My wife has made a resolution to post to her blog every day this year. I don’t have that kind of resolve. I’m shooting for once a week. I’m going to try not to do it from work, though. Except for this time.

So, what’s been going on in the ol’ gaming world.

First off, while my friend and podcasting co-host, Randy, has been on a between-semester break, we’ve ramped up our gaming schedule from 2 weekly games to 3. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to cut back once school starts back up, so we’re going to have to decide which of our three games we’re putting on hiatus until the next semester break.

One thing that I’m really going to try and do is to recap our gaming sessions and give my thoughts on what worked and what didn’t. I’m also going to try to post some on any one-shots that I’ve played, or games that I haven’t played, but have read. That should give me enough source material to keep this blog going somewhat.

In any event, I’m going to try and do some recapping of the two Burning Wheel games that we’ve been playing later today, in addition to posting some thoughts about a zygote of a game idea that’s been rolling around in my head for a while now that I have yet to actually put down on paper.

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Things have been slow as far as the DFRPG playtesting has been going. Fortunately, since my wedding is all done, and things have finally started to calm down, we’re actually getting a chance to play over the next few weeks. The hard part – character creation – is already done. As they come in, I’ll be posting the characters.

We decided to go with a standard naming convention for everybody’s novel (those of you who have played Spirit of the Century know what I’m talking about). All of them are a phrase that start with a number. This isn’t exactly supposed to indicate chronology, we just wanted a way to tie everyone into the same “series” as it were. The novels, preceded by the PC they are about, are as follows:

• Martin – First Edition
• Calista – Second Degree
• OK Tom – Third Wheel
• Kate – Fourth Quarter

I’m tempted to title the playtest scenario in the same way, but I can’t seem to come up with anything that starts with the word Fifth. If anybody has any ideas, feel free to post a comment.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how easy character creation went. Nobody at the table is exceedingly familiar with FATE/SotC, so it was nice to see that the character creation rules clicked pretty well for everyone. Not that they’re particularly difficult, but people latched on to them early on, and just ran with it. Even the newest player managed to create a novice Wizard with little problem. The only real issue we ran into was some confusion about the text, which was, I believe, an editing problem.

Probably the nicest thing was when we got to the “guest starring” phases, and people really started talking to each other about how they wanted their stories to intertwine. I really think that it helped get everyone on the same page and excited about playing the game.

On the mechanical side, it’s kinda nice not having so many Aspects in Dresden as there were in SotC. I think that people had an easier time coming up with things. Building the concept and theme of each character into an Aspect was also a nice touch.

As for skills, we went with the default 25 skill points, which gives a pretty good range of skills. Capping them at Great (+4) also gave the characters some room to diversify their skills. I don’t see this system as one that really rewards specialization as much as a lot of skill-based systems do.

On the downside, I wish that the character creation chapter talked about the Stress tracks, and how your skills relate to them. SotC starts characters out at 5 stress boxes, with skills and stunts that can push them up to 10. Dresden defaults to 2 boxes. This means that characters can get taken out pretty quickly (although, fortunately, the game isn’t designed to be particularly lethal), and are probably going to be picking up a lot of consequence aspects. The problem that I see is that the rules for increasing your available stress boxes are split between several chapters. I have no problem with them being detailed separately – like say, in the Skills and Stunts chapters – but it would be nice if there was a sidebar or chart that showed what skills and stunts increased your available stress.

All that being said, here’s the first character  that I’ve gotten turned in to me. This is OK Tom, played by my friend and TMD co-host, Randy.

Oklahoma “OK Tom” Tomorrow

High Concept: Psychic Rom Bicycle Messenger

Theme: Heritage v. Progress
OK Tom is trying to reconcile his family’s pressure to adhere to Rom traditions, and his own desire to understand the truth about the universe in all its scientific glory.

Background: Autodidact
He had to hide all his pilfered science textbooks from his family. He spent all his free time with his head in a book.

Rising Conflict: I slept in the bed, now I have to make it.
OK Tom cheated on his girlfriend while she was pregnant with his child. She aborted the fetus. OK Tom values family, and his actions destroyed his chance to have a family of his own. Now, he’s dealing with it.

First Novel: Eye for detail
“Third Wheel” OK Tom’s ex-fiance, one who his family arranged for him, has come back to town with a new squeeze. After an accidental use of psychometry, OK Tom discovers the man to be a serial murderer. Can OK Tom save the next victim all the while keeping it a secret from his family?

Guest Star 1: Watch Kate’s back
“Fourth Quarter” At Kate’s sorority party, OK Tom discovers the truth about an old book of spells just in time to save Kate from a fire she caused.

Guest Star 2: Shadowy contacts
“First Edition” OK Tom overhears Martin complaining about customs; he can’t get his goods across the border. OK Tom comes to the rescue, even though he had no clue how to do it. So he made some new contacts…shadowy ones.

Stunts:
Psychometry
Human Google Map (+2 to navigation-based Driving tests)
Backhanded Compliment (use Rapport for social attacks)
Quick Eye (Investigate twice as fast)

Skills:
Great (+4): Contacts, Rapport
Good(+3): Driving, Investigation
Fair(+2): Scholarship, Craftsmanship, Presence, Resources
Average(+1): 3 to be determined

Refresh: 4

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