creative collaboration, and putting yourself in trouble. In some ways it felt like a weird cross between Archipelago and Burning Wheel. Anyway, good event, didn’t regret sitting at that table.
The last event was Mars 244, Rachel E.S. Walton’s reimplementation of Montsegur 1244. Sci-fi setup revolving around a slowly unfolding space disaster, and I really liked what I saw. Good table, too: Mikael Andersson, Robert Bohl, Brand Robins and Mo Jave. Circumstances unfortunately cut the event short so I didn’t get to see the conclusion but the first half was really promising.
I’m pretty cooked and up way late, so tomorrow is gonna be waffles and Fief and I think that’s all. Oh shit, yeah, and that plane flight back home and away from my east coast friends. 🙁
I wish we could’ve seen more of Aurora. She was amazing.
It was great to play Spark with you, sorry for the rough edges!
Solidarity to ya on that flight back home. I know that challenge all too well.
I would love to actually meet you in person. Will be here until about 2.
Can you link to Sig? Planescape as a storygame sounds really intriguing.
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/153172/Sig-The-City-Between?src=slider_view
Thanks for running! Now I know for sure BW is not my cuppa tea.
Yikes! 🙁
I like your write ups!
No yikes! That’s what I wanted to find out. It’s not you, it’s me?
If BW were everyone’s cup of tea, it wouldn’t be the amazing game that it is.
Keith Stetson Not that you’re wrong—it might totally be not for you—but IMHO Burning Wheel is a game that you can’t fairly judge in a session. I ran a game for ~1.5 yr, and except for the proliferation of wises (I think they need an abstracted system, like Circles), we absolutely loved it, and would happily play it again. But the first dozen or 2 dozen sessions were really rough, despite following Luke’s advice and only adding in spokes one at a time, as needed. If you’d asked me at session 5 if this was the game for me, I’d’ve said ‘no’, that it’s just too crunchy and too fiddly and too tactical for me—that I prefer games where player mastery of the rules is less significant. But now? I think it’s not a pickup game, but one of the best long-term games out there, and I would happily run or play it again. And that’s despite usually rejecting running any game that crunchy.
Yes, I know that people play and enjoy one-off games, particularly at conventions. I still think that’s a poor fit for the game, not allowing many of the really amazing parts of the game to shine (because they require longitudinal play to come up), and emphasizing the difficult learning curve of the game.
I think Nat may also have pinpointed the reason why, Paul, it’s tricky for you to intro Burning Wheel as a one-shot. It seems very heavily designed for campaign play. The majority of the rewards cycles only really start kicking in after a few sessions, frex.