Here’s my breakdown of the games that I played at Origins.
Full Thrust (Thursday)
Full Thurst is a generic-ish starship minitaures combat game that I’ve had my eye on for a number of years. Unfortunately there were two games of it running at the same time, and I picked the table that wasn’t full. So it was basically me and the GM running through a fairly quick space battle. I had fun, but I’m guessing that the folks at the full table had more. I did win the game, however.
The Full Trust rules play a little bit like Star Fleet Battles Ultralight (more like a cross between Starfire and Mayday, actually, but that’s a more obscure comparison) and even large fleet battles with lots of big ships can be resolved in a reasonable amount of time. There are also hacks available to port the rules to Star Wars or BSG or Babylon 5 or whatever. The minis themselves are pretty nice. After having played it it’s not a game I am dying to buy into, but I’d play it again.
13th Age (Thursday)
13th Age is essentially an evolution of D&D4 with a great deal of the mechanical baggage pared away and less focused on combat encounters. I found it very enjoyable. What I did like most about the system, though, were the tools to encourage player investment in the campaign structure. These are nothing earthshakingly innovative by storygame standards, but they’re well-executed here and eminently stealable for other games. This particular event was a town bit followed by a wilderness encounter and a brief dungeon crawl, so we got to see most of the moving parts in action, except for those interesting storygame bits that only really shine in campaign play.
D&D BECMI, B4 The Lost City (Friday)
This classic is one of my all-time favorite D&D modules, so I was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately, the skeletal system lacked player options under a GM unable to provde them narratively, and as a result the players, including myself, seemed bored. This could have worked, and worked well, but to be honest about it I considered bailing. There were a number of character fatalities followed by immediate replacements, usually with a nigh-identical character, but I’m happy to say I survived. We got far enough into the pyramid to get some needed supplies, and then departed. I’ll have more to say about why this game didn’t work for me in Part 3 of this report.
D&D Next, The Legacy of the Crystal Shard (Friday)
The most successful of my three D&D events, this game was well-run and enjoyable. We didn’t play using the final D&D5 rules (which are already at the printer,) so under the late playtest rules that we used there were some pretty obvious balance issues. Nevertheless it played well and smoothly.
What I took away from the new ruleset in actual play was the impression of a blend of about 50% 3.x and 50% other versions of D&D (including 4th,) with the overall complexity dialed down to about a quarter of what you’d see in 3/4E. It was a good mix, and I continue to look forward to the new version of the rules, but I remain uncomitted to it as a rules platform for my own use… but I’ll have more to say about that in the next post as well. We only played through a small fraction of the published adventure.
Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator (Friday)
I could write a whole post explaining what this is, but instead I will have you watch the video below. Essentially it’s a computer-assisted LARP in which you play the bridge crew of an Enterprise-like ship. Actually participating, it’s tremendous fun and I will happily sign up for a few slots of it next year. It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to do every week, but I wished I’d gotten to play it once or twice more. It take about 45 minutes to play through a single scenario.
D&D BECMI, X2 Castle Amber
The GM for this was extremely good. Unfortunately, by that time I was running on 40+ hours without sleep, and my play reflected that before I crashed in a corner of the hall after about an hour in. My wife retreived me once the event was over, but she assures me she had fun.
Pathfinder Society, Destiny of the Sands, Part 1
Of my three Pathfinder games, this one was the least enjoyable. Not becuase it was a bad event, or becuase it wasn’t run pretty well, but because it was a home group (GM included) with me as the tacked-on sixth player. This is always damned uncomfortable, but there were also too many mousy players at the table, and me providing the only active personality was really awkward, especially in this group, in my first Pathfinder game in ages and my first Pathfinder Society event ever. But it wasn’t so bad for all that, and the adventure was good.
Pathfinder Society, Destiny of the Sands, Part 2
A highly enjoyable game. The GM was relatively unseasoned but carried herself very well despite a few rough patches in the rules, including one instance when myself and another player fucked something up (failure to notice that we had already used our AoOs that round) and we had to back up half a round. But a fun, fun event with rock-solid players who remained highly engaged the whole time.
Pathfinder Society, Library of the Lion
I broke out my Wizard for this very combat-light event, which I enjoyed enormously. The one fight was against some animated books and the rest was skills roles and puzzles which were at just the right level of difficulty for such an event. The GM was not good with boxed text but was otherwise excellent and the people at the table were fully engaged, except for one player who sat at the table silently knitting socks the whole time. Don’t ask me.
Pathfinder Society Play
As I mentioned, this was my first whirl with Pathfinder Society stuff and my first time doing any kind of organized play in many years. It was great fun especially for the third event. This despite the fairly chaotic marshaling process, which was not aided by the on-site book misprints which had incorrect start times, incorrect event prices and variuous other cockups. Now that I have a better understanding of how this works I can plan better for the next time and tweak my characters to be more effective in this kind of play.
That’s the wrapup of games played. In the next installment I will have some additional thoughts about how and why the Pathfinder events generally beat out the D&D events.
Ardwulf's Lair 