Mongol Home

Mongol Home

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Three Play Reports Behind and Then Some


I have been busy playing some RPGs with Big Darryl, Darryl Jr., Dalton and a couple of times with Big Darryl's wife Joann.

I'll start at the beginning - We played the second session of 43 AD, and we fought those battles and it didn't go well due to some extraordinarily bad luck on the part of the players rolling dice for the Romans. We also had to retcon a couple of things from the earlier session because we'd missed a couple of minor points in the rules in the first session. David wasn't there, so we all kind of missed him, but we knew it was kind of a long shot getting the kid back to game regularly anyway, he lives like 50+ miles away from his grandparents, and summer's almost over. Big Darryl was really not pleased with the character he had rolled and was starting to really show it in a big way after the Romans started losing battles big against the Germans, he actually wanted his character to desert at one point and had to be talked out of it, which was good because he ended up rallying the survivors in the end. The session was a meat grinder for the Romans though and we really stress tested the rules, we're putting the campaign on hold until after the designer gets back from vacationing in Australia so we can discuss a few points with him.

So, to keep the roleplaying going on, I dug out my Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition stuff and had everyone make characters for that. I figured it was a longshot for campaign play, but Dalton was into L5R and so was I. Darryl Jr. was always cool with AD&D OA back in the day, although he hates D&D now (3e killed the love), so I figured a fantasy samurai setting that wasn't D&D would be cool. Big Darryl might be a hard sell, since he's 70 years old and not really into Asian fantasy. I had that stuff with me because I anticipated ending early and I thought we might want to try out another game, and I wanted to push it on my group truth be told, since I had bought all the stuff for it, and continue to buy stuff for it. I bought an L5R Disk Wars starter on EBay because I'd never seen one before and it was super cheap, but I digress. We actually didn't finish character generation that evening, as it turns out, even when you have two (semi-)experienced players who are (quasi-) familiar with character generation, teaching it to others is still time consuming. So I gave each of them a book to keep and went home for the better part of a week.

My prediction about who would welcome the game turned out to be dead wrong. Big Darryl loved the setting, although his grasp of the rules is still a little shaky; and Darryl Jr. hated the bulky rulebook with it's immensity of stuff to read. Big Darryl liked it so much he talked his wife Joann into playing, and she hasn't played an RPG since the 1980s. So we ended up with Joann playing a Crane Bushi, Big Darryl playing a Unicorn Bushi, Darryl Jr. playing a Unicorn Bushi (he hadn't read a lot of the setting stuff and decided based on the fact that they are about 1/2 Mongol 1/2 Japanese, he figured he could roleplay that - he is a former Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors after all and a veteran OA player) and Dalton playing a Crab Shugenja. The father and son Unicorns are actually playing cousins.

I started them out with the adventure in the back of the book - "Ceremony of the Samurai" where they compete in the Topaz Championship. Dalton had played through the first day of this before with my family, but since the game didn't apparently stick with them, I decided it was OK for him to play it again. He's a good enough roleplayer to not ruin the surprises he knows about for the other players and not act on player knowledge; and he did just that. Roughly 3/4s of the way through the first day of the tournament I got a phone call from my wife that my sister was in the hospital and things were looking pretty dire, this was almost two weeks ago now and she's still in the hospital and things are still looking pretty dire. She's 300 miles away though and my parents went down to see her, there's nothing anyone can do at this point except hope, and pray if you are a person of faith. Still, her condition weighs heavily on my mind, and it's the main reason I've not blogged much for the last couple of weeks.

Anyway, that call kind of threw me off my game, but I got us through to the end of the first day. Since I need to keep myself occupied I've kept on playing games, although I haven't really been on my game all that much. I've missed stuff in the adventure and skipped some stuff, done some stuff just flat out wrong. I can't decide if it's because I am still really new with this system or I am too distracted to think straight. Anyway, last time Darryl Jr.'s son Dylan joined us and played one of the NPCs, Hida Fujizaka; so we had three generations of gamers at the table while I GMed. I wish the game had gone better, but maybe next time. I only have to finish up with day three and then Darryl Jr. has volunteered to take the reigns as GM to give me a break, since he "had to learn all the damned rules anyway"; and I'll actually get to play. I think I am going to be a Lion Bushi or maybe a Crab, although if Dylan sticks to the group I don't want to steal his thunder.

Here's some more stuff I got in the mail -



I needed this, I gave away three copies



Several of these were doubles for me, some were not. They were extremely cheap as a lot though $40.00 for the bunch, that was the minimum bid. I was a little surprised to win.

No comments:

Post a Comment