10 sessions! Wow! I feel super honored and grateful that we've come this far already. My first real reflection is that there is so much work that goes into this game that isn't mine. The players all do a great job and Scooter (@Discopreacha) is an amazing host and producer.
Ambient Realms always keeps us up to date on our sounds. I just love the sounds. They are so much fun! I have a bad habit of experimenting with new sounds in the middle of a session. Someday I'll learn.
Arcknight has given us a bunch of stuff to use for our games and giveaways. I hope we get to do a lot more giveaways, because we're ready for them! Also, their pawns are a lot better than other leading brands. I just need about a million more. For reasons. Every GM wants to field an army, right? :)
Before this particular session, I really tried to take stock of who I am and what I believe about games. The biggest change that I noticed is that with recording our game sessions I started worrying about continuity. I thought that it could be jarring to have things change from one session to another. I think that this was originally a reaction to my own problem with keeping things consistent because I really like to wing it in a game. I write just skeleton notes and make quick maps; everything else happens in real time.
So I found myself reacting really negatively to the idea of getting out of game for meta-info, such as item descriptions. I was also holding way too strongly to the idea of keeping character choices the same - sort of a 'play it where it lands' mindset. I think that it's great to keep balance in the game and hold people to their actions but I don't want the game to become a hassle. For anyone. I'm going to work on that.
A big source of inspiration for me in the past week has been Powered by the Apocalypse games. Specifically, Masks, Monsterhearts and Epyllion. I'm just now reading Epyllion. Masks has been in the pipeline for a couple of weeks, Monsterhearts I am re-reading. I'm not a big fan of OG Apocalypse World because of setting and tone but I love the way the game works and these derivatives.
During the game there were a lot of decisions that came together well and things stayed really focused. We really only played 3 scenes. There was an initial exploration, a giant combat scene and a concluding exploration. There were a lot of conflicting motivations throughout that had interesting results.
Also, there was so much fire in this session! I decided not to have ambient environmental damage, just directed damage, but EVERYONE took so much fire damage! There are times that resistance is just amazing and this was one of them.
After the session I had a player contact me to tell me that they had messed up a spell description and gotten a lot more effect than they should have. We had one of these last week too. It's an innocent proofreading mistake that gives the players the edge. I don't want to punish players but I also want to keep things even. I'm thinking I may establish some sort of karma pool for things like this: have the opposition able to 'ignore' an effect once for each player misstep. I can save it for the really big things. My thought is that it would be like Sorcerer metamagic and just change the way something goes off. We shall see.
Ambient Realms always keeps us up to date on our sounds. I just love the sounds. They are so much fun! I have a bad habit of experimenting with new sounds in the middle of a session. Someday I'll learn.
Arcknight has given us a bunch of stuff to use for our games and giveaways. I hope we get to do a lot more giveaways, because we're ready for them! Also, their pawns are a lot better than other leading brands. I just need about a million more. For reasons. Every GM wants to field an army, right? :)
Before this particular session, I really tried to take stock of who I am and what I believe about games. The biggest change that I noticed is that with recording our game sessions I started worrying about continuity. I thought that it could be jarring to have things change from one session to another. I think that this was originally a reaction to my own problem with keeping things consistent because I really like to wing it in a game. I write just skeleton notes and make quick maps; everything else happens in real time.
So I found myself reacting really negatively to the idea of getting out of game for meta-info, such as item descriptions. I was also holding way too strongly to the idea of keeping character choices the same - sort of a 'play it where it lands' mindset. I think that it's great to keep balance in the game and hold people to their actions but I don't want the game to become a hassle. For anyone. I'm going to work on that.
A big source of inspiration for me in the past week has been Powered by the Apocalypse games. Specifically, Masks, Monsterhearts and Epyllion. I'm just now reading Epyllion. Masks has been in the pipeline for a couple of weeks, Monsterhearts I am re-reading. I'm not a big fan of OG Apocalypse World because of setting and tone but I love the way the game works and these derivatives.
During the game there were a lot of decisions that came together well and things stayed really focused. We really only played 3 scenes. There was an initial exploration, a giant combat scene and a concluding exploration. There were a lot of conflicting motivations throughout that had interesting results.
Also, there was so much fire in this session! I decided not to have ambient environmental damage, just directed damage, but EVERYONE took so much fire damage! There are times that resistance is just amazing and this was one of them.
After the session I had a player contact me to tell me that they had messed up a spell description and gotten a lot more effect than they should have. We had one of these last week too. It's an innocent proofreading mistake that gives the players the edge. I don't want to punish players but I also want to keep things even. I'm thinking I may establish some sort of karma pool for things like this: have the opposition able to 'ignore' an effect once for each player misstep. I can save it for the really big things. My thought is that it would be like Sorcerer metamagic and just change the way something goes off. We shall see.
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