Recent Gaming

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Sorcerer

There have been two more sessions of Sorcerer. The first one was what I'd consider an interesting failure. It had a lot of problems, but it was also educational, and at least some of what we learned got applied to the following session, which helped. That one was a moderate success.

After that session, I checked around with everyone. Communication is a Good Thing. Sweet Dreams advocates not talking about the game between sessions, and this isn't a bad rule of thumb. I think it really does improve play not to discuss a session ad infinitum. However, it's also useful to spend at least some time talking about what worked, what didn't work, where everyone thinks the game should go, and so on.

Dave confirms that I'm being too easy on Andreas. He also agrees with me that, while I should have pushed far harder on the odd combination of his character's Telltale and his demon's Need, now is not the time to start. We're in endgame, and there are more important problems to toss at Andreas just now.

Reviewing my notes, I identified what I consider a lynchpin NPC. He's got connections to at least three PCs, and I've confirmed that the players are okay with my messing with him in ways that make their PCs' lives complicated. Also, Josh and Julian need to sort out player-level social contract stuff so that Josh can have Sebastian work on achieving the goal he thinks Sebastian should be able to achieve, while Julian can have Niccolo avoid an easy out that he doesn't want his character to have.

I started this game with a couple of interesting handicaps.

First, I had five players. I do not believe that this is a problem because of the demons. Rather, it is a problem because of the sheer amount of stuff going on. Demons are only one of the important parts of this.

Second, I limited the types of demons to Passers and Possessors-without-Hop. I think this actually helped the game, giving it more of a focus.

None of us had ever played a full session of Sorcerer before.

In addition, even though I knew intellectually about the differences in running Sorcerer in terms of the feel of the game, it took a while to begin to translate that into my actual game prep. I'm used to a more sprawly feel. I think someone more familiar with the game, including myself now, might have been able to run it in half the sessions it's taking us.

The amazing thing isn't that the game has had a variety of problems. The amazing thing is that it hasn't sucked. I'm still vacillating on whether, on the whole, it's an interesting failure or a moderate success.

Next session, thanks to a completely unexpected curve thrown by Beth in response to an off-the-cuff idea I tossed out, there's going to be a costume ball, where we hope the pot will boil over in a satisfying faction.

I've finished the write up of session eight, and am running it by my players now. This one may go to both the Forge and here, as it discusses the various problems we ran into.

I've done the write up of the ninth, and, to date, most recent session, longhand, and I have yet to type it in and run it by the others.

Any feedback I get -- if I even manage to post a write up before the game ends -- is likely to reach me far too late to implement for this game. Next game, maybe.

And, I'm mostly glad that the feedback from others has been sketchy. We needed to make our own mistakes and to find out what did and did not work for us.

D&D

Interesting social contract stuff here. Recently, the group rescued a teenage lamia, and discussed whether she should join us. We're a largely neutral and good group, and she is at least mildly evil, though she hasn't done anything bad that we know of.

Josh told us to focus on the player level first: Did any of the players object to the PCs' lives being made more complicated? One did. Once we understood that, things were much clearly. She's currently with our rescued villagers, as the objections were a) he didn't want someone who could drain his Druid's and the Clerics' wisdom traveling with the party, and b) he didn't want the group attracting too many evil companions.

Hub

Beth's recently restarted her Hub game. We're currently trying to untangle the attempted kidnappings of various groups of grabbers.

Edit: Things got interestingly convoluted, as we looked at the situation and realized it was likely that the PCs would wind up starting a rather large private war with a group of fairly nasty grabbers who aren't even the grabbers they were looking for.