{"id":8966,"date":"2015-06-22T18:22:02","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T18:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/random-average.com\/?p=8966"},"modified":"2015-06-22T18:29:28","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T18:29:28","slug":"summer-break-rpgs-with-kaylee-1-just-figuring-out-what-to-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/summer-break-rpgs-with-kaylee-1-just-figuring-out-what-to-play\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Break RPGs with Kaylee, #1: Just Figuring out What to Play"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My gaming with Kaylee is <a href=\"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/tag\/kaylee\/\">fairly well documented<\/a> and, in general, we&#8217;ve been pretty happy playing Fate or Fate Accelerated. It&#8217;s the sort of game that let&#8217;s me play pretty fast and loose with prep, and Fate Accelerated in particular gives us the flexibility to run pretty much any weird genre mashup Kaylee comes up with. All cool.<\/p>\n<p>With that said, I&#8217;ve had an itch to try some different games. There are a few reasons for this.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Famliarity.<\/em> While it&#8217;s easy to get excited about a new setting or story, it&#8217;s a little more difficult to get excited about the game system, since she and I are both quite familiar with Fate at this point.<\/li>\n<li><em>&#8220;Same-Same.&#8221;<\/em> Part of that familiarity brings along a sense that all of the obstacles and in fact the characters are a little bit&#8230; similar. Five aspects. Same numeric range on the same six approaches. Same numeric bonuses from the same number of Stunts. We can mix that up a bit by going for the more detailed Fate Core version, or something like Atomic Robo, or something even just a little more detailed like Jadepunk, but there&#8217;s an increase to overhead in there that doesn&#8217;t appeal to either of us at this point.<\/li>\n<li><em>Tiny bit more crunch.<\/em> I don&#8217;t like the way Fate &#8220;extras&#8221; are written, and Gear is gone in the current iteration, so if I want &#8220;stuff&#8221; that doesn&#8217;t just feel like a couple more aspects and stunt to keep track of, well&#8230; It&#8217;s hard to have them <em>not<\/em> feel like that, because in Fate that&#8217;s what they <em>are<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li><em>Better failure incentives.<\/em> Fate actually has decent incentives for failure. The problem is, the incentives for success (and the fuel &#8211; in the form of Fate Points) are stronger, and the mechanics are such that (at least in my experience), if you fail, it&#8217;s almost always because you let the other side win, like someone&#8217;s uncle &#8220;racing&#8221; their five-year old nephew across the backyard. Success is <strong><em>super easy<\/em><\/strong>, the instinct to win is natural and strong, the ability to do is <em>right there<\/em>, so while failure is often more interesting, it&#8217;s just as often disappointingly rare.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, in short, we&#8217;re looking for something a little different not out of any lack of love for Fate, but just to shake things up a bit, ignite some excitement for a new system to go along with a new game, and maybe get a bit more &#8220;classic crunch&#8221; in there.<\/p>\n<p>Now with that said, it&#8217;s no easy thing to just grab some other game, because I&#8217;ve got some counter-criteria.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Relative Simplicity.<\/em> Kaylee can easily deal with any game system out there, I think. Certainly, something like 5e wouldn&#8217;t be a problem, but there&#8217;s always the chance Sean will pop in and want to play. I want to make that happen, and as I&#8217;ve explained before, my guideline for relative rules simplicity is &#8220;can a four year old manage it?&#8221; (This is one of the other reasons Fate Accelerated isn&#8217;t working really well right now: the +\/- of the dice, subtraction that can go into negatives, et cetera definitely does not work for someone in Pre-K One.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p><em>Low Prep.<\/em> I have the time and ability to prep a game at the point, I suppose, but I&#8217;d really rather have something that&#8217;s 25% prep and 75% happening in the game, at least in part because playing with Kaylee is extremely hit or miss: She might be tired, I might be tired, something might get in the way, and it might be weeks or even months before some big-prep thing actually sees the light of day. The return on investment for heavy prep is just not there.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p><em>Two-Person Friendly.<\/em> &#8211; A whole bunch of RPGs want a handful of players, minimum. I could pull out DnD 5e (and I&#8217;d be happy to do so) and run Princes of the Apocalypse, but at that point either Kaylee is running three or four guys (with minimal attachment to any of them), or I&#8217;m using a spreadsheet and rebalancing the whole thing for one character which&#8230; no. No, I&#8217;m not doing that.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, the mix of all these things eliminates a lot of games I&#8217;d normally be quite happy to run or play, under other circumstances.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>DnD 5e. I like a ton of the stuff I&#8217;ve seen and read and heard about this game, but both prep and rebalancing encounters for a single hero is non-trivial.<\/li>\n<li>Burning Wheel. I&#8217;ve read some great &#8220;solo hero&#8221; actual play reports, but again the prep (for someone not entirely familiar with the rules, due to lack of playing) strikes me as a way too much. Lots of stats for everything means a lot of prep. No.<\/li>\n<li>Mouseguard. Hits a lot of the necessary criteria (prep is a dead-cinch, I know the system, I know what I&#8217;d change, and the mechanics and setting are Sean-friendly), but it&#8217;s a bit too far the other way in terms of interesting failure &#8211; solo MG would be brutal, and frankly that&#8217;s not what I feel like doing right now.<\/li>\n<li>Dragon Age. I like the rules, and the simplicity, and the stunt system. Honestly I just like this game a whole bunch, but balancing to one player seems like an exercise in frustration, even more so than DnD.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I toyed around with <em>The Strange<\/em> a little bit, but Kaylee didn&#8217;t seem to find the premise very interesting. I&#8217;m not confident the <em>Heroquest<\/em> dice mechanic would be very&#8230; approachable. <em>The One Ring<\/em> is great, but again I don&#8217;t think the game is really balanced for solo heroics.<\/p>\n<p>I kept coming back to Dungeon World (rulebook&#8217;s been sitting on my shelf since the kickstarter shipped ~mumble~ years ago), a fantasy adaptation of Vincent Baker&#8217;s <em>Apocalypse World<\/em>. The system is light and fast, and while the dice mechanic isn&#8217;t as simple as &#8220;count how many high dice you rolled&#8221;, adding three small numbers together is doable for any potential player in my household. Its fans trumpet the ease of prep, and in one GM&#8217;s words, running and playing the game is kind of like &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/walkingmind.evilhat.com\/2015\/03\/10\/diceless-apocalypse-2\/\">a diceless game that sometimes go to dice<\/a>&#8221; which, to put it mildly, fits pretty well inside my comfort zone.<\/p>\n<p>It all seemed to work for what I needed, except that the characters need to have Bonds with other player characters. However, I thought I might be able to make that work, assuming I could provide Kaylee with a rich array of persistent NPCs to interact with &#8211; a band of companions or something, but without the overhead of &#8220;the GM is basically playing a half dozen other fully-statted PCs.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A band of companions&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>That gave me an idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My gaming with Kaylee is fairly well documented and, in general, we&#8217;ve been pretty happy playing Fate or Fate Accelerated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,6],"tags":[145,56,121,116,63],"class_list":["post-8966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actual-play","category-musing","category-table-top","tag-dungeon-world","tag-fate","tag-fate-accelerated","tag-fate-core","tag-kaylee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8966"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8969,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8966\/revisions\/8969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}