RPGaDay - Days 24, 25 and 26

#RPGaDay

Day Twenty Four – Most Complicated RPG Owned

The most complicated game I’ve played is a homebrew created by my friend Rowan and set in the Star Trek universe. It’s wonderful, having grown organically to suit the needs of the group. The character sheet is pages and pages long, covering different roles in the ship (command, engineering, science) and also personal life. Each page is a spider’s web showing how skills grow from other skills – you can’t progress a skill further than any pre-requisite skills already are. And sometimes prerequisites come from a different page.

And that’s before you have to do anything. I can’t remember the dice system except I think it’s D100 based and sometimes you want high and sometimes low so you roll your die, tell your result and relevant skill level and GM works from there. And certain results automatically mean weird stuff happens and also the GM rolls a D100 and if you get the same number something good happens but if you get the digits reversed number something bad happens (and something downright random if the number is the same digits, ie 33). Most of the numbers that have auto-wibble meanings reference geek culture in some way (eg 66 for Order 66 in Star Wars) or from particular previous in (or out of) game experiences.

For the main players, it doesn’t feel complicated because the system has grown around them; for Husbit and I, coming in to cameo whilst we visited one weekend, it was massively complex. But in a really wonderful way, and I think that comes from it being a long-running, oft-adapted homebrew system.

For the most complicated game I own… it’s a while since I’ve played most of the games I own, but I remember them all as being fairly straightforward. So I’ll stick with Rowan’s amazing Trek homebrew.

Day Twenty Five – Favourite RPG No One Else Wants to Play

World of Darkness. Have been watching Supernatural with Husbit and thought that may encourage people to want to play Hunter, at least, but no joy. I do miss World of Darkness.

Also, no one else seems to want to play Abney Park’s Airship Pirates, even though it looks amazing and is all steam-punky and Husbit (at least) is into that. But between Aberrant and Pathfinder I am spending a fair amount of my free time gaming (or blogging about gaming) so I probably don’t really have time for more games anyway.

Day Twenty Six – Coolest Character Sheet

For Day 11 (weirdest game), I discussed the Window system and a game in a setting called ‘Dockyards’. In the comments below, the GM was kind enough to share my character sheet from that game, and seeing it again did give me a lovely fit of the giggles – Kismet was great fun and the Window encourages a verbal style over numbers. She really has more skills than the system encourages, but I was having too much fun writing skills that way. I’m not sure it counts, though.

In the Final Fantasy Noir homebrew game I was in, Kella’s (a lot of my characters have names beginning with K. Not sure why) sheet was beautiful. The GM had prepared them in presentation binders because there were several pages so things could be spaced out clearly with screen shots from the console game. That was pretty amazing.

But coolest character sheet not handwritten or from a homebrew is probably the Deadlands one. I can’t remember if the sheet we were using is the one from the book or if it’s a fan-created one we found, and the books are at the bottom of a heavy, precarious pile so I haven’t checked, but I rather like this.

We use paper clips to mark the ammo, wounds and spell points, so you don’t end up damaging the sheet with constant rubbing outs and that works because they’re at the edge of the page. The back is character background, gear, permanent injuries and spells, but the ammo, spell points and wounds are in the same place so your paperclip still marks them whichever side you’re looking – which is quite handy.

The imagery matches the setting, too, and the fact someone’s thought about it is nice.

Lizbeth is the character I played in Coffin Rock

Although, now I’ve seen the Numenera sheet I have to admit that does look gorgeous!

With thanks again to Autocratik.