Yeah; other top contenders are Anima (but no complete English translation exists, and the main ENG publisher just dropped it, and it’s enormously complex) and Tenra Bansho Zero (which looks neat, but I haven’t read enough of it yet). BESM kinda rubs me the wrong way for whatever reason, but it’s been ages, so maybe it bears looking at.
And these questions are precisely why I love the idea of this thread so much!
See? See how I brought that back around? Oh yeah. . .
Aha, BESM was it. I wasn’t involved in that one, but it sounded like fun.
I have previously considered trying to recruit folks here for an online game or even an ongoing campaign with very similar aims: I. E. getting some of the various lower profile RPGs I have bought and/or Kickstarter over the years to move from idle reading material to actual play. But at the time it seemed like most people wanted D&D, or at least something similar, and that is no longer really my bag. My personal preference would be for rules light, improv-oriented systems like Apocalypse World or Fiasco, etc and I think that would be especially good if planning on monthly rotation since more complicated systems tend to require, or at least reward, system mastery.
On the flipside, one might argue that the problems inherent in the crunchy systems might be masked by a shorter campaign. Less time to level up and get bogged down in an endless procession of feats and rules exceptions and weird spells…
Or maybe I’m still just sore from what an absolute bear my Pathfinder campaign was to run by the time we hit level 13, Mythic Tier 3…:-D
This is exactly what I’m inclined towards. Honestly it is why I like rules light systems (in theory), by not having the vast majority of rules dedicated to combat, it makes combat less incentivized. Which in turn leads to more orthogonal thinking and actual role playing. In theory at least.
How things go in reality depend on the group. but it is hard to deny a D&D or Pathfinder tend towards combat due to the number and depth of mechanics dealing with combat.
There’s still way more of a learning curve. And way more required reading. As far as I am concerned the player only needs to know what’s on their character sheet to play Apocalypse World. Everything else can be invoked by the Mc as needed. Fiasco is even simpler. There are other indie games that are more involved, of course, but I don’t think any of them barring maybe Burning Wheel hit the overhead of D&D and its contemporaries.
I’d argue some do (the aforementioned Anima comes to mind, as does the infamous FATAL–but that’s almost unfair to bring up!), but it’s certainly rare.
But yeah, yeah, just being pedantic :). I have run one-shots of PF for people with no prior experience, but it mostly meant doing a ton of hand-holding and suggesting, and it really A) ran counter to the point of the system, and B) probably ran counter to the point of a one-shot. More or less, more work than it was worth, however much fun we might have had in spite of ourselves.
I’m very much in line with this as well - I’ve got a copy of Fiasco, Dungeon World, and some newly-delivered Burning Wheel books sitting here and I’d love to play stuff focused more on the narrative. But I like a good dungeon crawl too, and Torchbearer is getting a lot of good buzz so it’s on my short list to pick up to read through soon.
I should be working on homework for my grad class but instead I’m learning Google Forms! Inspired by @fire’s Secret Santa post, I made a sign-up form (also added to the main post) to keep track of who’s interested. I’m embarrassed to say how much time I’ve spent tonight trying (unsuccessfully) to get a Google Spreadsheet to filter down to just the most recent row for a given username.
I like the idea of seasons. I think there’s room for groups to be lower or higher commitment during a three month season while still getting the benefits of a campaign. It loses a little of the constant rotation through game systems, but I think I’m probably in the minority wanting to learn and play different stuff over and over.
If there’s enough interest in trying out a three-month season, we can kick off the first towards the end of the month for October-December and use that to work out the overall process.
And signed up! Thanks for kickstarting our collective asses into gear :-D
Indeed! As someone who wanted to do this, but hadn’t yet actually made the effort, thank you @mtthwcmpbll for starting us towards actually doing it :)
Signed up as well. Just have to create a Roll20 account now. :)
Signed up, interested to see how it goes!
Tenra Bansho Zero maybe?
Signed up, but couldn’t figure out what my Roll20 account name is.
I just put in my email address, cuz my first name and last initial show up on the site itself, and THAT seems incorrect. . .
You can change the display name to whatever you want in “My Account”.
Yep, I’m not actually sure how useful the Roll20 username is, but I didn’t want to ask for your email address. I tested to make sure the player search found me using the account name I set in “My Account” (it defaulted to Matthew C., and I changed it to match my forum username here). Mostly this is to help folks find each other once things get started. You can always fill out the form again to update your preferences or add info like your username and I’ll grab the latest entry for your forum username.
I’m super excited folks are into this - this is the first forum thread I’ve started in the seven years I’ve been floating around here, so I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect! We’ve got eight folks signed up at the moment, so we’ll give it a week or two to let anyone else sign up and then use the last week or two of September to vote on Season One’s game system and sort out the groups.
Signed up, though I’m not sure if I can do Roll20 unless there is an iPad app for it at this point, so it might be moot (Laptop is pretty much toast).
So here I was trying to figure out a way to describe the kind of discussion about a system throughout a season by referencing the Classic Game Club, and then I notice the meta thread for that and find I framed everything here almost exactly the same way @Nightgaunt did there (complete with the book club analogy)! I’d seen the specific season threads pop up and love reading folks thoughts on the game, but never ran into the main thread for some reason. Well, I’m a little embarrassed at my lack of originality but I’ll take it as a good sign that the format works well here.