Tell me about your games

[Wendell_Burke]

Hey, Anyone out there feel like sharing what your current game is like? Maybe a little back and forth Q&A? I'd be interested to hear.

[Sanctaphrax]

I've played in a number of games, but by far the largest and longest-running is Enduring the Apocalypse. As the name suggests it was originally about PCs trying to survive the gradual end of the world, but the focus has shifted massively over the years.

It started back in 2010. Wasn't my idea, actually; someone wanted to play an ultra-high-Refresh game and I got talked into running it. It was set in Berlin, and the basic concept was that the players were the morally-mixed power players of the city trying to deal with the post-Changes world. The PCs weren't a team, exactly, but the German government's magical intelligence service brought them all together to address imminent crises like an army of demons preparing to descend upon the city.

A lot has happened since then. Many players have left, and none of the original participants are still in the game except me, but the current three PCs have been stable for a long while. I've been using former PCs as villains, and honestly some of them make more sense in that role than they did as protagonists.

We recently finished a major story arc, which was about a G8 meeting where the spooky sides of the world's major governments hashed out an agreement to cooperate. The PCs were involved in the diplomacy, and also carried out a secret mission to decapitate the CIA so that the Library of Congress could take over the American side of things. They were very successful, but the summit ended on a down note as a now-villainous former PC managed to talk the various nations into letting him wriggle out of the consequences of his earlier misdeeds.

Since the game started at 18 Refresh, it naturally tends to go very big. Fight scenes with small armies of participants, people claiming dominion over regions of the Nevernever, weapon 10+ attacks being thrown around left and right, people casting rituals with massive complexity, high-stakes arguments with a whole bunch of independent sides. That kind of thing. The system has held up remarkably well under some pretty intense pressure.

It's not a particularly subtle story, but we've managed some interesting character arcs. One character recently half-died and came back, and is now on the path to picking up a Sword of the Cross after a deathbed conversation with Uriel.

I could go on and on and on, but it's probably better to let you ask if there's anything in particular you want to know.

[Wendell_Burke]

That’s a really long running game! I had read that the game didn’t handle high power very well, but it’s good to hear that it wasn’t a problem for you. It sounds like it was a bit like a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade games in that it was more about the powers that control everything than your typical lower level character groups.
I’ve seen a lot of player characters that are more antagonist than protagonist, sadly.
Is your general play preference for higher power games? I’ve never gotten to play DFRPG so I don’t have any feel for the Refresh system and what it allows at the various levels.

[Sanctaphrax]

I don't have a strong preference, power-level-wise. This is just what I ended up running.

One nice thing about high-Refresh play is that you can hit your players with all kinds of crazy stuff and just assume they'll be fine. I once had the largest non-nuclear explosive in the world go off next to an unsuspecting PC, and it actually made for a great scene.

On the other hand, there's a natural tendency for the bookkeeping to pile up. Character sheets get long, and hordes of mooks demand a lot of dice-rolling. Would be a bigger problem if the game wasn't PbP.

[Wendell_Burke]

I tend to enjoy very granular games. I keep pretty extensive notes so long character records don't bother me, but I do see how they could become encumbering after a while. I haven't played pbp in a very long time. I like the Aspect system in the game and was particularly impressed with the city creation method. Just basic enough to be able to work through it in a relatively short time, but specific enough to build a good framework off of to expand on in the future. Both systems combined, I thought make rpgs more like film in how they develop the character of locations. I always felt that was important.

[Taran]

Most of my DFRPG games have been PbPs.  I've a few live games while I was learning the game, way, way back in 2010 or something.

A bunch of the games were high refresh but I had at least one 'feet in the water' game and it was a lot of fun.  I played a scottish hunter who got pulled into the Nevernever when he fell asleep in a fairy circle or something (I think...it was a long time ago).

Like many PbPs I've played, they tend to stall out.

I'm currently one of the ones playing in Enduring the Apocalypse.  What would you like to know?

[Mredaniels]

We just made characters last night.  It's a 2 person game...1 is a Native American Tempest wizard, the other is a clued-in son of a Mafia Don.  Looking forward to it!

[Wendell_Burke]

We just made characters last night.  It's a 2 person game...1 is a Native American Tempest wizard, the other is a clued-in son of a Mafia Don.  Looking forward to it!

What's a Tempest Wizard?

[Wendell_Burke]

Most of my DFRPG games have been PbPs.  I've a few live games while I was learning the game, way, way back in 2010 or something.

A bunch of the games were high refresh but I had at least one 'feet in the water' game and it was a lot of fun.  I played a scottish hunter who got pulled into the Nevernever when he fell asleep in a fairy circle or something (I think...it was a long time ago).

Like many PbPs I've played, they tend to stall out.

I'm currently one of the ones playing in Enduring the Apocalypse.  What would you like to know?

How quickly do you feel the game moves you through experience levels? My preference is for lower level play and to remain there a lot longer than most. I know that's up to the GM but I'm just curious what your experiences have been? I like the Scottish hunter concept. I could see that being fun to play. Yeah, pbp games do seem to fizzle out quickly.

[Taran]

How quickly do you feel the game moves you through experience levels? My preference is for lower level play and to remain there a lot longer than most. I know that's up to the GM but I'm just curious what your experiences have been? I like the Scottish hunter concept. I could see that being fun to play. Yeah, pbp games do seem to fizzle out quickly.

I find that lots of groups like to move to chest deep pretty quickly with the goal of going submerged.  After that, it really depends.

Feet in the Water is a great place to learn the game. It's also a good place for gritty games that don't have as much 'High Fantasy'.

I've never played in a game that went from Feet in the Water to Super high refresh.  Usually, if you're playing with 15 refresh, IME, the game usually starts there.

[g33k]

I had an idea for an alternate setting, a semi-mobile game rather than traditional city-based.  So, this isn't a game I'm playing, but it's in my pocket as an idea I might one day run.

A bit of context:
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.  A major recreational destination for our region is the Lake Tahoe area, in the Sierra Nevada; depending on specifically-where your origin & destinations are (within those two (rather large) large geographic areas), the no-traffic drive ranges from 2.5 - 4.5 hours (bad weather and bad traffic can add substantially to that (including complete road-closures)).  Additionally, the Bay Area is itself a major recreational destination, as well as a tech-hub & financial center, while the small-town / alpine Tahoe vibe is often taken to include the short jaunt to Reno, NV ("The Biggest Little City in the world").  The state Capitol is roughly at the midpoint.

But the campaign I'm envisioning is the SFBA/Tahoe corridor, with the extended anchor-points at each end being a bit more ancillary, rather than the usual "city campaign" focus.  There's big-city action, tourist traps, insular small-town blankface, &c.  San Francisco is notoriously progressive, while rural California is deeply conservative.  Etc etc etc.

The amount & variety of people and money and etc etc etc flowing along that corridor is huge.  Most regulars have favorite stops along the way, while others prefer to take it as one massive push.

Treat the entire travel-corridor as a "city" for city-creation purposes.  PC's can have any sort of background from anywhere along the corridor (including each end) or any good reason to come there.

[Con]

I've never actually played a game in full, I've always wanted to though, and I've made several characters to that effect.

My favourites are:

Neutral Evil-White Court Spymaster Malvora; Who helped organise the Black Court Purge. Basically he was the White Court envoy to the Black Court during one of the Vampire Alliances, and he used his position to study Black Court resources, fortresses, nests support networks, so that when Lara pulled the trigger with Dracula he lead all the human mobs to all of their hiding places, including coordinating with Simon Pietrovich and leading the Blackstaff to Tunguska.

A Chaotic Good-White Council Thief. Member whose a thief in the real world so breaks or skirts the human laws but doesn't break any of the Laws of Magic and just dances around the edge of Warden Jurisdiction, but not seriously on the Blackstaff radar. I have him as Margaret Le Fey's unofficial apprentice and just as good with Ways. Good with crafting items. Vulnerable in real world but power ups if in the Nevernever.

I've got a Dagon Knight character. Think Eragorn meets KotC.

I've also stated Jack Frost and Peter Pan as Winter Princeling and Summer Princeling respectively. (In a submarine level)

An idea I've been tossing around is An Athlete whose the Grandson of Thor and Hercules. So just a straight up Champion.

[Frankto]

Right now I'm running a game in Dublin town, Ireland proper. The biggest challenge so far has been doing the voices, because my Irish accent is just... oof. Tragic stuff.

I'm trying to steer well clear of the main plot, so that means no Outsiders or any of that nonsense. However, it did kick off on December 21st, 2012 and the primary antagonist currently is an Apocalypse Engineer.

My players are largely unfamiliar with the Dresden Files, so I made them promise to steer clear of the wiki and went through Your Story and redacted all the spoilers by hand, because that seemed like the thing to do at the time. The idea was to introduce them to the world the best way I knew how so they could experience all that drama and sense of discovery properly for the first time. That also means they have no idea about Changes (which happens in 2012), the Fomor, or any of that stuff until I introduce them to it. Good stuff. 

Still not sure if that was a dumb or a great idea, but they seem to enjoy it so far. They're about to butt heads with their first Warden here soon.

Anyway, that's about it. Themed around not so much the Apocalypse as just apocalypses, plural. With any luck it runs into the 2050s and beyond, but who knows really.

[Wendell_Burke]

Treat the entire travel-corridor as a "city" for city-creation purposes.  PC's can have any sort of background from anywhere along the corridor (including each end) or any good reason to come there.

Sounds neat! Or maybe you could do a 'City' sheet for sections of the overall area, like breaking it down into quarters or something, depending how big it is?

[Wendell_Burke]

Right now I'm running a game in Dublin town, Ireland proper. The biggest challenge so far has been doing the voices, because my Irish accent is just... oof. Tragic stuff.

Have you ever considered picking up instructional audio tracks for the accents? I love doing voices and there are a lot of resources out there for actors to help with that sort of thing. I was watching an amazing video by this one actress who switched between all of the accent regions of the various isles. It was awesome!