This chick is awesome, and I applaud her for encouraging people to speak out. It’s important for us to do so, and, despite what some people may say, it does NOT make you “militant”.
Saturday evening, I ran a Dread game at Endgame in Oakland. For those of you who listen to the podcast, you may have listened to theoriginalrecording of the playtest of the scenario.
All in all, I feel pretty good about how it went. Only one characte died, which is a little disappointing. Not because I particularly like killing characters in RPGs, but Dread is a little special. Dying can be pretty awesome in this game. In any case, things went well. My players gave some really good feedback, and managed to stay in the game pretty much the whole time. I’m going to go back and edit the scenario again, keeping their feedback in mind. I don’t usually run the same game multiple times, but I think that the Ghost Hunters scenario works well enough as a con game.
There were a couple of things that I changed for con play. First, I dumped one of the ghosts. I felt that, in the original draft, there was too much going on, and it distracted from the story. Also, there was a rape in the original scenario. While I haven’t removed it from the scenario entirely, I decided to omit it for the con. If I ran this at KublaCon, I would probably leave it in, since each game has its own private room. At Endgame, there were a great deal of people around (hell, a game of 3:16 was going on immediately behind me), so I figured that a murder/rape, even when described through the filter of a FLIR camera, might not be appropriate for all audiences. It didn’t take much away from the game, anyway.
I’m very strongly considering running this scenario, with some more edits, at KublaCon next year. I don’t think that Dread gets enough love, and it’s such a fun game. That being said, I’d like to thank The Game Master Show for introducing it to me.
Information on this particular title has been sketchy at best, but there are some really interesting things about it that Luke revealed during the interview. We know, from the website, that this is a sci-fi game, but beyond that, it’s proven to be quite the mystery. Some of the new info sounds incredibly promising, though.
The setting and the rules are supposedly more than tightly integrated. They are, in fact, the same thing. This makes things interesting because it means that there is no such thing as metagaming in the Project Donut system. I find this to be a fascinating concept, especially after having run Burning Wheel, where gaming the system is somewhat expected (see Practice in BWR). I’m used to hearing things like “i need 100 more XP to make it to the next level,” but the idea that you can talk about the game mechanics at the table and still remain 100% in the game is, well, amazing to me.
Perhaps the most fascinating idea is that the game setting is one where there is a disctinct lack of both scarcity and death. This, of course, means that there’s no money, and no life-or-death struggles. The economy of the game is based on the idea of your social currency - how many friends, fans, and followers you have - and how much you can give away. At least, that’s how I understand it.
