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Players, man
Jun. 25th, 2019 12:40 amPrior to last October I was running a FATE System game loosely based off of the old Bureau 13 TTRPG and pulp novels, in turn based off of a previous iteration of the same game idea run in GURPS. I am of two minds about which system is better for this particular game idea, but it seems to be easier to get other people to play FATE, possibly because you really only need one book to be a player (whereas for GURPS you really do need at least two most of the time). The game went on hiatus because SDK was the most enthusiastic member of my player corps and we didn't really know how to handle returning to the game when he wouldn't be at the table. (His widow has also now bowed out of the group because of a combination of logistical issues and externally-generated drama; this is not nearly as big a problem, because her character was an extremely poor fit for the rest of the group and she saw no particular reason to fix this.)
We decided to timeskip the game and start again, and last Saturday we sat down to play for the first time in about eight months. I was a little worried that the couple of pages of game outline I had written up wouldn't be sufficient, but in fact we got through barely a paragraph and a half, because one of my knuckleheads decided to stab the wall of a hidden alien spaceport. Now, granted, I hadn't been 100% explicit about how much of these aliens' tech is biotech, but goddamn, son, that was rude. And so the next hour and a half of the game was his player dealing with the fallout from that, and everyone else arguing about whether or not he needed to be quarantined.
The silver lining is that this is, in fact, an very Bureau 13 thing to have happen, and of a very different flavor than the previous running joke of the game (the trials and tribulations of the matriarch of a very large family of Cajun were-gators), so I'm not mad. But I continue to be astonished by how little of my meticulous plots actually ends up in the game.
We decided to timeskip the game and start again, and last Saturday we sat down to play for the first time in about eight months. I was a little worried that the couple of pages of game outline I had written up wouldn't be sufficient, but in fact we got through barely a paragraph and a half, because one of my knuckleheads decided to stab the wall of a hidden alien spaceport. Now, granted, I hadn't been 100% explicit about how much of these aliens' tech is biotech, but goddamn, son, that was rude. And so the next hour and a half of the game was his player dealing with the fallout from that, and everyone else arguing about whether or not he needed to be quarantined.
The silver lining is that this is, in fact, an very Bureau 13 thing to have happen, and of a very different flavor than the previous running joke of the game (the trials and tribulations of the matriarch of a very large family of Cajun were-gators), so I'm not mad. But I continue to be astonished by how little of my meticulous plots actually ends up in the game.
