James Bond 007

I'm looking at running the old James Bond 007 game as my pick. Character creation for it involves spending a big pile of points to buy skills and stats. Would people prefer it if I built the PCs or would you like me to write a chargen summary and let people build their own slick British spies? I figure we could do group chargen via blog if that's what you all wanted.

Choices, Choices...

Hey all...

I have three different games that I could run at our first outing. Personally, I care not which one I run, so I figured I'd take votes. And the nominees are...

Feng Shui -- High action combination of wire-fu and ballistic ballet...

Iron Gauntlets -- A non-D20, high fantasy sort of thing I stumbled upon...

and Deadlands Reloaded -- The "Weird West", redone using a modified Savage Worlds ruleset...

Also... I might have a scheduling conflict with January 14th. The 16th is my son's birthday and my wife isn't certain yet if we're holding a party thing on the Sunday before (the 14th) or after (the 21st). I'll drop more details as it's worked out.

peace... Dave

Picking A Game

One of the rules of the club is that each GM enjoys absolute discretion in picking the game they will run. I trust and vouch for each member that they will not ask us to play something that will abuse this discretion. For example, I think Greg Costikyan's Violence might actually be worth playing, but I feel it would be churlish of me to try to use this venue to conscript unwilling victims.

So how do we pick a game to run? I've got literally shelves full of various RPGs and I suspect one or more of you nice folks might have a larger collection than I do. Here's the list of questions I've come up with, please feel free to suggest more.

• What game have I alway wanted to run, but never had a chance?
• Does the game I favor work well as a one-shot, or is it really more suitable to campaign play?
• Will chargen be a terror if I go with this game?
• How much of the session will be taken up by the players getting the hang of the rules?
• To the best of my knowledge does anyone in the group absolutely loathe the game or genre I'm considering?
• Is this game old hat for one or more members?
• Can I run this game in Jeff's gameroom and not get him in trouble with his wife?

Just some food for thought.

a reminder

I sent invites to all Club members so you could post new items on this here blog. The idea was that you could ask questions, offer feedback, or supply information on the session you are running. We could even hash out chargen in this venue.

However, none of that will work if you don't accept the invitation I sent you to be a member.

Revised schedule

January 14th - Dave
February 25th - Doug
April 22nd - Jeff
May 27th - Stuart
July 15th - Kathleen
August 26th - ?
October 14th - ?
November 19th - ?

Do we want to discuss who wants to GM at the last three meetings, or cross that briadge when we come to it?

Proposed Schedule

January 14th - Dave
February 25th - Doug
April 15th (Does anybody wait until the last minute to file taxes? If so, April 22nd might be a better choice) - Jeff
May 27th - Stuart
July 15th - Kathleen
August 26th - ?
October 14th - ?
November 25th (Weekend following Thanksgiving? Would anyone be out of town normally?) - ?

All these dates are Sundays. Is four hours sufficient? I was thinking we could start at 1pm and got to 5pm or 2pm to 6pm.

Doug shows his hand

Last week Doug mentioned in passing an idea for his contribution to Run Club: an adventure using d20 Modern/d20 Future set in the world of the old TSR sci-fi thrilla Star Frontiers. Sounds like a hoot to me. Personally, that closes off d20M and space-opera style sci-fi as avenues of inquiry for my own Run Club game. That's a couple fewer items off my list of game ideas. I thought other people would appreciate the heads-up for the same reason.

This week I hope to post a tentative schedule specific enough for everyone to hate.

EDIT to add:

I caught up on comments in the previous post. Dave is looking at running Feng Shui, Iron Gauntlets, or Deadlands/Savage Worlds. Those all look like great options.

some questions

What day do we run? I prefer if we could all agree to a specific day and time ahead of time, but if we have to work it out from meeting to meeting that's okay, too.

Do we want to recruit an additional member? I said 4 to 6 people in the initial post. Assuming Doug is hopping on board we have five. Do we want to recruit another? Six people around my game room table would be a bit of a squeeze, but at the same time if we find one more awesome person I hate to turn them away.

Who GMs first? We could do GM order by drawing out of a hat. Or since this whole thing was my proposal I could run first. Or if someone is dying to run their Dream One-shot they can go first.

reposted from Jeff's GameBlog

I got this from Treasure Tables (thanks, Martin!). Last month on ars luddi Ben Robbins blogged about a concept he calls Run Club. I've been talking about something similar on and off for years now, a round robin series of one-shots with rotating GMs. Veteran GMs would get to play (a rarity for some) and have the freedom to bust out something experimental. Novice GMs would get to a chance to run something in a friendly, open environment and would get the push of being required to run something. The maniacal Dave Hoover was interested in this idea last time I brought it up and coeli has mentioned getting together for another one-shot like the Blue Rose test run we did a while back. Now, I don't have room on my schedule for even another monthly game right now, but do y'all think we could plan a quarterly or every other month thing and make it work?

So let me out line my proposal in full: The Run Club would be composed of four to six people, all of whom are committed to GMing at least once in '07. We meet either every other month or every third month. No part of a meeting is spent in character generation. Each GM either pregenerates characters or provides detailed chargen instructions or otherwise works out characters ahead of time. GMs have sole discretion when picking their game, but are advised that the point of the exercise is not to test folks' comfort zones. (e.g. If you want to run FATAL to try out the basic engine that might work, but I ain't rolling on any Wandering Rape Charts or anything like that.) I'd be happy to host all the meetings, but if someone else wanted to take a turn playing host that would be okay too. The commitment to participate would be for the year 2007 and we'd schedule enough meetings so that everyone would run at least once. A groupblog or yahoo group or somesuch would be used to coordinate the club and for general discussion of the games.

6 Comments:
Stuart said...

I'm in.

the Red-Haired Maniac said...

Hey Jeff,This idea still intrigues me. As you are well aware, I can be ALL about the experimental. I would be quite interested in doing this as long as we can get it to where it does not conflict with anything else going on in my life.As far as frequency goes, while I like an every two week sort of thing, I understand that's not what we're aiming for here. However, I think quarterly, or even bi-monthly, is just too much time passing for folks not to forget about the sessions. What about every six weeks or so? That would give us around 8 or 9 sessions a year. That would allow a group of six GMs the ability to at least run once each, and then have a couple extra sessions for the more prolific among us to run a bonus thing.

Just some thoughts...

peace...

Dave

Jeff Rients said...

Six weeks might work. Say the first meeting was mid January. That would break down as follows:
Mid Jan
End of Feb
Mid April
End of May
Mid July
End of August
Mid October (Halloween special?)
End of November (Christmas special?)

coeli said...

I like the proposed schedule. Count me in for sure!

Doug said...

What day of the week are you thinking about for that?

Jeff Rients said...

Uh, Sunday afternoon? I'm just throwing that out as a possibility.
Any takers? Anything I'm missing?