Recent Gaming (spring 2025)

Lots of gaming lately. Here's some highlights:

My Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign continues to go strong. It's rolling on 5 years now, roughly twice a month, so we've recently crossed our 100th session with the same characters. Dworkin/Oberon's universe was destroyed, and the action now takes place in Corwin's universe and another universe that Fiona created, plus the occasional scene in the tiny islands of primal matter in the Abyss that were left when the old universe imploded. Those are basically the only place where Brand can exist without the "immune system" of the other universes trying to destroy him.

I just wrapped up my Feng Shui 2nd Edition campaign about a week ago. The players foiled a really major push by the Ascended to conquer 2 of the 3 Junctures they didn't already control. This caused a Critical Shift (the second one of the campaign) and after a truly epic battle we ended with the PCs stepping into a portal to a future they don't know.

For the same group (as played Feng Shui), I'm now prepping a Cyberpunk Red campaign. Scroll down to my last post, from earlier this week, to read about that. 

It was a bit of a toss-up among the group whether we wanted to do Cyberpunk or Pendragon, so in the next few months I'll be reading The Great Pendragon Campaign and the Book of Uther and doing bits and pieces of light GM-prep for that, so that when Cyberpunk wraps up, I'll have that in my pocket and ready to go. But, given that the last two campaigns for this group ran multiple years each, I'm not too worried about getting Pendragon ready in a hurry.

I'm also now playing in an RPG as well. A friend of mine is running Night's Black Agents, aka spies vs vampires. In NBA designs their own vampires and determines whether vampirism is supernatural or superscience or literally infernal demon hell-powers. Our campaign is taking place in the 1980s, so in the two sessions we've played thus far, we've had to sneak across the Berlin Wall three times now. Our characters have rescued a journalist, and the goons who were holding her captive had weird mysterious creepy stuff going on, but we haven't really connected that they (or their leader) is a vampire yet. There's one of them that makes us instantly nauseous when we get near them, but we haven't really figured out why. A different one jumped on top of our car and ripped the roof open trying to kill the journalist, but the roof-rider burst into flames when we shot the heck out of her. We're not at all certain what to expect, or what we're up against. Unraveling the mystery is pretty fun, and the uncertainty makes it easy to tap in to the fear and bewilderment our characters are experiencing. 

This weekend I got together with some friends and played the card game Innovation and the board game Thunder Road.

Innovation is really good, but kind of overwhelming the first time you play.I had really good early turns, or so I thought, as I was in the lead in points and achievements.  Unfortunately, in the mid-game I just could not manage to draw cards with any synergy at all. Well, really the problem was that I had a great hand, but I foolishly commented on it, so someone Melded a card that they could then use via Dogma to steal my hand. I didn't even know that was a possibility... but, duh, I should have, it's not like this is the first game to ever let you steal cards from another player. I just never recovered. Good game, but boy does it have a ton going on.  It's sort of a civilization-builder, where every card is an invention or cultural breakthrough. You start in the stone age, and end in the far-future. Every card in the game is unique, and they all have multiple unique ways to play them. So while I liked it a lot, I imagine its' not going to be good match for everyone.

Thunder Road is much simpler. Just good chaotic Mad-Max style shenanigans. Sort of like if Gaslands or Car Wars was a streamlined racing boardgame. We played with the Chop Shop expansion, which adds cool asymmetric super-powers to your cars via a drafting mechanic at the start of the game. I enjoyed it a great deal, and may end up buying the game and that expansion. Based on just one play, it seems like the core game without that expansion is very light beer-and-pretzels without much depth, but that expansion made every turn interesting and unpredictable. 

I continue to play the occasional solitaire-RPG or solo-skirmish miniatures game when I have insomnia. For the solo-RPG I've been mostly running D&D, with one PC (a Satyr Circle of Stars Druid) and a rotating cast of lower-level NPC sidekicks. When I started I had to lean a lot on the Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and its sequel. I'm a little more freeform of late, but that book is great for getting you started and comfortable with solitaire play.  

And every once in a while I boot up Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to be careful with those because man can I ever lose an entire evening just rearranging my darned inventory. When that happens, I feel like I've wasted a resource (my life, my time) that I'll never get back... and yet, I love both those games so much.

Multi-Platform The Warriors

Have you seen the movie The Warriors?
It's an old 70's film about a New York street gang trying to get back to Coney Island while all the other gangs in NYC hunt them. It's got some really trippy gangs - like the Baseball All-Stars. For a while I considered just stealing the plot for Cyberpunk 2020 and it's various posergangs.

Then I realized, it'd be cooler if each gang were represented by a different RPG system. There'd be a CP2020 gang for sure, plus a Vampire gang, a gang of Spanners, some Pendragon knights, 40k Orks, a D&D party, etc. Eventually a gang shows up without any connecting theme, and hopefully the players intuit that it's the GURPS gang.

This would make a good GwenCon one-shot, too, so there's hope I may run it this fall or next.

I'm not sure exactly what system the PCs should be from. One option would be Amber, using hoodlum junior versions of the Elder Amberites trying to get home without their trumps. Problem is the lack of randomness to that system - I'm unsure if it's a good idea to run a fairly combat-and-chase-scene intensive one-shot in such an abstract system. I suppose they could use Amber mechanics when defending, and the enemies mechanics when attacking, or vice-versa. That would shake things up a bit.

Alternately, PCs could be the colorful (and full-color) Everway sample characters.

Improvement by Time and Training

In general, I don't like systems that require or incentivize training. Frankly, training is rarely exciting. An occasional montage might work, like Luke with Yoda, but mostly it gets old quick. To make that the only method of advancement sounds uninspiring.

Enforcing realistic improvement rates slows character development to a crawl, so it's generally better to skip on this realism unless you have some way of guaranteeing the same playgroup for consecutive years. If you have a foolproof retention method, please publish it!

That said, Time & Training works admirably for Continuum. Largely because it's a time-travel game. The PCs control their own development, being capable of saying "I need to know about Art History to answer this question, so I'll jaunt off for a semester at MCAD before attempting the roll." Time & Training is not the only XP system therein, they also have an Improvement by Attempt sub-system. Players can fluctuate between actively seeking skill upgrades and just incrementing those things that the GM asks them to roll.

It can also work pretty well for any game that features sweeping leaps of narrative time. I don't recall what the XP systems of Pendragon and Orkworld are like, but I imagine you could work a fairly realistic advancement system into any game that uses their concept of "winter season".

My old "Hearts of Darkness, v2" LARP did so fairly effectively, though it was using a hybrid system of this mixed with XP by Accomplishment. The game featured immortal vampires as PCs. We'd run 6-8 session story arcs, then advance the timeline by 5 to 20 years. Experience could only be spent between story arcs. Your accomplishments in the previous arc made various things cost less XP. We'd give each player an individual list of things that had reduced costs due to their efforts.

What are your thoughts (or anecdotes) regarding games that use strongly simulationist methods of character advancement?