Wednesday, August 21, 2013

The Big Next Game

With the amazing conclusion of our decade-long Buffy the Vampire Slayer: RPG series (Slaying Solomon), my gaming group now finds itself at a most delicious crossroad - choosing a new campaign!

I confess that I didn't expect to find ourselves in this uncertain state. I had expected that talk of the new game would proceed while we wrapped up our final Buffy episodes. But I was extraordinarily reluctant to start conversations related to the new game while Buffy was speeding to conclusion. I have been accused (fairly) of Gamer ADD in the past and I wanted to make sure Buffy had my undivided attention. I also didn't really have a good idea of when we'd hit the last episode. As it turned out, we wrapped up several sessions earlier than I expected.

Now we are sharing proposals for the future game in preparations for a vote. We've already taken a pass to select our top six:
  1. Sword & Sandals in Roman occupied Britain
  2. Rockets & Rayguns based around a Retro-Future Martian Spaceport
  3. 20th Century Supers spanning multiple generations of a City
  4. Near-future Action-Thriller involving the construction of a Space Elevator
  5. Gritty Sci-Fi among the criminals and dissidents of a futuristic Prison Planet
  6. Post-Apocalyptic SF on a Prison Planet cut off from Interstellar Society
With the exception of #1, all of these proposals have something to do with space elevators. Weird how our group goes off on tangents

We're very keen to capture whatever it was that made Buffy so great. We've discussed this at length and we think that a geographically focused and hyper-developed setting had something to do with it. Thus, in all the proposals listed above, we can take a very specific locale and develop the hell out of it, with or without Microscope before hand) and certainly over the course of the campaign.

We also want to make sure that campaign's structure fits our busy adult lives. Even though we try to schedule bi-weekly sessions, most of the people in our player pool cannot commit to sessions very far in advance. We need to campaign framework where each session (for the most part) is a stand along episode and that we can rotate player characters in and out seamlessly. Sharing GM duties is also a top priority.

One thing that we haven't been talking about (much) is system. We all have different preferences and we are pretty much agreed that that genre choice should dictate the system. We're using this down-time between campaigns to try out potential games to see how suitable they might be to any of the various concepts. We've tried Fate Core (with excellent results) and I'm sure that system could be used for any of the proposed campaigns without difficulty. But we're also going to try Leverage (for the Near-Future Thriller) and a few other systems as well.

(Cross-posted from Risus Monkey during the transition to this blog)

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