I had planned for my next post to be a continuation of the play report for the first SCP game. But I just spent an hour and a half talking about D&D over Skype–an epic conversation that ended only when both me and the guy on the other end of the line realized “Shit, it’s midnight”–and I realized two things.
1) I really, really want to either run or play in a D&D game. The SCP campaign is fun because each session can be a single adventure based around a single SCP, and there’s so many of them that you never know what you’re going to find, but it’s not D&D. Spirit of the Century is fun because insane, ’20s-pulp action is happening every second, but it’s not D&D. I want to step out of a tavern in a dingy street and see the world in front of me and try and take as much of it for myself as I can. Failing that, I want to set up such a situation for my players. With the SCP game or Shadowrun or whatever I have to plan things out, create missions or scenarios and put the players into them. With D&D, I can just ask the players what they’re doing next.
“We’re thinking about going north and hunting down that witch who keeps sending stuff to attack Strider,” they might say. And then I know what to prepare for, and I get surprised by what’s up in the north and what’s changed since they’ve last been there and it’s a living, breathing world and I love it.
2) I want to make my own derivative of D&D. This is an idea I’ve had lurking in my head for a while. I don’t much care for Fourth Edition D&D–it’s never really felt like Dungeons & Dragons to me, despite the use of the name–but, as Dorf is so fond of reminding me, 3.5 isn’t perfect either. I want a system where combat is fast and feels brutal, where creativity on the part of the players is encouraged, and where playing smart can get you further than charging in and assuming you can kill everyone before they can kill you. I want to mess with the skill system and change how magic works. I want to rewrite the underpinnings of reality for the game.
So, yeah. No after-action report today, I’m afraid. My mind is filled with other things.
Varrik ,
Technically, you can do all that stuff (addressing point #1) in any system. The way you had a list of major players in the world and what they were doing, and kept the players in a persistant, dynamic world; that was all just DM technique, nothing D&D-specific. I would love to play a sandbox-style game of Shadowrun, you’d just have to come up with a new set of dynamics for the world.