The kids in my street are worrying me. I think it is a general thing worldwide but I’ve just started to notice it now in the UK. Kids just have no concept of money.
I caught the kids playing with D&D miniatures in the street last night on my way home from work. Nothing wrong with that you might think. And you’d be correct in thinking that. What gets me is how they were playing with them though.
When you buy miniatures you realise they are expensive and take care of them. If they are bought unpainted you spend hours painstakingly painting every single individual link in it’s chainmail and personalising its livery. You carry them about in a lined carry case or at worst wrap them in toilet paper and put them in amongst your dice. Even the prepainted models you look after because you know how expensive they are in the long run.
These kids were throwing them off walls, chucking stones at them and generally doing everything a child would do with toy soldiers. The obvious problem with this is these are not your £1 green plastic soldiers. They weren’t even the slightly more expensive £5 for 20 model soldiers from the local model plane/boat/tank shop. These were from the £8 D&D blister packs and they had about 50 of them all over the street in various states of disrepair.
A few of them are possibly a bit young for roleplay games but some of my stepsons friends might be about the right age to start getting into it. They already play the collectible card games so the step up might not be that big for them.
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Do you know the last time I had to learn a completely new gaming system? I’m not talking about jumping between editions of games here but proper separate systems. The last time was fourteen years ago when I had to learn the WOD system after a ten hour shift and several cans of lager. Thankfully WOD is basically a very simple system but it would have been a totally different ball game if the system was any more complex.
As those that follow this blog may know I’m coming out of retirement as a gamesmaster very soon to run a Shadowrun game. Now those systems we play I know off by heart but I’ve only ever played SR once and it was as a player 18 years ago.
I’ve read through the rules several times now and its a fairly simple system but I cannot for the life of me retain any of it in my head. Have I reached my limit? Have I got to the same stage as Homer Simpson and for every new bit of information that goes in two bits fall out?
How do you go about learning a new system? Do you just go with a brute force attack and sit through your evening reading and rereading the rules and playing games regardless with the books in front of you or do you have a way of remembering the differences between systems and using those as hooks for learning the new rules?
At the moment I’m going with the brute force idea but it’s failing badly. I usually go through the character creation on my own to pick up the basics and repeatedly build the same generic character over and over again. Normally this will highlight those few areas I have trouble with or can’t quite get correct in my head but I’ve drawn up three characters so far and you’d think one was from WOD, one from D&D and the other from a completely homebrew game that is based on playing germs and living with the bleach under your kitchen sink.
I wonder if you can get any nanotech that make learning gaming rules easier?
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After playing Left 4 Dead the other night at a friends i started wondering just how you could fit a setting like that into game. The suspense side of things could easily be handled i feel but I’m more concerned about the combat mechanics where dealing with 3-4 characters and upward of 30 enemy at anyone time with almost constant waves hitting you is the norm. Whatever mechanism you use would also have to take into consideration the attention the ’special monsters’ you would come across such as the boss ‘infected’ in the computer game.
Zombie films and computer games have been done to death over the years but I’ve yet to come across a game system that portrays zombies as anything other than slow moving mummies without their clothes on. I’m sure it’s the mechanics that’s stopping a game like this from being produced as every system I’ve tried struggles to deal with anything more than 10-15 enemy at once. In saying that I haven’t tried the current version of Dungeons & Dragons which seems to me able to handle small hordes which may work for a fantasy setting but I’m not sure how it would hold up if you ramped up the number of bad guys and added automatic weapons.
It’s more than just a curiosity I have in how this might work as part of the campaign I’ve been trying to write for Nanowrimo this month involves hordes of bad guys and if I can’t find the right mechanics I may have to rewrite the enemy a little but it will take away from feel I’m going for.
Has anyone came across a system that handles this sort of thing well?
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