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Here’s the question that I’ve been dreading. Day 6 of #RPGaDay2015: Most Recent RPG Played. Yeah… About that…

The sad truth of the matter is that I haven’t played an RPG, aside from work-related playtests of stuff I’m designing or that my students have developed in my game design studio at the Kansas City Art Institute, for literally years. I think the last time I was actually in a game was a 4th Edition D&D “Essentials” campaign that ran for a couple months back in 2010. Half a friggin’ decade ago. Yeesh.

There have been a few fits and starts since then — mostly character creation and single sessions which never panned out into recurring games, mostly due to scheduling difficulties and such. The One Ring, Marvel Heroes, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. The starter clicked, but the engine never turned over. Most of my friends are spread around the globe, and the ones that are local have all come down with severe cases of Life, making scheduling problematic.

It’s gotten bad enough that I’m seriously contemplating running an online game — something which I’ve never done before. Not sure if it would scratch the same itch, to be honest.

Well — THAT’S a depressing entry! Let’s check in on Dave for his video entry for the day… with special guest, the inimitable James Wallis!

Day 4 of #RPGaDay2015 beckons! The first question which requires a bit of sussing out: Most Surprising Game. Does this mean a game where you were expecting one thing, but got another? A game which surprised you in and of itself, or a time you were surprised by events occurring in-game? Personally, I’m going to go with this: A game where your expectations where completely blown away, and your way of thinking about games was fundamentally altered in some way.

I’m sure that a lot of people are going to list some indie darling, which approaches gaming in a unique way — the field is certainly full of that; some successful, some less so, but it’s sort of the hallmark of the “brand”, if you will. As for me, though: I’m going to be a doddering old grognard and pick a game that completely changed the way I looked at game design, when I first encountered it over 30 years ago — James Bond 007: Roleplaying On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Gerry Klug, published by Victory Games.

Readers of last year’s #RPGaDay entries will recall that I waxed rhapsodic about this game a couple of times — it even took the coveted “Favorite RPG of All Time” category. James Bond 007 was the game that made me want to become a game designer. Before it, I had never seen a game system that emulated a genre — systems were, in my meagre experience of the time, mathematical models of action, and that’s it. But Klug’s design in this game showed me that you could create systems that not only modeled HOW something happened, but could bring across the feel of a thing — the emotions and sensations. The chase rules, for example, bring the tension and rising stakes of a chase directly to the players through the rules, not just the results. It was an epiphany.

So definitely, that qualifies as my “Most Surprising Game”, since I was not expecting it at all — and everything after it was changed.

Here is Dave Chapman’s video entry for today, along with his special guest, Becky Annison of Black Armada:

So now you know what surprised us. What about you?