Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Anticipating Tomorrow's Game


So the last couple weeks or so, my cell phone has been on the fritz and (hating technology as I do) it's taken me till the last day or so to get it fixed. Which means today is the first time I've had a chance to talk to the Doc in a while. Here's a paraphrase of our conversation:

Doc: "So what are you doing tomorrow?"

JB: Well, I've got to get up early for work (taking the bus), and then I've got my Thursday night game.

"Yeah? What are you guys playing now?"

Oh, that's right! I haven't talked to you in a couple weeks...we've been play-testing the new game; the one I'm writing?

"Oh, yeah? How's it going?"

Pretty darn good. I've been tweaking the rules every week. Last Thursday was a fairly awesome session. Everyone really seemed to have a blast; I know I did.

"What happened?"

Well, a lot of action...killed off a few characters.

"That's not good!"

No, no it was fine...actually I only killed off one guy. A couple others got knocked out, but they weren't "permanently" killed.

"How'd they die?"

Well, the troll got greased in the stairwell by some ork thugs with laser-sighted submachine guns. He did manage to hose a couple of 'em down with his assault rifle before being riddled with bullets. Then the computer hacker got gunned down while he was trying to snipe the same guys, though he did take one of 'em with me. See, the orks were trying to get up the stairs, the players were trying to keep 'em down and there was this kind of running gun battle with a race to see who was going to whittle down the other side. Eventually, it was down to a badass shaman versus a sociopath troll...

"The shaman was the bad guy?"

Yeah, bad guy human, "good guy" troll.

"The shaman had magic?"

Yeah.

"What kind of spells did he have?"

Um, you know...like fireballs and bolts of power and some spell that made him more badass in combat...stuff like that.

"Wow. Your spells sound awesome."

Um, yeah...I might have been a little off with the "challenge level;" he may have been a little too powerful for the 1st level characters.

"That's not unusual for one of your games."

Thanks...anyway, he went toe-to-toe with the troll, big-ass spear in hand. The troll was getting low in hit points, and decided he'd take the shaman "over the edge;" as in, taking him over the rail and dropping him five floors down the center of the stairwell.

"Why'd he decide to do that?!"

More damage...he planned on riding him all the way down...and landing on him. He needed to roll something ridiculous like a 16 or something on a 20 sided dice, but he was able to use Ego points [a game convention, gained from role-playing one's alignment...in his case tasering some poor sucker earlier in the session just because the dude was ignorant and the troll's a sociopath] to automatically succeed. He knocked himself out, but he got the shaman down to 5 hit points or so...then the dwarf army vet raced down the stairs to plug the mage with a handgun. I'm not sure why he felt he needed to get in close and personal, but after trading a few shots at close range, he was able to put the guy down.

"Wow...so they managed to beat the wrecking crew?"

Yeah, it was mission accomplished at the end. I found it pretty exciting myself.

"Cool."

***

And that was about it...though Doc did say he wished I lived down in Oregon so we could game together.

I've been so busy (and so tired) since the weekend, that I completely forgot how elated I was after last week's game...glad the rules are finally starting to gel the way I want 'em. Last Friday, I spent much of the day thinking about the prior night and anticipating our next game session. Now that it's tomorrow...well, shoot, I should go get some sleep so that I'm fresh for the game!
: )

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