Originally shared by Eloy C
Eloy’s gaming progress report for March- April 2016:
I’m a little late posting March’s report, so there’s some April stuff in here too.
Tl;dr : Burning Wheel! Burning WHEEEL! BUR-NING WHEEEEEEL!!!!! 😛
WARNING: These reports are super long and ranty. Proceed at your own risk…
1) Played another session of A Song of Ice and Fire. We’ve switched back to my original character for the game, a Knight, now recently become an lord of our House (by marriage to the daughter of the former lord, following a highly successful tournament we held last November.) My character and his retinue have journeyed to Highgarden, to find out where the allegiance of House Tyrell lies. The other 2 players have rolled up new characters and things are starting to become interesting again.
My complaint with the game is the mechanics. Combat is fine, but this is one of those games where niche protection is a strong thing, so if you’re good at one thing, you are horrible at everything else. I’m playing the knight, so fighting is my thing, We’ll see what happens.
2) Have run 5 more sessions of From Distant Shores, my Burning Wheel game. The game keeps getting better and better. The characters were all comfortable cleaning up some things and taking care of some mundane stuff, when I threw them a curve ball. This led to fantastic reactions from the group. We had a couple of exciting sessions, full of action and drama. We’re now at pretty much the end of a chapter.
Had our first Trait vote session, and next session will help us see where the campaign goes next. Really looking forward to that.
I’ve also started writing procedural reports of these sessions (see the links in my profile page), describing how I run these, both for personal use and hoping that they are useful to others to learn how to play Burning Wheel.
3) Played 2 more sessions of Dogs in the Vineyard, run by Dan Maruschak I had some difficulty with the session, until we had a conversation and hammered down exactly what the townsfolk expect the Dogs to do. We had a little disconnect as to how exactly we’re supposed to run this, although it seems well described in the book. In any case, our latest session ended in a gunfight against a demon-possessed heretic. This was kind of how I expected the game to be when I started playing.
I still have some difficulty playing the game. The mechanics are second nature now. It’s more a matter of how to approach the religion. I know next to nothing about the real life religion upon which the game is based, so best I can do is related it to the religion I know best. It’s still a disconnect. Reconciling gunslinging/justice dispensing with priests and missionaries as I know them is difficult.
If the game is expecting to confront my real-life religious issues in gameplay… I don’t think that it’s going to really work for me. I got those issues squared away a long time ago.
I’m also starting to feel done with the game. This is one problem I have with these narrow focus games. This is who we are and this is what we do, as my friend Neil Goodrich says. I find stuff like this, like Blades in the Dark, difficult to play in the long run. At some point, it just becomes repetitive.
4) Started running a SECOND game of Burning Wheel. Met this nice guy on the G+ BW group, who posted a setup for a Burning Wheel game he’d love to play in. Apprentice Sorcerers trying to get accepted into an established Cabal of powerful Sorcerers.
I’ve wanted to play exactly that sort of setup using Burning Wheel for YEARS.
So I said to him: “I can run this!” In no time flat, we had 2 more guys looking forward to play. All 3 seem like really nice guys. We started talking, and hit it off immediately. We had a few online sessions and post discussion, agreed on a Situation and setup, Burned up characters and got underway!
We’ve played one session of the actual game, and it was a blast! I’ve got tons of ideas for the upcoming session, and the characters and the setting that we came up with are really fantastic!
I’m also doing procedural reports discussion our sessions over at the BW forums.
I don’t know if it’s partially due to our procedural reports, but there seems to have been a spike in increased activity in the BW forums.
I guess Adam Koebel ’s Roll20 videos are spreading the word about Burning Wheel, but there are have recently been all sorts of new actual play posts. Reading these, commenting and interacting with the new and old Burning Wheel players in the Forums is a lot of fun.
There are at least 2 new Westeros themed BW games going (It should be obvious from my post that these are 2 of my loves, and they go great together), as well as Judd Karlman , Rachel E.S. Walton and Drew U ‘s Swordlords BW game, which are a fantastic mixture of knights, orcs and sorcery. Also, very close to my heart. As if that weren’t enough, Judd’s also running a BW game with lots of Art Magic in it, with Renee Knipe and Eric Duncan , I believe. I’m not crazy about combining my fantasy with my sci-fi, but, judging from their AP reports, they’re making it work. Very well.
5) I’ve also been having fun reading Paul Beakley ‘s commentary on The One Ring, and now he’s started talking about Eclipse Phase, which is another game I’m curious about.
6) I plan on organizing an irregular online Fight! practice session. I’ve got at least 1 interested person. The idea is to run through the infamous Fight! subsystem of Burning Wheel.
Most people seem completely intimidated by the system and unsure of how to run it. I’ve studied it a bunch and actually played out quite a few fights, but the ones I have been involved in usually involved little armor and mostly glossed over positioning and clumsy weight (I’ve studied up on those too) . Those are things I’m interested in working with.
I’ll give more details once I’ve had time to build this up a bit more. My idea is not for this to become an exercise in Character Burning. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.
My plan is to create premade characters, likely a Saxon warrior against a Dane Viking warrior, with similar stats and skills, and just change weapons loadouts. This’ll put the emphasis on Scripting, dice rolls and weapon differences, and minimize character optimization as a factor in running fights.
I’ll post when I’ve structured this thing a bit more. If I get more than 1 player interested, I’ll be happy to arbitrate the fights, and learn from that.
All in all, I’ve made quite a few new internet friends in the last couple of weeks. Looking forward to making more. All my gaming is online, these days. Looking forward to gaming more and more.
How about you? What have you been up to?