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ffutures ...Went fairly well, except for a slight lack of preparedness on my part - I had the player characters and handouts for my adventure ready before I left, but the scenario was pretty much a page of notes and a list of characters which needed some fleshing out before I ran it. Which i had to get done on Friday because like an idiot I'd said I'd run it Saturday AM. Got to the con site about 2, just after the first games session had started, to find that there were no places left in any game in that slot, so went to my room and spent the next four hours writing up characters and scenario notes. Had a meal about 6.30 then went to the evening games session, got back around midnight, and typed more notes for another couple of hours, and somehow made it to the 10AM game session feeling ready to run the thing - spoiler, I wasn't...
The basic problem was simple - it was WAY overpowered for the player characters. As a reminder, this was Bring Me The Head of Harry Potter, in which a group of John Wick style assassins have to kill the titular character, set in the Buffyverse version of LA. There's rather more to it than that, of course, but I don't want to say too much because I'll probably be running a revised version at Dragonmeet in December.
There were NPCs with powers that could rip through most of the characters like a chainsaw, and they never got close to the objective, which was to kill Harry Potter. In particular, illyria (from Angel), who I will be cutting from the revised version, is basically The Flash with super-strength and invulnerability, and the characters who were fighting her were more or less normal humans, with good combat stats and some special abilities. I started rolling dice before realising how badly they were outmatched. The characters that might have stood a chance were doing other things when that happened, and three out of six were killed in about five minutes of play, about 30 seconds of game time. Another two took on battle-hardened Harry Potter (a few years after the Battle of Hogwarts) and despite one being a wizard weren't up to the challenge. They ended up port-keying out to San Francisco and deciding to stay there. The final survivor had a reasonably happy ending but didn't kill Potter, and the final part of the adventure (which was when I'd expected to kill most of the player characters) simply didn't happen. I don't think any of the players were too unhappy, but I know I could have done it much better.
i know what I need to do to fix this - a couple of the player characters need to be replaced, all of them need to be better equipped and briefed, and Illyria needs to go and a couple of other NPCs need to be changed. Not a huge problem, but I would have been a lot happier if I'd got it right this time.
The other games were fun, but i didn't really take detailed notes. in no particular order;
A steampunk / Superhero / Cthulhu Mythos adventure using the Savage Worlds rules. A lot of fun, and worked reasonably well most of the time but I'm not a huge fan of the rules system and this adventure didn't really change that.
Fiasco (with Regency romance add-on), in which the story evolved a plot which made my character's eventual well-deserved suicide inevitable to protect the honour of two ladies. I haven't previously played the card-based version of this game, it works better than the pencil and paper version but I suspect is much more expensive.
The Battlestar Galactica board game - despite our best efforts (apart from the Cylon infiltrators) we ended up dying horribly. It's an interesting resource management game with a lot of very hard choices, and gets VERY paranoid in the end game.
Matrons of Mystery - a British indie game based on the Apocalypse Engine system, in which the characters are British lady sleuths on the lines of Miss Marple etc. Had a lot of fun with this one and I think I'm going to be buying it - it's currently on offer at £5 for the PDF and it plays pretty well.
Bones Deep - a Troika variant about people who are animated underwater skeletons in their afterlife, which is even dafter than it sounds. Silly and a lot of fun, but I'm still not a huge fan of the system, not sure why.
The basic problem was simple - it was WAY overpowered for the player characters. As a reminder, this was Bring Me The Head of Harry Potter, in which a group of John Wick style assassins have to kill the titular character, set in the Buffyverse version of LA. There's rather more to it than that, of course, but I don't want to say too much because I'll probably be running a revised version at Dragonmeet in December.
There were NPCs with powers that could rip through most of the characters like a chainsaw, and they never got close to the objective, which was to kill Harry Potter. In particular, illyria (from Angel), who I will be cutting from the revised version, is basically The Flash with super-strength and invulnerability, and the characters who were fighting her were more or less normal humans, with good combat stats and some special abilities. I started rolling dice before realising how badly they were outmatched. The characters that might have stood a chance were doing other things when that happened, and three out of six were killed in about five minutes of play, about 30 seconds of game time. Another two took on battle-hardened Harry Potter (a few years after the Battle of Hogwarts) and despite one being a wizard weren't up to the challenge. They ended up port-keying out to San Francisco and deciding to stay there. The final survivor had a reasonably happy ending but didn't kill Potter, and the final part of the adventure (which was when I'd expected to kill most of the player characters) simply didn't happen. I don't think any of the players were too unhappy, but I know I could have done it much better.
i know what I need to do to fix this - a couple of the player characters need to be replaced, all of them need to be better equipped and briefed, and Illyria needs to go and a couple of other NPCs need to be changed. Not a huge problem, but I would have been a lot happier if I'd got it right this time.
The other games were fun, but i didn't really take detailed notes. in no particular order;
A steampunk / Superhero / Cthulhu Mythos adventure using the Savage Worlds rules. A lot of fun, and worked reasonably well most of the time but I'm not a huge fan of the rules system and this adventure didn't really change that.
Fiasco (with Regency romance add-on), in which the story evolved a plot which made my character's eventual well-deserved suicide inevitable to protect the honour of two ladies. I haven't previously played the card-based version of this game, it works better than the pencil and paper version but I suspect is much more expensive.
The Battlestar Galactica board game - despite our best efforts (apart from the Cylon infiltrators) we ended up dying horribly. It's an interesting resource management game with a lot of very hard choices, and gets VERY paranoid in the end game.
Matrons of Mystery - a British indie game based on the Apocalypse Engine system, in which the characters are British lady sleuths on the lines of Miss Marple etc. Had a lot of fun with this one and I think I'm going to be buying it - it's currently on offer at £5 for the PDF and it plays pretty well.
Bones Deep - a Troika variant about people who are animated underwater skeletons in their afterlife, which is even dafter than it sounds. Silly and a lot of fun, but I'm still not a huge fan of the system, not sure why.
