Category: Gaming

Today’s question: Describe your plans for your next game?

I currently do not have one, sadly. Too busy with projects that are far too late, plus it’s difficult to get a group together and find a regular time to play. (I’m currently running a STAR TREK ADVENTURES game that only meets once every 5-6 weeks or so.)

I have TONS of ideas for games I want to run. Too many, really.

• A Far West game (which I want to do once it’s done, to “wash my mind out”, replacing the stress I associate with it’s seemingly-cursed production with the joy I have of the setting).

• A Doctor Who game (for that combination of nostalgia and a setting I love).

• A 5th Edition D&D game, in an original setting, different from the usual “D&D epic fantasy standard.”

• A 1930s pulp game, as a playtest for a new edition of THRILLING TALES (you heard it here first, folks!).

• Something Hammer-Horror-esque, maybe for Halloween.

• …and too many more to list.

Someday.

 
 

I’ll be honest, I’m not 100% sure what “tricky” means, in this context.

I’ll go with “challenging” — At GenCon 1992, there was a homebrew “Twin Peaks” event on the schedule. This was right after the second season ended (not to return for nearly 30 years), on a cliffhanger which featured Agent Cooper apparently possessed by “Bob.”

So it turns out that the event was, essentially, a systemless LARP — run as a direct continuation, and was a helluva lot of fun. The GM had me play Possessed Cooper. Another guy played the True Cooper, trying to escape the Black Lodge. About halfway through the event, that guy and I had an idea. We pulled the GM aside, and got clearance from him, and he loved it.

We figured that if this was on TV, both of us would be played by Kyle MacLachlan — but in the LARP, people knew that I was Possessed Cooper, and the other guy was True Cooper.

So we switched roles, without telling anyone. Just clues in how we played.

And we pulled it off. It was a lot of fun, and one of the most rewarding game experiences I’ve ever had as a player.

 
 

Today’s question: Describe a failure that became amazing.

Interestingly enough, this allows me to repeat a story that first appeared in #RPGaDay2014, day 13: “Most Memorable Character Death.”

In the mid-80s, my best friend and I sat down to play a game of Hero Games’ DANGER INTERNATIONAL. It was a Champions spin-off that was for playing un-powered action hero types: spies, private eyes, cops. soldiers, that kinda thing.

Dave (my best friend) was going to run me through a game where I was playing a DEA Agent. I was pretty excited about this, because in our games, I was almost always the GM, so getting a chance to play was great. We spent quite a long time creating my agent (remember: Hero System), and started to play.

David set the game in Miami, and had me looking for my partner, who had disappeared while on an undercover operation. No sooner had we started playing, than he partnered me up with representatives of the local police: Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs! (Yes, we were both fans of MIAMI VICE, which was at the height of its popularity at the time).

Rumor had it that members of the cartel that my partner had been investigating were holed up in a stilt house, out on the water near Biscayne Bay. So of course we hopped in the speed boat, and one Jan Hammer musical montage later, we arrived at the house. We split up, with Crocket and Tubbs taking one side of the house, and me the other. I neared the door, and kicked it in…

…and caught a face full of claymore mine. The door (the whole house, in fact) was trapped. Nobody was there. KA friggin BOOM. One unreasonably large handful of d6 damage dice later, my DEA agent was dead.

What we had thought was going to be a story about the exciting adventures of a rough-and-ready DEA agent, turned out to be only the motivational death in the pre-credits sequence of a Miami Vice episode.

This definitely qualifies as a “failure that became amazing,” because we still remember and laugh about this, 30 years later.

I hope Crocket and Tubbs got the bad guys in the end.