Graph Paper Games

First of all, I'd like to share a quick video about a guy who has been running D&D (or technically, AD&D First Edition, from the look of the rulebook) for 35 years straight. For someone who has never run a single campaign longer than about two years, I have appreciate that level of commitment, and the collection that has sprung out of it. I, on the other hand, have not posted in two months.  Mostly that's because I haven't been running anything, and more often than not tend to post gaming recaps these days of games that I am actually running, rather than playing.  But the games in which I have been playing haven't been running much either the last two months.  Baker Street , I fear, has succumbed to the weight of the number of players.  The last session was enjoyable, but only about half the players really engaged, at the raw number of players ensured that someone in the group had the maxed-out skill for whatever task was required. The most recent se...

So, as I mentioned recently, I've got a lot of sentimentality for Star Trek RPG's, and Star Trek in general.  Three actual honest-to-God licensed ones exist in history: FASA's, Last Unicorn Games, and Decipher's.  I own the first two and have heard mixed things about the third. But there are also a lot of non-licensed Star Trek RPG's out there, and recently I saw that one of them, Far Trek , was offering a hard copy for a couple of bucks on Lulu.  Never one to let a deal go by I picked it up and thought I'd give you, gentle readers, my thoughts. Far Trek is a light-hearted, even breezy take on the Star Trek universe, almost exclusively the original series.  There rules incorporate stats, skills, and talents.  There are four stats: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, with the stats ranging from about a -2 to a +2, reflecting their modifier on the die roll.  I actually like this mechanic, which I first encountered in True20.  It does...

Barking Alien once posted his "life of gaming," and it was such a good read I thought I would do the same myself. Plus it is my 100th Post!  Woo Hoo! My first experience of roleplaying games came when my uncle gave me a gift certificate to Sears.  Now back in the day, the Sears-Roebuck catalog was a big honking deal at Christmastime because you could look at all these toys you couldn't find anywhere else.  But even more bizarre that year was that the Sears store was selling a box set of Basic Dungeons & Dragons.  I was a huge fan of knights as a kid, not to mention Narnia and the Lord of the Rings books (admittedly I had only seen the animated movies), so I managed to talk my parents into letting me buy the box set. Despite the assertions that this game was huge, I found it very difficult to find people to game with me.  My sister was only marginally interested in hanging out with me, since we were getting into full-blown sibling rivalry (plus ...

EOW (End of the World) is my annual mini-convention I participate in with my friends, and it was this past weekend.  It's basically three days of gaming, with a different GM running a session each day using the same generic rules system but different genres.  It's a fun weekend, and here's the review of how it went. Day One (Friday): Star Trek GM: Me Story: in the TNG era, the crew of an aging Reliant -class ship are contacted by a Romulan intelligence agent about a sector the Empire ceded to the Federation several years ago.  Two centuries ago, a Romulan ship was destroyed there under mysterious circumstances, and now a colony may be at risk.  The crew discovers a planet-sized being that can siphon energy from any source. Liked: it's my scenario so I don't want to sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but afterwards one player said that the session "really felt like a Next Generation episode." Disliked: I waited until the last minute when it came ...

I've owned this game for a very, very long time and with my mini-convention coming up was thinking about doing a Star Trek scenario.  I wanted to try it out, however, and decided to run a one-shot using the Last Unicorn Games version of Star Trek. I'll say first off that PC creation is a cinch and only takes a couple of minutes if you use the pre-made packages for their early childhood, training cruise, etc.  There's enough options for ship positions to round out a five-person party easily without someone having to be "Ship's Counselor," which I think would be a dull position in most cases. I will say that the dice mechanics, as it played out in the scenario I designed were odd.  When you want to make a skill check you roll the number of dice equal to the applicable attribute, pick the highest die (they are all d6's) and then add the skill rating value.  So if you have a skill rating of 2 and an attribute rating of 3, you roll three d6's, pick t...