More Fun

[thebitterguy]

Today was Spirit of the Century w/ pyat and doc_mystery. viktor_haag GM'd, although we played at Doc's house. Hey, interesting fact: Google Earth doesn't mess me up too often, but when it does, it messes me up HARD. The street I had to take a right onto to get to Doc's house was NOT ACTUALLY THERE. Thank God for celly's.

Game was fun. The first half of the session was chargen, and each of us developed our characters for the campaign setting; in this case, we were hired to work on a super sub. doc_mystery has a good summary.

I like how the last phase of Chargen actually encourges the PCs to know each other. Aspects look interesting, but they haven't impacted play yet, negatively or positively. And we don't even have stunts yet, due to a paucity of copies of the rules.

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Is that your Stadler mechanical pencil left on the table?

Also left behind was the vinyl eraser that may be Viktor's, and tickets meant for Piet for the upcoming Disney on Ice.

Meanwhile, I forgot to burn some OTRs for you guys...

::B::

[rentagurkha.livejournal.com]

Here's a link to the SRD (http://www.crackmonkey.org/~nick/loyhargil/fate3/fate3.html).

[tfbretz.livejournal.com]

In my experience, it took a bit of time for most of our group to get the hang of aspects. Once folks did, they (the aspects) took over the game, which is how it should be. IMO, the big notions the GM needs to reinforce are:

Fate Points are the currency of the game; spending them freely will likely yield more.

Your Fate Point total is what you have available at the start of each adventure, not the sum total of your career.

Using Fate Points to tag opponents' and places' aspects is where the game really starts to sing.

[thebitterguy]

Rock! That's perfect, thanks.

Oh! Did you get the email about the movie thingy?

[thebitterguy]

Yeah, the eraser and pencil were Viktor's.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Gah! Yes, please set them aside! I would very much like to get them back. It's not trivial to find those kinds of mechanical pencils any more... 8)

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Yes; part of the reason that Fate Points didn't play a bigger role is (a) we're just learning, and (b) I forgot to bring along my box of big, red poker chips. When you have a stack of big, red poker chips in front of you, you really want to spend them on something... 8)

Yes, Fate points refresh to your number of Aspects whenever a "refresh" happens. I'm tempted to say that this isn't every session, but probably tie it to narrative points -- i.e. every "adventure" or every "chapter" or whatever...

The thing that I most like from reading this game was the Aspects, and I do want to work with groups I'm playing this with, to get these working for us.

Stunts I find seem to have a formidable curve to getting to. Neither group have got into stunts yet, and character generation with both groups was at least 90 minutes. I see what stunts are for, but I think they're an example of crunch that really depends a lot on players having and having read the rules (sort of like Feats or Spells in D&D, I think). This does not sing "pick up game" to me. Frankly, I can see what Evil Hat means by "pick up game" and SotC has a lot of those aspects, but if really pushed to say what's the best pick-up rolegame I can think of I'd say HeroQuest hands down.

I want to give SotC a good test run through its paces, but it remains to be seen whether it'll be a "game of choice" in my weekly groups or not (right now, those spots are taken by HERO, HeroQuest, and to a lesser extent WFRP and BRP/CoC).

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

Once characters are done, I tend to put the effects of the stunts on the sheets themselves. Tends to encourage their use more vigorously.