I'm pretty much burned out on Pathfinder for the foreseeable future, so my group is getting into a number of other games these days. I'm in the middle of prepping for a Fate game where the players are going to play supervillains, drawing on Necessary Evil for inspiration. I'm also playing in a monthly Monster of the Week campaign and running a short game of Lady Blackbird. Recent non-Pathfinder games have included Fiasco, Monsterhearts (which is awesome!), Shooting the Moon, Starblazer Adventures (another great one - I used it to run an Original Trek campaign which was extremely successful), and Durance. So many more that I'd love to try running, though - if we finish Lady Blackbird before I'm done prepping the Fate game, I think I'll run a short game of How We Came to Live Here.
We just finished up our campaign last weekend. The kingdom was called Stormvale, with its capital city of Stag's End. Most of the other cities held their original names - Candlemere, Varnhold, Fort Drelev, etc.
1. How long have you been gaming: Since Christmas 1995.
2. First game system you played: AD&D 2e. Specifically, the Introduction to Dungeons & Dragons boxed set with the giant red dragon on the cover.
3. What are your 3 favorite systems: Fate, Apocalypse World Engine, and probably Old World of Darkness for nostalgia purposes.
4. Fate of your first character: Retired, as the campaign basically trailed off with no ending.
5. Do you still game with any of your original group: Depends on how generous you want to be with the term "original group." I first started playing with one or two other guys, mostly playing solo adventures with them, and I don't play with any of those people anymore, as we've all split up and moved to different states. I do still play with one guy I gamed with in high school, despite the fact that we no longer live in that state.
6. Why do you visit these forums: I like the community and enjoy seeing what's going on with the most popular RPG out there, even though my gaming tastes tend toward different things.
I like the way FATE does it - during character creation, you basically come up with a story that happened to your character prior to the start of the campaign, then everyone guest stars in two other people's stories. You get an Aspect based on your own story and each of your guest spots, which is a central part of your character going forward. The party starts out already knowing one another through with all kinds of relationships that way.
Huh, goes to show you how differently things can be interpreted by different viewers - I thought it was clear that they were about to sleep together. I guess we'll find out soon enough.
Anyway, my feelings about the show in general are pretty much summed up by this Penny Arcade strip. It's just a lot more bland and formulaic than I was hoping for. I wouldn't say I'm hate watching it, because I don't care enough about what's happening on screen to hate it. I guess I'm eye-roll watching it.
Has anybody read any David Mitchell? I am thinking of starting Cloud Atlas and am not sure what to expect.
I'm a big fan of Mitchell's. Cloud Atlas is impressive on several levels - it's incredibly well written linguistically and structurally. If you're not sure whether you'll like him, you can start with Ghostwritten, which plays with structure in similar ways but which is shorter and not quite as dense, or Number 9 Dream, which is more of a standard novel but which has a lot of Mitchell-esque flair.
As for me, I'm slowly making my way through The Gulag Archipelago.
I just recently read through all of the F&GM stories - I thought a lot of the early ones were really good (mainly the ones that have been highlighted here), and I liked the full-length novella he did about the
Spoiler:
rat invasion,
but the last two books left me cold. I thought they were generally pretty dull, didn't find the love interests all that compelling, and thought they took some bizarre (and pointless) sexual tangents.
I'm currently reading The Apocalypse Codex, the most recent book in the Laundry Files series. It's a fun read, and the series is full of cool ideas. I particularly like the idea that magic is done via mathematics, and if you do the computations in your head you risk opening mini-portals to elsewhere inside your brain.
Just started The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Enjoying it so far, though I'm less than fifty pages in. Recently I've been reading Houses of the Blooded and its sourcebooks - I think it would make an interesting counterpoint to the Kingmaker campaign I've been playing in for the last year or so.
Martin has said that there were characters whose story needed to be told and so he couldn't do the flashbacks he originally had planned. I fear he meant Brienne, Cersei and those useless Iron Island POV's, which notably all were the worst parts of AFfC.
I'd argue Cersei is one of the characters that suffered most as a result of his decision not to advance the timeline. If he'd gone with the jump-forward
Spoiler:
the damage she does to the country would have been a bit more believable. Five years isn't all that long, but if she fires all of her competent advisors and makes a bunch of bad (though at least marginally understandable) decisions, it makes sense that she could really put the country in the ditch and still be a reasonably intelligent person. As it stands, she has to make all of those decisions within the span of, I don't know, a few weeks, which makes her seem catastrophically stupid.
Based on his decision to go back and continue from where ASoS left off, you get to see all of that stuff happen, but she looks completely incompetent.
1. I would say that I'd rather not get spoilers, but knowing things in advance doesn't completely destroy my enjoyment of an adventure.
2. So the point of your post is that if the player reads ahead, he can retroactively fit his backstory to the game to make the story better? I think the GM can do that for the players without spoiling anything. When I ran Shackled City, I got the players' backstories and then made relatively minor edits to fit them all in better (changed one villain from a human to an orc so that he could be a half-orc character's father, for example).
For GMs, mine would probably be Quentin Tarantino, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Joss Whedon, and Stephen King. Not necessarily in that order.
Players would be a different story, for that I would probably look more toward actors. Patrick Stewart and Jon Hamm immediately come to mind, though that list could go on and on.
FYI, there is a spoiler from the books under that spoiler tag. A piece of information in there hasn't been revealed on the show yet (though there have been hints).
He's one of Robb's primary bannermen (at least he was until the Red Wedding). It was his people that captured Jaime and Brienne and cut Jaime's hand off, so Roose let Jaime go on the condition that Jaime tell Tywin that he had nothing to do with Jaime's maiming. On the show he's been seen hanging around Robb and giving him advice, and at Harrenhal letting Jaime go.
On an unrelated note, when playing an AGoT RPG before I had read the books, I decided to have my character come from House Bolton just because I thought Roose looked cool in the book. All of the other players just chuckled and then constantly smack talked my family. Uncle Roose is just misunderstood!
Changes from 3rd to 4th edition could be handled much more elegantly than they were - the 4th edition generation FR designers admitted they wrecked the FR because they didn't wanted to learn the existing lore. Yeah, they decide to continue the setting without using the setting...
Really?! Can you link to that? I want to read it in all of its original stupidity.
Personally, I got tired of it myself, partially on account of the let us say...Greenwoodian aspects of the campaign (Mary Sues all over and a propensity towards fetish) but it was one of the more solid 'basic' 2e settings.
I don't disagree with the fact that there are a ton of high-level NPCs running around the setting, and I've heard stories similar to what Death Quaker described about those characters hijacking sessions and whole campaigns, though I agree that it's an issue that can easily be solved by a GM just deciding not to involve them (though if you're running a story about the end of the world, you might need to explain why Elminster isn't taking care of it instead of the PCs).
To be fair to Ed Greenwood, I don't think the preponderance of Mary Sues running around the setting is all his fault - or at least it's an unintended consequence. I met him at a con one time and kind of brought this up to him, and he was very much of the opinion that the world is yours when you choose to set a campaign there, and all of the setting elements are there for you to make your story better as you see fit. If that means killing Elminster off in scene one, so be it.
To address the OP's point concerning game systems creating a culture for certain kinds of players, I'd agree with that to an extent. Well, I can't really say for sure about a game system fostering a culture, but I do think that the system that a group plays does have an impact on how the session or the campaign is played. I wouldn't go so far as to say that any group playing D&D is going to focus entirely on hacking and slashing, and one playing V:tM is going to become an amateur theater company over time, but in my experience the game system tends to give subtle pushes toward certain gaming styles just by virtue of what it supports and doesn't support.
Personally, I'm much more interested in storytelling than character optimization, but my group is more moderate - we have people who enjoy both equally and a guy who really prefers character optimization to storytelling. We play a lot of Pathfinder and a lot of Fate (different games using the same system). When we play Pathfinder, nearly every encounter we have ends in a fight - I would say 70% of the campaign has taken place in combat rounds. Likewise, every story ends with a boss fight. There is character development, there are storylines for individual PCs, and we focus on the story elements as much as I can get away with, but the game really supports the tactical aspects better. In combat, I can try out weird stunts or creative uses of spells to try to take an enemy out, but often I find that this kind of thinking is discouraged - I can try something creative with a really low chance of success, or I can just throw out another fireball.
When we play Fate with the same group, I think the storytelling comes out a lot more. Combat is a much lower percentage of the game session, problems are often not solved with combat, and we have more scenes that focus on investigation, character development, etc. I think this is because the system supports these differences - spending Fate points encourages players to tie personal character motivations into actions, and social combat is handled the same way as physical combat, meaning that the two are (or should be) equally fulfilling as methods of resolution. This isn't to say that Fate is objectively better (though I prefer it) - when physical combat does happen, it isn't as robustly supported by rules as it would be in Pathfinder.
So I do think that, everything else being equal, a game system does have an impact on the style of game that's played by a group, though it's a fairly subtle one and the players won't necessarily find their philosophy as to what constitutes the perfect game session changed. It's similar to Ron Edwards' point in his "System Does Matter" essay, though there he was talking about arguments that all game systems are equally good in the hands of a good group. Here, I'd say that story gamers are going to include storytelling in their games no matter what they're playing, but the system they choose will support them to a varied extent and may shift their emphasis over time.
This illustrates what is a huge problem with any mechanics for social interaction.
A player who finds out about the Antagonise effect, will see nothing wrong with ramping up the modifiers and milking it to death, encounter after encounter after encounter after encounter…..
Yet if a PC is affected, even once, by the same tactic, the players scream murder.
Same with maxed Bluff, Diplomacy, glibness…the goalposts for what constitutes acceptable outcomes, acceptable odds, are dependent on who’s the giver and who’s the receiver.
I've played in games where social interaction mechanics have worked really well, just not D&D or Pathfinder. In games using Fate, for example, you can set up social conflicts where each side sets the stakes, and those stakes can involve changing someone's mind about something. So I could play Darth Vader, and set up a conflict with Luke, and tell him that if I win, he joins the Dark Side. Generally, you can bail out of a conflict that's going badly by compromising something (Luke's player gives up and jumps off a balcony rather than letting himself get converted), but if you go all the way with it you can get taken out and wind up with a different perspective. I think it works because you go into the conflict knowing the potential outcomes rather than having someone just come up to you, roll Bluff, and then expect you to go off and murder Han Solo based on some lie someone told you. It also helps that each roll in combats like that gets played as part of the argument, so your potential change of heart has some more foundation.
I played a lot of Heroes Unlimited back in the 90's and would not recommend it. The system came off like 2e D&D with a ridiculous number of hit points. It would take several gunshots to take down a standard goon, for example. Characters with access to magic could short circuit that in a number of ways and so seemed really overpowered.
I haven't had much experience with other superhero games - I've played M&M 2e a couple of times and thought it worked pretty well. My next long term campaign is likely to be a modified version of the Necessary Evil campaign using ICONS, though. Another one I thought looked really interesting is With Great Power... It's an indie game where the rules are designed so that you fail early on to succeed later (think Spider-Man getting dumped and then beaten up by the Vulture before he comes back to save the day). Seems like an interesting attempt to imitate the structure of an actual comic book story.
I just finished plowing through Cold Days, which I thought was a good read. Butcher did a good job of plotting everything this time around, though I could have done with one or two less action sequences.
I'm just starting Consider the Lobster, a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace. I'm only a few pages in, but it's already hilarious.
So what is the fate system I think ive seen it but im not sure
It's a universal RPG system using Fudge dice, which are six-sided dice with two blank sides, two sides with plus signs, and two sides with minus signs. So for any given roll you'll have a skill number, modified from -4 to +4 based on your roll.
The two big mechanics in the system are Aspects and Fate Points. Aspects are important elements to your character - could be abilities, could be personality traits, whatever. They're whatever you think is important about the character. Examples would be stuff like Itchy Trigger Finger, First on the Scene, Sucker for the Ladies, etc. Whenever you're in a situation where one of your aspects might be able to help you out, you can tag that aspect by paying a Fate Point, and give yourself a +2 on the roll. Enemies and scenes can also have aspects that you can tag to get bonuses.
One of the best parts is that Aspects aren't all good. In fact, the best ones could be either good or bad. Then, when you come to a situation where your character's aspect could get him into trouble, the GM can offer you a Fate Point to do something that hurts him but serves the story and the character. This is the only way to gain Fate Points, so you find yourself getting into trouble a lot.
I'm a huge, huge fan of the system - pitching even $1 into the Kickstarter gets you a look at the basic rules, so I'd recommend going ahead and taking a look.
For the Runecarved Key event at GenCon this year, our party was as follows:
Druid
Sorcerer
Bard
Bard
Bard
Bard
The bard-centric group was surprisingly effective during the middle section of the adventure, which was about convincing people not to participate in an auction in a variety of ways, but as soon as the combat-oriented climax began we hit a brick wall. No deaths, though, so it was a moral victory.
We had a really cool moment last night in the campaign - we're playing Kingmaker but are on a sidequest which involves trying to steal an artifact from the Chelaxian government in order to stop the Red Mantis from assassinating my character - the party is seventh level. We determine that the artifact is located in a tower in a university, but that the only door to the tower is a portal that you have to enter through the royal palace a mile away, and further the artifact is protected by all kinds of magic and a group of Hellknights.
At the end of the previous session where we made our battle plan, we joked that we should just go in and Bluff them into giving us the artifact. The DM jokingly noted that with a Bluff roll around 50, that would be possible. I laughed it off, but later that night I got to thinking...
Fast forward to this session, where we announce the entry plan. I had my character cast Heroism and Eagle's Splendor on myself (as well as Alter Self to appear as a Hellknight), donned a Circlet of Persuasion, drank a Potion of Glibness, got Moment of Greatness cast on me, and then got a fortune hex placed on me which would give me a second die on my next roll. The druid used stone shape to put a hole in the tower, and I staggered in, telling the Hellknights that Cheliax was under attack and that I had been sent to bring the artifact to safety. I explained why I'd had to make a hole in the wall (the castle was under attack and the other side of the portal was being hidden from the attackers by an illusion) and why the Hellknights needed to go up and get the artifact without letting any of the alarms go off (that was the signal that I needed reinforcements from the queen, which could cost her life if they were sent needlessly). The DM gave me a +5 on my roll due to the elaborate lie, and I announced that my roll would be at +49 - the final result was a glorious 66. So the Hellknights went up, disarmed the magical protection, and handed me the artifact. The DM later told us that the artifact had been protected by a power word stun effect that would have taken a bunch of us out for 2d4 rounds and would have alerted the entire palace to our position.
Before I could get out the door, an erinyes popped through the portal on patrol and shot me a few times, but I made it out and the druid used a readied action to close the wall up. Since the tower was dimensionally locked, they couldn't follow us out immediately, and my character and a few other party members teleported out of the city using a scroll of teleport. The rest of the party was kind of left in the lurch and were forced to retreat to a safehouse, then crawl out a sewer and kill a Hellknight and an erinyes in their escape.
And that's how we stole an artifact with an epic lie.
I don't like obvious "this is an Earth country that we just refluffed fantasy and planted into a fantasy world." I want a _fantasy world_ to be just that. I do not want, "Oh, this place is France/Japan/Mexico, but with wizards." Now, there's some leeway to be given here. Obviously, because fantasy draws from our own mythlore, and obviously, because we need to have some basis in reality we look to history to feed how we are going to build nations and cultures, some fantasy nations and events are going to have some resemblances to real world culture or history--but it shouldn't be blatant, and there should be creative mishmashes and stuff made from whole cloth to make these places unique and not obvious expys of real places.
Could not agree more. The Kara Tur boxed set from second edition was the worst offender I ever saw - literally every country they gave had a direct real world analogue. It was like they wanted to make a game set in Asia and add monsters, but they thought it wouldn't sell so they slapped a Forgotten Realms label on it and shipped it.
Roseanne had a weird ending, but I suppose it was better than the last season.
Ugh, yes! I forgot about how bad that was - I agree that the last season was terrible and the series finale was an attempt to retcon it, but then they went back and retconned the whole series as well. So stupid.
Other than that, I agree with a lot of the other usual suspects - wasn't a fan of Lost or Neon Genesis Evangelion (though I hadn't liked Evangelion too much even prior to its ending), and I absolutely hated the finale of Battlestar Galactica. I think of it like the fictional movie in Seinfeld called "Cry, Cry Again," because when you see
Spoiler:
them unanimously decide to shoot their entire fleet into the sun so that they can start to die of starvation and disease needlessly
you cry, and then when you get to
Spoiler:
the ridiculous coda which suggests that the moral of the whole thing was that AI is dangerous
Good to see gamers in that area! I'm from Manchester originally, just down 37 from Toms River, though I live down in Atlanta now. We had trouble finding players there too, though we had a pretty good group by the end. Good luck filling out your game!
I'm not sure how common this is, but I've never run or played through an encounter with a deity. I don't think a mind flayer has ever appeared in a game I've been part of, either.
We didn't realize you needed to re-click submit if nothing happened the first time, and every event we wanted except True Dungeon and one other were sold out by the time we got in. Would have been nice if the site notified you that your request timed out rather than letting you wait until you felt brave enough to refresh. We also joked that there should be an automatic refund offer if your wishlist processed and you got zero tickets from it.
Excellent interview, thanks for posting! What was the ADwD question you refrained from asking because it would spoil someone in the audience?
My primary concern from the interview is that it seems like he hasn't actually done that much writing on TWoW since ADwD was published last year. When asked about the status of the next book, he basically said that he has a couple hundred pages done (which I believe is mostly stuff moved over from ADwD which had already been written), and that he hopes it comes out faster once he really starts in on it after he clears out his current side projects. If I were him, I'd be extremely concerned that HBO could need to finish the series before I could get it done. I think he can get TWoW finished in time, but I have serious doubts about the final book being finished before HBO gets there unless they start splitting all of the books into multiple seasons, which seems like a bad idea.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that GRRM seems extremely friendly and accessible to fans, so kudos to him for that!
I'm in one face-to-face group - we aim to meet once a week, but we wind up missing at least one session per month, sometimes two. We play on Wednesday nights, generally from 8pm or so to somewhere between 11pm and midnight. We also alternate campaigns - I'm running a Star Trek TOS campaign using Starblazer Adventures, and another guy is running Kingmaker every other week. Starblazer runs quickly enough that I don't have a problem finishing up an episode per session, but we just started the Kingmaker game and I'm not sure what the pacing will look like over the long run.
Anything by Ayn Rand. Chick had a chip on her shoulder, coupled with a seriously misplaced case of idol worship, and willfully refused to look at reality when it conflicted with her Nietzschean imaginings.
You know that scene in Fight Club where they're talking about which celebrity they would fight if they could fight anyone, and one of them picks William Shatner? I'd fight Ayn Rand.
I read an interview somewhere in which Martin outright said that readers should NOT take Ramsay's letter as truth...here's the link. That doesn't mean there's no truth to it, but I'd be surprised if that whole battle took place offscreen.
That being said, I have plenty of other gripes with Martin at this point...most of my complaints with ADwD are set forth (by someone else) here.
The british upper classes have always been allowed eccentricities, which dovetails quite nicely with the permissive nature of the church of england, resulting in a Oscar Wilde friendly culture that we haven't had on this side of the pond until very recently if at all.
The British haven't always been that Oscar Wilde-friendly. Oscar Wilde himself spent two years in prison for "gross indecency" (homosexual acts) starting in 1895.
Google search reveals that there's a reference to a Slohr, as in "many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of a Slohr that day, I can tell you." I don't know where the reference is, though - I just read that book and didn't catch it.
Found it. It's on page 202 - the timeline mentions that the Arthfell Forest was trampled by a Slohr.
Google search reveals that there's a reference to a Slohr, as in "many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of a Slohr that day, I can tell you." I don't know where the reference is, though - I just read that book and didn't catch it.
You're absolutely right. That was my meaning when I said, "(By the by, it is equally frustrating to watch a character die off only to find out that his double was killed. That is like reading a whole book and finding out that the entire story was just a dream.)"
In service,
Rich
Ah, my mistake. I had thought that was what you meant at first, but you had also said something like
Spoiler:
"neither the murder of the Onion Knight [nor someone else's murder] were necessary to move the plot forward in ADwD," and the potential switcheroo is actually in AFfC, if I remember correctly.
Anyway, the character in question hadn't been killed onscreen, so I never fully believed he was dead. Same with
Spoiler:
Stannis Baratheon and Mance Rayder
in ADwD. You don't see them die, so I wouldn't assume they're dead. I'm not even 100% sure the latter of those two was reported dead, actually.
A Dance with Dragons (DwD): A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five
Dancing in the Doldrums
I never liked the series, because GRRM played with your emotions from the first book, and he reveled in causing grief to good characters and rewarding evil.
I wasn't the biggest fan of ADwD, either, but
Spoiler:
The Onion Knight doesn't die in it. Lord Manderly fakes his execution and then sends him off to this island to bring back Rickon Stark. He'll be back.
Also
Spoiler:
I didn't get the sense that Varys was necessarily meant to be riding in as a white knight at the end - in fact, he's taking actions that are going to get more people killed by further destabilizing the country. He's trying to keep Westeros unstable for Daenerys' return, because he's a Targaryen loyalist. We've known that since the first book, when he was plotting with Illyrio to aid the Targaryens.
I'll agree with those who've mentioned the following:
Wheel of Time - I read the first book and thought it was fair, but certainly not enough to keep reading when even many fans of the series say that the middle volumes are terrible. Even the first book really failed to grab me; I didn't like any of the characters and the primary vilain seemed one note.
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever - Ugh. I appreciate that the author was trying to play with genre conventions, but this was too much. Absolutely hated Covenant and wasn't enthralled by the world building or supporting characters.
Dragonlance - I read the first trilogy last year and wasn't really impressed. The only main character that I thought had any real depth was Tanis.
Icewind Dale Trilogy - I remember being surprised at the quality of the writing. You could make a drinking game out of some of the phrases Salvatore reused over and over in this series - the one that stands out most is "the stamp of booted feet."
EDIT - One that I don't know that anyone else has mentioned: The Name of the Wind - I didn't actually hate this, but I liked it a lot less than most. Kvothe is a bit of a Marty Stu, and I found myself rooting for him to get slapped around. A lot.
Hmm. I was thinking of starting his series, but maybe not. If I read them all now, I'd have to read them all again when the next one comes out and then read them all again when the last one comes out. Because that's what I do.
I'll probably wait for the show to come out on DVD, read the books that the show covers and call it quits.
That's not a bad idea. While the series on the whole is really good, I don't know if I'd recommend beginning it now. The first three books are amazing - the fourth and fifth are weaker, but I'm optimistic that they'll work once the series is finished and you can immediately find out how they resolve. Plus, there's the problem that the wait between books is years long (and if I'm not mistaken he basically took the second half of this year off, so I don't think that's likely to change). Following along with HBO you'll at least get the story on a regular schedule.
I've played in campaigns where the GM had a strong hand in designing characters. (The current game in the rotating-GM project I'm playing is like that: the GM handed out cards such as "this character is older than the others, here's the mechanical effects" and "this character is good at hunting, here's the mechanical effects" and so on. We had to distribute the cards among the PCs.)
I am reminded of the original DragonLance series of modules; the party was strongly encouraged to play the PCs from the novels.
The mechanical advantages for the GM are obvious. She can design a character with this or that special ability, that would be gloriously imbalanced if it were an allowable option to all PCs.
I've got a friend who is planning a Star Wars game in a similar way, but taking it further. He's planning on basically coming up with character roles or hooks beforehand, along the lines of "Your sister was killed when you were a child, your life's goal is to find her murderer" or possibly even things that involve professions, like "You are a smuggler who bought his ship on credit from a crimelord, the next payment is due soon and you have no cargo." Then the players choose between them and decide on stats and personality.
It makes it easier for the GM to tie the characters into the plot, as everyone has built-in hooks. On the other hand, I'm not sure that things will have as much of an emotional impact, where your character's big payoff is something that you had no hand in creating. Essentially, I think the approach is borrowed from video game design, with all of the same benefits and drawbacks.
I should probably avoid that one then. Rant almost put me off, but I was able to get past my revulsion to finish it.
I found Rant to be much more 'explicit' than Choke. I think Chuck kind of has this reputation of being an 'edgy' author, but the beginning of Rant just seems like an exercise in him trying to outdo himself, which resulted in me rolling my eyes very vigorously. Once I got past the beginning sections of the book I found it much more enjoyable.
Choke ... didn't gross me out nearly as often or as much. Of Chuck's books that I have read I enjoyed Choke the most, though I haven't read Fight Club. I have to say that I did not enjoy Lullaby or Diary overly much. From watching the movie for Fight Club, I can see there are quite a few parallels between Choke and Fight Club.
I haven't read Rant nor Choke, but I can't imagine anything being worse than Haunted...I read somewhere that Chuck takes pride in actually making people pass out when doing live readings of the first story in that book.
I've yet to use my stats to create a character. I might play anything from a private detective to a college professor but I don't want to duplicate your persons. What are you thinking of doing?
I'm thinking Columbia doctoral student in history, doing some research into the supernatural on the sly.
For me, no matter which AP I am running I have learned to own all 6 books and read them once through before I begin my preparations. I am far less likely to make a mistake if I know who/what the Npc's are and what they are up to.
This is a big one. It also helps in terms of foreshadowing and making sure that major villains get some face time before it's time for them to get killed at the end of the AP. Once you know where the plot is headed, you'll also have a better idea of how to customize it for your group without going so far off the rails that you need to rewrite the later books entirely.
The changes they are referring to is that they might be slightly less free than the books with bringing in new characters and may instead concentrate more on the established gang.
For example, in Book 2 there are two prominent characters from Book/Season 1 who barely only appear, and we only really hear about what they are up to off-page:
** spoiler omitted **
In both cases the characters' roles will be widened in Season 2:
** spoiler omitted **
Because of this, some new characters and storylines from Books 2 and 3 may not appear or be as prominent. Though based on the casting announcements for Season 2 so far, this may not be immediately apparent :-)
That sounds good - based on their departures in season 1, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt in terms of edits. What's your take on how they'll handle books 4-5?
There might be some blurring between the end of book 2/beginning of book 3 and where the TV show chooses to end things, but season 2 is likely to cover most or all of ACoK, considering that Martin has stated that he's writing the script for the Blackwater episode of season 2, which is toward the end of the book.
That said, I imagine they'd have to step away from the books by the time they get to AFfC, assuming they don't want to confuse the viewers by having half the cast sit a season out. The question is whether they then try to get two seasons out of the combination of books 4 and 5, and whether they take from the beginning of book 6 to pay off some of the storylines that (I feel) were left unresolved by book 5 unnecessarily.
So here's the deal. I want to run Masks. I began the game once on tabletop and it was highly successful, but it fell apart when two players left the group due to real life needs. Now I want to take a crack at it electronically. I haven't made up my mind about whether it should be PBeM (run through Yahoo! Groups for file storage, since I loves me some handouts and play aids) or Skype with a VTT and with a Groups site for file storage. Frankly, I'm open to either one, and which one I choose will likely be determined by the response I get. I'm in GMT-6, though of course that doesn't matter for PBeM.
So right now I'm looking for 5-7 players. Obviously people who've never played the campaign are welcome, but I also welcome people who've played one or two chapters (I get the feeling that beginning Masks is far commoner than completing Masks).
As for me, I've been GMing and playing RPGs since about 1978. I've both played and run CoC as well as many other systems. As a GM I tend to be more on the storytelling and roleplaying side than the hard crunch side, but fortunately BRP's rules are sufficiently flexible and simple that hard crunch is seldom an issue. As mentioned I give lots of handouts. I also tend to roleplay my NPCs rather...exuberantly. Since I've run three chapters of MoN already and have given extensive thought to the others, I feel like I'm ready to roll with it right away.
For players, I'm looking for people who are reliable, who are not completely familiar with the campaign, who like to roleplay, and who understand that the core of CoC is investigation, madness, and death (and therefore will embrace those challenges rather than get upset when this notoriously dangerous campaign claims yet another investigator!). Familiarity with the system isn't required, since it's dead simple and I run it crunch-lite. As I see it, there are several near-certain TPCs in the campaign as written, and my intention is to modify them so that the players actually have a fighting chance of getting out alive (if not...
I'd love to give this a try. I've played CoC a few times in the past, and have loved it each time, but I've never played a campaign of it. I've heard great things about Masks, but I haven't read it and I'm not familiar with the plot at all. I also typically favor storytelling and the like to crunch, and I understand that madness and death are par for the course with CoC (I've survived 50% of the sessions I've played). As far as characters go, I like the idea of playing a retired British military man or a history student working on a PhD in something like history.
As for format, PBeM would probably be easier for me (I would be able to post at least once per day, often more frequently), though I could possibly play on a weeknight other than Wednesday after 7:30 or so eastern time. I've played on Skype a few times and never really had too much of an issue with the technical side; whenever someone would get booted it typically wouldn't take long to get them back up and running.
Curse of the Crimson Throne - 13
Kingmaker - 4
Savage Tide - 3
Rise of the Runelords - 3
Legacy of Fire - 3
Carrion Crown - 3
Shackled City - 2
Against the Slavers/Giants/Drow - 1
Age of Worms - 1
Second Darkness - 0
Council of Thieves - 0
Serpent's Skull - 0
