Originally published at /var/log/vadept.log. Please leave any comments there.

Last Sunday (yeah, I’m a slacker), was my first game as the Mutants and Masterminds storyteller.

I must say, it went rather well.

There is one aspect that I got a taste of when I ran Shadowrun that I really see now.  No matter how concrete you think your story outline is.  No matter how much you have prepared for the game thinking of all of the possible sidetracking your players will go on, they will always think of something that you didn’t.  We spent most of the game ignoring the fact that all of the superheros of the world went missing (except the ones in Stockton) instead on trying to balance the budget of California so the Stockton Arena wouldn’t get shut down.

Yeah.  My players wanted to move the prision system to another dimension to save California money.  Yeah, I’m at a loss too.  It wasn’t until I made something very dear to them go missing did they get back on track.  Wow, screwing over the rest of the world to save the Stockton Arena and California.  Never saw that coming.

Other than that, keeping my fingers crossed for another good game.

Originally published at /var/log/vadept.log. Please leave any comments there.

Last night I concluded my shadowrun game.  The ending wasn’t as exciting as I imagined it in my head, however my players were tolerant and were really good sports.

I did however, realize how much Shadowrun is a very binary genre.  People either love it, or hate it.  One of my players loved it, 2 of them hated it, and one was meso-meso.  I think it really takes a lot out of/kills a game if the players don’t care about the setting that the game is in.

Shadowrun v4 all-in-all is a very complex system to the point of being annoyingly complex.  Unless everyone is a die-hard cyberpunk fan (and knows the rules to the game inside and out) the game grinds to a halt the moment the stats are involved.  Complex dice rolls for everything, and a lot of things make sense to people who are (in real life) computer literate, but no sense to people who have no idea how the internet/computer work (like certain hacking related rolls are 100% based upon your comlink, no character stats are involved).

It was a fun experiment to do, the backend I wrote (although nobody used it) was a good experience, and short of all the arguing and drama over this game I really had a good time running it.  Of course I say that now rather than last night when I wanted to murder some of my players.

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