Sunday, April 26, 2015

The Big April Hoot... didn't expect to be playtesting.

We just finished the first hoot of the 2015 year. It's been quite the Crawlspace and Red Bat weekend for me. When Peryton cancelled her Friday night Dr. Who session, I was asked to fill in the slot, because none of us were ready to tackle the nine year-old unopened box of The Arkham Horror-- a re-gift, I suppose, to Caed from us. So I ran the Apogee campaign scenario called "The Creep" . As you already know this is part four of my "Castle of the Moth" Cycle of the work. I was going to run it on Saturday night, but just moved it up. On Saturday, once again nobody was ready for the boxed game, I got to do the first session of "The Keys to Christmas Place" ... at least part one of it.

During these sessions some thoughts came to me about the Hedonist Type for the game and still more on death rules for the system:
 The Hedonist has the "Is it the Sequel Yet" Perk, or "resurrection feat" as Caed has dubbed it. But in the course of extended play, it is rather hard to kill in Crawlspace, and to date not a single Hedonist player has had to use it. That is at least when it would do any good in the stories being played, like say, after the Cthulhu-walrus has destroyed the coastal city you were supposed to be saving. My younger sister surprisingly enough playing a Hedonist, (who would've thunk it?) developed a Perk of her own. Basically using her CHARM stat to calm down someone that had failed a NERVE Draw. It was rather like psychotherapy, but do I want to use that name for the PERK (I am open to suggestions).
More and more often, especially later in the scenarios, I am arbitrarily killing Characters as it helps the yarn. That means, I don't allow the All-In Hand. Luckily, to-date, no one has gotten rules-lawyery on me and whined about it. But I need to amend the published rules to state that every so often, the GM will indeed just forgo the  All-In Hand. Peryton also had some thoughts on this, which I think are awesome


Beckett ran his Glow scenario "A Fistful of Hypos" on Saturday. I used the opportunity to quick-learn him on the new Red Bat rules. Once again during the course of play, I needed a highlighter and started making notes on how to clarify things. I even used a regular pencil to make notes in the margin for kewl tweeks to add later. Mind you all, I had nothing to change about the man's writing. The story is based off of the Red Harvest novel/Yojimbo film story that we all love. The dude had ant-chicks even, it was rather spectacular.

Caed has me thinking about some LARP production in 2016. Not rules, but events for GenCon that year. I guess I've gotten over the last scandal already.

2 comments:

  1. I actually did use the Sequel ability once. When we played at the Northcoast Game Bash (http://www.christinalea.com/2013/12/just-for-one-day.html) my hedonist got killed, used the perk, and then got killed again.

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    1. Okay, I won't get rid of the Perk, but I'll have to clarify it's role with the GM Arbitrary Death clause.

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