Monday, October 31, 2016

So, What Am I Playing These Days?

I deep-sixed Necessary Evil as no-one was having any fun.

The players felt over-matched. This was mainly because they would plan and reconnoiter, then make a frontal assault against overwhelming odds. They apparently never learned that the bad guys had super-powers too. Oh well.

The GM, yours truly, hated it because of the huge number of misprints in the plot point campaign. I only run these things so I can avoid doing massive amounts of game preparation, so I need the plot point notes to be right.

And they weren't. Bad guys were shorted their powers and abilities routinely because the notes in the betsiary in the back of the book had been mis-transcribed into the notes in the plot point adventure.

So we dumped it for Gamma World

We decided to start playing through the boxed set scenarios after I got back from my vacation in Sunny Florida, and I used that time to get a full set of the extra cards printed up.

One of the sucky things about fourth edition D&D, and by extension Gamma World, is that Wizards of the Coast used it as an experiment to attempt to introduce the Collectible Card madness into the RPG world. I've always hated the "blind package" hobbies for the very reason the companies that use such marketing love it: the overspend factor. Buying cards in packs of eight guarantees that you will end up with multiples, and most of those will be unusable because the rules limit the number of duplicates you can have in a deck.

These cards are of two types: Alpha Mutations, which are mutant powers the player characters develop "because of all the radiation" such as tentacles, the ability to fly and so forth, and Omega Tech, which are devices that can be used once and maybe more often, but usually only once. Found treasures.

I played in a brief Gamma World campaign and ended up buying a few packs when I could get them at discount prices, but I would need a fairly complete deck if I were to run the game. One of the players was eager to use his own deck (players can optionally make up their own decks - WoC are not dumb and want everyone at the table to have a chance to hurl money at them) but the other interested guy had no cards and no money so I would be "fronting" him - which I was completely OK with.

So I ordered a set of the after-market cards as a print-on-demand deal from Drive Thru RPG.

The other sucky thing about Gamma World is that it is so far tuned for the "Encounter" experience it is not untrue to say it is just a board game for which no-one wanted to write proper board-game rules.

The setting as a post apocalyptic one, set after a disastrous "collision" of different parallel worlds. Players take the roles of mutated animals, robots and animated plants in this bizarre landscape and take on quests and adventures.

But after a couple of games it is woefully apparent that "off the grid" (out of combat) the mutations they pick up are mostly of no use whatsoever. The vast majority the card powers are things to use in combat situations. And any time a one is rolled, the powers switch out in a random mutational surge. It is impossible to approach this game with any sort of serious intent when this sort of manic Keystone Kops nonsense is going on. To say the game is "light hearted" is akin to saying "the current crop of presidential candidates is a tad uninspiring".

Not only that, the rulebook is deficient in anything not directly involved with combat. It is painfully obvious that this game was designed to sell cards rather than to be a gripping RPG experience per se.

But the players are seemingly enjoying themselves. I'm not, but I can stick it out for the few weeks it will take to get to the end of the thing.

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