August 12: What game is your group most likely to play next? Why?
My current group is made up of a lot of teachers, the husband of one teacher and a couple of off and on college kids who play with us when they can. As such we are now on hiatus for summer break. A summer break that is quickly falling into its death throws. This time next week the air will be filled with the sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth as our final week of vacation will come to an end. On the plus side, we should be back into the gaming swing of things that same week.
We kind of rotate DM/GM duties in this group. The main GM is my friend Jeremy he'll usually run the bulk of the time, but when he's getting worn out or lacking in material--I usually take over. We both are currently somewhat running D&D 5th--he's doing an Underdark campaign while I'm running The Curse of Strahd. We both ran intros to our newest campaigns late this Spring trying to anticipate who would be back for the new year. We know that we are losing one player for sure and that one of the group got married, so there's no telling how strict the wife is going to be. Either she'll reign him in to staying home everyday or maybe he'll be able to pull her to hang with us. That means that although we were being careful--there's still going to be some fallout. Which leads to today's question...
There are two games that I'm going to try to run this year, both of which I hope will further differentiate my campaign from my partner's. First, since we are going into the Halloween season and since we've already played the campaign intro I'll be sticking with the Ravenloft setting and Curse of Strahd, but with a twist. I've decided to run the campaign using Dungeon Crawl Classics rules. I got turned on to this system over the summer and have read a great deal of the book. I especially like their magic system. Converting monsters to DCC looks like it will be fairly easy and I've already found a conversion system for the 'funky dice'. Don't let the size and the initial look of complexity about the system fool you. Once you get to reading you should find that the tables and the like are mostly for flavor. The core game mechanics are very simple--maybe not D&D5 simple, but certainly not Pathfinder complex either. Honestly, depending on how the guys play, there is more than enough material in Curse of Strahd to last the whole school year, but if we get tired of playing or if we get a TPK and the guys want something different, from my end that something different will be The 7th Sea. I backed the Kickstarter for this one and it looks great. My hard copy text arrived this very day and all of us backers have had access to the PDF version for quite some time. I ran the playtest version of the rules a while back with a few of the guys and they all liked it. Again, playing this system will give the guys a different set of mechanics to work with and in turn (hopefully) keep our 5E play fresh.
I recommend that everyone take the time to play different systems--old and new--whenever they can. They make for good palette cleansers between campaigns or a good one shot anytime. You may find a system or a game mechanic that you like and you can incorporate it in your regular games.
No comments:
Post a Comment