Monday, August 4, 2008

Ultra-high-level roleplaying, and the perils thereof

A few quick hits from the weekend...

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We played our second session of Wild Talents on Sunday, and a few things became clear. We are — by choice — playing a very high-powered game, with each character being the head of some guild or private army or merchant union. This means, by extension, that our story involves very high-level, world-threatening themes. Again, this is cool. What we realized in our Sunday session, however, was that our very powerful characters were going to succeed in most die rolls put before them, so we had to figure out a way to keep the game challenging while we mobilized starfleets, influenced planetary law and rerouted energy shipments (all high-level stuff that went off without a hitch due to our insanely high stats). But failure — or the threat thereof — is a good thing, and we’ve made some changes to ensure that the dice still serve a purpose in our Wild Talents game.

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Black Sun Games’ official Web site is up and running, though most of the links don’t work. I’m continually impressed by these guys: By all accounts, they’re doing everything right as far as opening a successful, long-term game store in Chicago. Check out their banner...looks like some Flames of War minis in the background? I’ll have to check that game out.

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I joined Dark Reign, the Warhammer 40k RPG fan site, and was simply bowled over by the volume of fan-generated content on there. They’ve got GM aids, full-fledged sourcebooks, adventure hooks, random encounter tables and alternate rules. The best part is that (it appears) any member can contribute articles, which really has my creative gears turning. Shouldn’t be tough to find inspiration — I’m about 200 pages away from finishing up the massive Eisenhorn omnibus by Dan Abnett, which means I’ve been totally immersed in 40k for the last month or two.

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