Graph Paper Games

I've been talking for a while about starting a superhero game now that the previous "home game" of D&D had wrapped up last year.  For a while I had been planning on running Champions, mostly because I thought it would be fun to run a game that meant so much to me as a college student and might promote long-term play. But as it turns out (to the surprise of few) Champions was difficult to teach and difficult to make NPC's.  Between the holidays and a bunch of stuff at home nothing was happening and the game seemed to be stalling out.  But then I found Bash, a fairly simple supers RPG that was easy to teach and easy for me to make villains, etc.  Two weeks ago I ran a test session of Bash, using 1940's WW2 characters. It was a big hit, and suddenly the WW2 session, the PC's the players had been trying to build for Champions, Bash, and the book The League of Regrettable Heroes  all jelled together into what appears to be the first session of a campaign. ...

I had the chance to follow up with several of my players who were present for the one-shot I ran last Friday of Bash! Ultimate Edition .  Many of their insights matched my own (submitted in no particular order): It's a very easy game to pick up.  The one-rule mechanic of X times 2d6 for effect with X being an attribute or a power, usually between 1 and 5 was pretty simple to grasp.  It also made play pretty quick, even with the six players that I had. The dice mechanic is jammy.  "Jammy" is a term that has somehow made into my gaming group's lexicon, meaning that there is a lot of swing in terms of results.  This is especially true because when you roll doubles of any kind, the dice "explode" and have you roll a third die to add to the total.  If it also matches the others, then it explodes again, etc. For example, if you have an Agility of 3 (low superhuman) you can get a result of 9 (two 1's would explode on the roll, so a 1 and 2 is the lowest ...

With all the craziness going on right now, I took some good advice and set aside complicated plans for long campaigns but instead ran a one-shot of Bash , a fairly rules-light superhero RPG. I also took a break from the norm by setting it in the Golden Era of Comics, with the PC's being a group of patriotic superheroes called The Defenders who are called on by FDR himself to battle the Third Reich.  They are led by American Wonder, with his teammates Pyre, Cosmo, Nitro, Haute Couture, and Blind Fury.  By the time the session was done they had battled Nazis, Tiger tanks, and eventually the Nazi's top-secret weapon, the supervillain Ubermensch!  Thankfully they were not alone, being joined at various times by the stubble-jawed Sgt. Brick  and Pat Parker, War Nurse (along with her Girl Commandos)! Pat Parker, War Nurse is an actual comic book heroine from 1946, depicted here in a bit of fan art. Bash is a pretty fun, easy system that my group picked up right aw...

I'm several days late on getting some sort of end-of-year retrospective, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know, I suspect. Way back in January 2016 I drew my D&D 5E campaign to a close.  This had been going initially as a way to try out the new rules, and lasted until then with a pretty dramatic climax.  At that point the Other Rob picked up the D&D ball and ran with it, doing his own 5E through the Fall.  That was a good game in many ways but to me illustrated the weaknesses of 5E high-level play and made me appreciate bailing out when I did. But in addition to the regular "house" game, 2016 saw a lot of people get behind the GM screen.  Rachel ran her zombie game using the FATE system.  Emma did a one-shot of her own D&D story, and is talking about starting a club at her school.  John started up a regular game of d6 Star Wars , which had a strong start and is still going on. a great photo of Rachel perched behind th...