19th Level

I thought I'd be able to catch up on this year's RPGaDay upon my return from Manhattan but I've come down with a cold that I'm fairly certain is Captain Trips from The Stand . I've been alternating between sleeping and painful coughing. This has also caused me to miss out on some grad school work. Once I'm feeling a bit better that will need to be my priority. 

I'm going to be a little loose with my definition of impactful. I've made some friendships in games that are older than my kids, and that's certainly impactful. Though friendships grow and diminish over time typically. Probably for me though was when a bunch of us got together in the apartment my wife and I used to live in in the late 1990s. It was me, her, and two of her co-workers, gathered together to play Star Trek by Last Unicorn Games. Though I'd gamed off and on throughout the 1990s with family and friends, I hadn't had a regular gaming group since the 1980s. That game kicked off a series of campaigns that has had me playing pretty much constantly, albeit with hiatuses here and there, since then. The members of the group have changed and it's transitioned to a pure virtual group, but I've been fortunate to have regular gaming since that point.

I just spent a few days with my eldest daughter in New York City and was way too exhausted to write at night... So here goes a super-quick catch-up... Day 14 - RPG For Open-Ended Campaign Play I like Call of Cthulhu for an open-ended campaign. While characters do advance, they tend not to ever get so powerful that they have nothing to fear. Indeed, as characters learn more magics they may find themselves close to insanity. Death, insanity, and retirement take many characters out of play but it is possible to add replacement characters to a group, to the point where there may be no original characters yet the campaign continues. Day 15 - RPG I Enjoy Adapting the Most I've done well using Fate for Star Wars and I've begun thinking of other ways it could be adapted. Day 16 - RPG I Enjoy Using As-Is I've found Call of Cthulhu works incredibly well as it is. It fits its genre well and has begun adding dials to make for pulp style experiences. D...

For me, possibly the most transformative experience was shifting from a physical to virtual table. It's something we did in stages, but the first stage was probably the most important - a simple webcam connecting us with a player who moved away but wanted to keep gaming. Over time we added bells and whistles - discovering tools like Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 but the actual act of managing a remote game for the first opened a doorway for me and my group - a group which has people scattered east of the Mississippi River now...

This is more of a "show, don't tell". For me, the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide  has the most inspiring interior art. From dramatic to goofy it sets the stage for an AD&D game. An almost-but-not-quite medieval society, with the influence of magic and monsters clearly evident.

There is still a Star Wars RPG   being published - three actually, by Fantasy Flight Games. I ran a campaign with Edge of the Empire and found it to be a perfectly enjoyable game. But for my money the incarnation I've the fondest memories of is the D6-based RPG put out by West End Games in the 1980s and 1990s. I literally played my first game of it the day I got it. It was so easy to play and so easy to GM - and it felt like Star Wars. The system wasn't perfect - I can see areas where a 3rd edition might have cleaned some things up. The Force rules worked well for wanna be Jedi type characters like Rey and Luke prior to being trained by Yoda. It required a bit too much dice rolling in combat. I found the stats for major film characters to be a bit over the top. But I played a game a few years back and it still played just fine. I know sometimes licensees get permission to republish old versions of products that they didn't make. For example, Marvel has republished St...

Well in the 1980s I was fond of Dragon Magainze 's RPG Reviews column. In the 1990s and early 2000s I often went to rpg.net. I still pop in to rpg.net every once in a while but I tend to get a lot of my opinions off of Google+. Often there will be links to blogs and other websites for more details. Yog-Sothoth is a pretty handy source of reviews and opinions for Cthulhu. You can decide if I mean the god or the website...

Ten sessions isn't a bad length for some campaigns. But from my recent experience Fate Accelerated works really well for something around ten sessions. The characters are pretty competent to start with - if you wanted to you could pretty much ignore advancement. If you do go for advancement your characters will advance pretty quickly, a nice way to model Luke Skywalker going from a farm boy to a Jedi Knight in a few sessions. I think Fate Accelerated would work fine for something a bit longer, though you'd want to slow down the default advancement. Dresden Files Accelerated  gives some options on how this might be done.

I've managed to play in a game or two of No Country For Old Kobolds , based on the Apocalypse World engine. It was a fast-paced game - we made our setting, characters, and played a quick scenario in under an hour. I died a horrible death. It's fun being the little guy. It's probably worth noting that nowadays most of my sessions are around 2.5 hours long...

At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I don't know if this is actually something I'd want to do - if I had that much free time I'd probably use some of it for gaming, but I'd also want to do other stuff with that time. Some stuff with family, some geeking out - I think I'd be sneaking in a marathon Civilization game... Don't get me wrong, it's a hobby I enjoy a lot but it's hard for me to imagine having that much time, which might make answering it a bit difficult. But to stay to the spirit, I'd probably be interested in running a session of whatever regular campaign I'm currently doing and then finding time to sit in a variety of other games. I'm going to want someone to teach me how to play Shadowrun ...

For me the RPG cover that best capture the spirit of its game is from the game that got me into the hobby - the Erol Otus D&D Basic Set cover. The treasure. The weird environment. The bold adventurers. And the dragon emerging from the water. It was very clear what the game was all about.  I've two close runner-ups. The first is the first edition AD&D Players Handbook . Like the Otus drawing above, it captures what the game is all about. These aren't necessarily heroes, they're after the gemstone eyes. Finally, Call of Cthulhu has had some great art. My own favorite is the cover to the third edition.We've got a mysterious castle/house the investigators are approaching. These aren't hardened warriors. Even without the slithering horror it's a creepy scene, full of menace.

Yog-Sothoth is the gate folks. The past year has been a little bouncy, but I believe if I tally all sessions it'd come out with the most for Call of Cthulhu . That said there's been some variety. I finally had some success at GM-ing a Fate game, using Fate Accelerated for Star Wars . I also had a chance to GM the old D6 Ghostbusters  which was great fun. I've had a chance to actually play some Apocalypse World Engine games which was a nice change of pace for me.

This is going to be a shock, but I find out about new RPGs mainly through the internet. I suppose I can be a bit more specific. Once upon a time the answer would probably have been sites like rpg.net and ENWorld.org. I remember visiting Eric Noah's website to get news about the upcoming 3rd edition of D&D (there was much talk about this "attack of opportunity" thing, though I believe I first encountered the concept from FASA Star Trek ). Probably I see the most from Facebook and Google+. Also within my gaming group we'll often share RPG news - the Top Secret Kickstarter caught me that way...

As a fan of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, I'd love to see an RPG published that captures this series. There's a few Age of Fighting Sail RPGs out there, but I haven't yet found the "perfect" one. I'd want something that captures the feel of life at land and at sea, the social aspects of the era, and provides for exciting ship combats. It would need to manage the advancement of characters while also having a way to keep a group together. It would need to handle the passage of years, though for gaming purposes I'd be fine with it also making the year 1813 last as long as it needed to, much as Patrick O'Brian did. And it would need to appeal to people who aren't perhaps a tad obsessed with the genre. I keep thinking that Pendragon  could be reskinned for this purpose. A game that expects a campaign of many game years. Perhaps living long enough to see your son take your place might be a bit much, even with a long 1813, but one ...

We'll take this for a spin again in 2017, though I imagine my posts will be a little briefer than last year's given my grad program has shifted its schedule and I'm in the middle of a class this August... Given I've just kicked off an Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea  game that's in one sense my answer - I'm not so flighty as to immediately wishing I was doing something else. I've probably clocked a ton of AD&D in my life so I'm looking forward to playing a game with a setting inspired by my favorite authors (Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, HP Lovecraft, etc.) with some rules based on AD&D. However, let's assume the answer is something I am not not currently playing. I've begun receiving material from the Cthulhu Dark  Kickstarter that I'm really itching to try. To be honest, if I ever have a game with just two players I think I'd whip it out for a one-shot, something Cthulhu Dark seems very well suited...

Money is no obstacle... I've been primarily a virtual gamer over the past few years so my tastes will largely skew in that direction. We've got a nice desk with three monitors on it - want to make life easy for me on the virtual tabletop setup. We've also got on the walls a lot of shelf space for books, boxes, etc. I'd also like to be able to support a physical group as well, so we've got a nice large table, with room for books, papers, munchies, recreational beverages, etc. Lots of power outlets to charge up laptops, tablets, etc. And since I'm not big on miniatures, I'm thinking in the center of the table a nice, large, touchscreen monitor with active stylus support - even if we're all together a virtual tabletop can make for a nice tool. And a refrigerator for those all-important recreational beverages.

That's a bit of an odd question. Generally speaking, if I'm thinking of travel, there's other things I'd want to do besides gaming. However, let's suppose I'm thinking of a place to live for the gaming community there. Obviously, since gaming is not my profession and I have a family here in the Boston area, I'm not going to be doing such a relocation. But there are a few "gaming scenes" I'm curious as to what it would be like to be a part of... New York City - I'm a Brooklyn boy originally, so it would be nice to go home. Being a huge city there's a lot of gaming taking place there as well as part of the Autarch team being based there. Atlanta - Original home of White Wolf, I'm told it's a good place for some World of Darkness Gaming. Seattle - A lot of gaming companies in the area plus culturally I'd probably fit right in there with my latte-drinking, liberal secular lifestyle...

Actually I've had this happen to me recently... Given my group has some folks younger than me, I've gamed with people who have never seen Star Trek  in any incarnation. That's not too shocking once I gave it some thought. Star Trek: Enterprise  debuted in fall of 2001, some fifteen years ago. And it was not a particularly popular Star Trek. Someone who is thirty now would have been around fifteen then. And Voyager debuted in January of 1995, so you're talking being under the age of ten for that! There's certainly a things I've not read or seen that are on other people's "I can't believe you've not read/seen that" so I've no judgment. With that caveat, there's a few other things I'd be surprised a gaming friend hadn't seen - Butcher's Dresden Files , the classic Star Wars trilogy (I know a number of people who swore off the prequels), Lord of the Rings (whether in film or novel form), and A Song of Ice and Fire (...

Probably when I first started gaming there were some unusual circumstances and places. My first gaming group met at the Howard Whittemore Memorial Library in my hometown of Naugatuck, Connecticut. I was in middle school at the time and they hooked us up with a meeting room located near the children's section of the library. Of course we always got yelled at for being too noisy to the point we were pretty sure the sound of dice rolling would earn a "shhhh". Admittedly, it was  a library... It did get a little bit awkward when part of the room was dedicated to storage and we had to maneuver our way to the table. I did make some friendships which lasted for many years. I also remember occasionally being granted permission to play in study hall back at City Hill Middle School. By then we'd mastered the technique of rolling on hardcover books to muffle the sound of the dice rolling. Back in the day we had to have book covers on our textbooks. Fun fact - a Dungeon M...

Really any when you think about it. Just looking at some of my own: As a software engineer/data scientist I'm awfully good at using and making digital tools As a history geek, I've got a wealth of information that gets a good outlet As an amateur cartographer, I can make a reasonably good map Though I've not hiked much since having kids, once upon a time I spent a ton of time up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire - something which gives you an appreciation for wilderness movement rates... I've gamed with people skilled in art, always an asset in RPGs. Alas, my drawing skills are limited to purple Risus stick figure dudes...