What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

My big D&D campaign continues, with a current party of seven. Last session was the dramatic conclusion of an epic adventure that we started more than a year ago: the Banewarrens. The final battle was the biggest that I've ever run in miniatures scale, covering a half mile in horizontal distance and another half mile in vertical distance. At one point, we had a sidebar discussion about how fast things fall in six second combat rounds and ended up looking up terminal velocity during the discussion.

At the time we wrapped up the last session, the druid was dragging off the necromancer and the cleric for possible resurrection. The rogue went looking for them and instead stumbled into a trap that the party encountered in an earlier session that he missed, resulting in his paralysis due to temporary loss of strength points. Elsewhere, the barbarian was guarding the cowardly wizard and the ineffectual chaostechnician, and they didn't know what happened to the others. Because the party has been overspending on magic items, they can't even afford to reincarnate the necromancer or the cleric right now, so those two players are thinking about starting new characters. For in-character reasons, the player of the barbarian is also changing to a new character, as will the rogue, who recently lost most of his magic items to Mordenkainen's Disjunction. The players are disgruntled at the moment, but nobody wants to quit. At least I had fun.

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An adventure and an NPC i wrote are published. AFS magazine is a rather small low print run rpg mag. Consider burning $10 and having a read.

Savage Worlds - I've been using the system to run an Orkworld/Warcraft/Song of Ice and Fire hybrid and it's been excellent through 20+ hours of tabletop gaming. I just recently used it to run a large scale battle, the first time I've ever tried something on that scale that worked. Mass combat in Savage Worlds is abstract and at the macro level but my players loved it. We were able to run a battle that encompassed hundreds of combatants on either side and not lose focus on the story or get bogged down in the minutiae of measuring ranges or tallying hit points.

The system has just about everything a GM would ever need in his toolbox to tell fun stories and keep the fun rolling by supporting narrative decisions with easy to use mechanics. Tactical combat is here if you want it and various subsystems exist to run thematic chases on foot or with mounts and vehicles. Social conflict is easily managed with just enough crunch to keep things interesting if you are the type of GM that likes to take into account a player's roleplaying ability (or lack) and his PC's strengths/weaknesses.

Character creation is fast and can be used to build almost any concept imaginable, especially if you start adding in any of the excellent companion source-books. I've been using Savage Worlds for sword and sorcery style gaming but it can easily be adapted for WWII, sci-fi, horror, superhero or any genre setting you can dream up.

If you're looking for a rules light RPG system that keeps the action "fast, furious, and fun" I can't recommend Savage Worlds enough. It's allowed me get a game I've been wanting to GM for years to the table but could never find a suitable game to pull it off. I loved John Wick's vision in Orkworld but the mechanics behind it seemed awkward and minimal. I could have used D20 Pathfinder or D&D but both options were not appealing given how much I hate bookkeeping and the inexorable advance of the PC's into higher levels and added complexity. A Song of Ice and Fire RP from Green Ronin captures the intrigue of court and political backstabbery, but there are no orks. Plus the game suffers from the buckets of dice syndrome and subsystems on top of subsystems so I dropped back and punted on it too. Enter Savage Worlds and it's flexibility and my problem was solved. On top of the elegant rules the game is easy on the wallet too, with both the hard copy and PDF versions selling for under $10.

TL;DR - if you like sword & sorcery action or just need an elegant rules-light RPG I highly recommend Savage Worlds. It's easy to read and put to use at the table and won't hit the pocket book all that hard either.

My big D&D campaign continues, though the pace has slowed to maybe 18 sessions per year now. The average party member is still at around 11th level, due to deaths and new characters. The party is now somewhat heavy on the spellcasters, with a druid, a cleric, a necromancer, an evoker, a bard/barbarian, and a chaostechnician/sorcerer. However, the 3rd level minotaur barbarian is so devastating in melee that he can make up for all the cringing spellcasters.

I spent a large amount of time playing diceless role-playing games last weekend. While working on my Amber boardgame, I stumbled across the existence of a local Amber convention, and signed up for it. Attendance was down by half this year because it fell too close to GenCon on the calendar, but there were still enough people to make it work. I wasn't sure if I would have fun with these folks, so I only committed to Friday and Saturday events.

Game #1: Lords of Gossamer & Shadow. This is Amber Diceless with the serial number filed off. We discovered a WMD capable of destroying multiple realities at once. I was playing the Gossamer equivalent of Benedict of Amber. In the end, I successfully persuaded the others to follow my plan of strategically detonating the device to prevent it being used or backwards-engineered by enemies of the realm.

Game #2: Blackmoor. Like many of the games at the convention, this is an ongoing campaign, with various participants showing up at some or all three of the Amber conventions in the U.S. to play in the latest adventures. The campaign setting is standard Amber plus a whole slew of other stuff mixed in, including psionics. Characters go on espionage missions. The tone of this particular adventure was Lovecraftian, so I enjoyed it.

Game #3: Lords of Olympus. This game system is Amber Diceless brilliantly re-themed to the Greek Pantheon. I played a bastard son of Zeus working as a homicide detective, loosely based on Jimmy McNulty and Gary "Fucking" King. Again, the style of the particular adventure reminded me of Call of Cthulhu. We investigated a serial killer in Atlantic City. This was my best showing. I figured out the big bad in the first 30 minutes and worked the case hard. In the end, we forced a confrontation with my wacked out idea to employ a Greek Orthodox exorcist. It ended badly for my character, but I had a great time.

Game #4: Infinite Amber. I wasn't crazy about the campaign, which includes at least a dozen alternate reality versions of Amber, but this adventure was good. We had to defend a weak realm from a stronger one. With seven creative players, it was a very wild brainstorming session.

I was worried about the people, particularly because the quality of the GM is crucial in a diceless rpg, but I really enjoyed playing with these people. Compared to other rpg players, diceless attracts more women, more sociable players, and strong role-players. Everybody there knew each other, and they were happy to get an enthusiastic new player. Only two disappointments. The morning sessions ran really long, and it becomes a bit challenging for me to stay focused and in character after six hours without a break. As a result, there was never enough time for people to sit down and try my prototype Amber boardgame. Fortunately, the organizer of the convention lives just a few miles from me, so we will definitely get my game on the table sometime soon.

I was able to give the Firefly RPG from Margaret Weis Productions a whirl on Saturday and my initial impression is favorable. It uses the Cortex Plus rules for those familiar with them. In short, you build a dice pool with various d4 thru d12 combinations based on your PC, the environment, and any complications that might apply and try to beat a target number based on an opposing roll. The game is fairly rules light and focuses more on narrating a tale over skirmish rules or mountains of spell and equipment lists and I like that. Gone are my days of wrestling with encounter levels and accounting for every experience point or gold piece.

I'm looking forward to more and hope my group continues to stick with it so we can get to know the system better.

I played in a Firefly campaign for a while. The system is solid, and they did a nice job with the setting. But the experience of playing Firefly is somewhat disappointing. A lot of what I liked about the show was the humor and the interaction between the characters, and normal roleplayers just don't bring much of either to the table.

My Ptolus (D&D 3.5) campaign has stagnated in the last year. We have been meeting less regularly, and certain players spend too much time picking spells. Worse yet, the combats have been bogging down with 3 of the 7 players frequently summoning creatures. Sometimes as many as half the participants in a fight will be creatures summoned by the druid and the two wizards. After 3 years of usually bi-weekly gaming, the average party level is only 12th.

So I have notified my players that I am accelerating the pace of the campaign, in order to finish sooner and with more action. For the next five or six sessions, we will start in the middle of things, at the start of a combat. To simulate skipped encounters leading up to that combat, I will put a pile of d6s on the table and ask the players to assign the dice to their characters. Spellcasters can cross off memorized spells to eliminate dice equal to the expended spell levels. Any remaining dice are rolled against the assigned characters as damage. If the players take too long to assign the dice, I will add additional dice to the pile. After the first combat, I will summarize the next several traps and encounters and put out another pile of dice. Then we will proceed to the next key encounter. A few of these key encounters will be traps, puzzles or encounters with important non-hostile NPCs. After each session, I will hand out grants of XP sufficient to level up each player character.

Once I get the party up to 17th or 18th level, I will drop out of accelerated mode as they begin the final adventure of the campaign. If that bogs down in the first session, I will resume the acceleration somewhat, to move quickly through the less interesting encounters. My intention is to finish the whole campaign within the next six months. I enjoyed the campaign, at least up until recent months, but it seems like the sweet spot for D&D 3.5 is maybe 4th through 10th level. The low level adventures are too easily derailed by character casualties, and the high level adventures seem to bog down to the complex potential interactions of a wide range of spells, monsters, magic items, and character abilities.

That was my experience playing Pathfinder and Star Wars Saga Edition, Shellhead. Anything below level 10 was fine, but after that it got to be too much or a burden to manage NPC stat blocks, piles of HP, and list of feats and spells. It felt more like an accounting class at the higher levels and that just took too much time away from the story telling aspect of playing an RPG so I ditched those systems.

To add to your point about most RP'ers not having the chops to portray a Firefly game I can see that, but like most games, it really depends on the players and the chemistry between them far more than the system to have a good time, and that doesn't apply only to RPGs either. There are folks I like playing Twilight Imperiumwith and there are other gamers who don't like that style of game and make playing it a miserable experience.

My three boys have fired up the 1st/2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons again, and I've been sitting in with Friar Grazie, my 5th level Cleric/Thief. They've been taking turns DMing and my character is getting an array of magical items that don't exactly fit with my previous 40 years of "normal" stuff. I have an Orb of Not Quite Flying, which largely does what it says. Last night I got a magic morning star -- +3 to hit, ignores shields, hits critical on a 19 or 20, and on a natural roll of 17 if you hit it's not from the swinging ball. Instead you've swung back like normal but instead of swinging forward you've pushed a button on the handle and a rod has shot out the bottom of the handle and hit your opponent in the eye. Boink! +3 damage in that case. I've named it the Curley Joe Morning Star.

I went online last night to pick up a couple of extra copies of the Player's Handbook and Unearthed Arcana, which I used to be able to pick up used for about $6. They're up to about $12 now, more than they originally sold for. It would be nice to have duplicate copies with four of us playing. I'm surprised their price is going up, making me wonder if more people are showing interest in the original rules again. Either that or more guys like me are too cheap and too lazy to buy their kids the new stuff instead.