Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Which Setting Would Like to Play In?

Okay, I have a couple of questions for all you readers. Which kind of setting for a pencil and paper fantasy game would you rather play in and GM?

Setting one an Arthurian era setting before the sinking of Lyonesse and Hybrasil. Something like the Lyonesse stories and Arthurian legends.

Setting two a fantasy setting in an altered North America set after a couple of thousands of years of migration from Europe and North Africa.

Both have fantasy, swords and sorcery and derring-do.

Question Two would you rather play a fantasy skill based game, class based game with levels, or a combination of the two.

Please leave answers in the comments. If you think of some options I've missed for game type go ahead and make recommendations.

11 comments:

  1. A long time ago I played in an BESM (Big Eyes Small Mouth) anime game in which I played a card wielding duelist (something similar to the Yu-Gi-Oh or Duel Masters anime) who used a standard 52 card deck to play a "deck of planes" to damage enemies. The card's powers, similar to the anime, were by GM discretion. One of the cards was "wheel of fortune" which is in which *anything* could happen. Playing it was the card of last resort, because you didn't know if luck would be in your favor or not.

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    1. My son has created a very similar card based rpg with Magic cards. Tough to figure out which card to play when you don't know what they do. How did you decide what to use?

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    2. It was based off of a 52 card deck. If you're doing M:TG there's a (green/ forests) world enchantment card called "mine, mine, mine" in which you have your entire deck at your disposal to cast from. But once cast, they're gone from memory. But that's really not how the DM did things. We did it by power points, and I could cast any spell I had access to (calling out the attack[s] in typical anime style), but the problem is that it was a thing of trial and error. I could blow my entire pool of points with a few spells that did nothing because the enemies were immune or took significantly less damage. So there was some strategy involved in deciding what to cast.

      If things were played the way the card games play, as a card wielder, you'll typically have 6 or 7 cards in your hand, your deck and a discard pile. You could give all the cards a number and play with a physical deck (this only works if you have a tabletop, not online, because you can cheat). Conversely, you could roll what cards you get, and ignore/ reroll duplicates from cards that are either in your hand or have been discarded.

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    3. Interesting. I've never been a fan of cards as a mechanic. Probably because my brother was an amateur magician. I know too many ways to move cards where you want them. Plus I can recognize the cards in a deck by their backs. I don't like it when I know what other people have.

      If it isn't that kind of game it doesn't matter as much.

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    4. It does and it doesn't matter, but to me the point of it is to give the game a unique feel to it if you use regular cards, or a CCG (collectable card game) cards. But collectables are inferior in a variety of ways: cost, edition, limited prints, etc.

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  2. I've never been fond of using collectable cards for something else. Although when I was a kid we made up our fantasy baseball teams with the cards we had.

    I like regular cards better and values can be assigned easily. It is a different feel than dice that is for sure.

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    1. I've played Protocol, which is a card-based GM-less narrative game. It was great and run through Greybarks. The cards were normal playing cards.

      As for the setting, I think alternate North America would be cool. Or even the whole American continent. You could have tribal nations and them eventually banding together to stave off the Aztecs or something, even, with the random explorers from Europe or Africa and Asia thrown in. Especially funny would be references to the viking colony centuries before the Age of Exploration (I think it was called Vinland or something and they all died/assimilated IRL).

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    2. That setting is kind of like what I am thinking of. The first non-Native colonists would be small city states on the East Coast that were refugees from Atlantis.

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    4. I would be interested in alternate North America if it was a Shannara-like setting only.

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  3. Dominique Crouzet,

    So is that the movie Shannara or the books Shannara? I haven't followed a book in decades.

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