Catching Up

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 Session Notes (08/18/22 - 11/12/22)

I’ve been busy but I haven’t been typing up my session notes!


Dungeons & Dragons (5th edition)

Almost every Wednesday since school started, the tabletop gaming club has met to play Dungeons and Dragons.  We’ve had a steady number of students each week.  One student has been running horde of the dragon queen for a dedicated group, whereas I’ve been running an open table game for the students that are more infrequent.  The game has been a rollercoaster, and I’m getting madder and madder at D&D for being D&D hah (I’m so tired of it!  I was tired of it 4 years ago!).  But there have been some highlights.  The best one for example being when the deck of many things was introduced and two players both drew “the sun” which raised them to 9th level immediately.  It was an exciting time and everyone was high fiving, which is basically the best possible outcome in a D&D game.


UVG+TROIKA!

My group of online friends has been playing UVG with Troika! Characters.  I’m playing an “Ardent Giant of Corda”.  In my mind Corda = Anarres from “The Dispossessed” and my giant has a romantic, poetic, wistful bent to his actions.  It's been fun so far and really refreshing to be a player.  We haven’t quite made it out of the violet city yet, but we’ve been planning a large feast that should be commencing in our next session (some classic Troika! Stuff right there. The adventure our characters are having is hosting a dinner party).


Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha

Finally, I’m playing this game!  I answered an ad on the chaosium discord and found myself in a game!  And I’m playing a Duck!  It's been a learning curve but we’ve done 4 sessions so far and it's getting easier to feel the game out for its strengths.  It's giving me lots of ideas on what kind of game I’d like to run as GM, which is nice. I've really enjoyed reading and reading the gamebooks but there is just such a wealth of world that I've been really stuck on using it.  I listen a lot to the God Learners’ Podcast, and I tend to agree that the games’ rules are a bit too complex.  Actually playing has been giving me lots of ideas on ways I’d modify the game, but nothing that's been field tested.


Mothership: Ypsilon-14

Finally, at D&D club I said “y’all I’m tired of D&D can we play something else?”  They agreed and I whipped out Mothership, and ran the Haunting of Ypsilon-14 for them.  I gave them each 2 character sheets “for when your first character dies”, which got them visibly excited.  With almost no effort they created their characters and they all immediately had some great vibes.  This is the third time I’ve run Ypsilon-14, but the first time using the WIP 1e preview rules.  It went really well, and everyone had a good time.  2 characters died, but the survivors and replacement characters managed to kill the horror.  Only a few of the miners on the station (and the cat) survived.  They did find all the tapes, samples, and hidden caches, and they pieced together the timeline.  So their score was Survive: 50%, Solve: 100%, Save: “partial credit,”.  They agreed that going forward we should do D&D every other week and that in the intervening weeks we could play other TTRPGs, which is fantastic.


So my mind is starting to stack up lists and lists of games that I can run as one-shots, that will show them the breadth and depth of the hobby without being too overwhelming. I can also chip away at my shelf and get some games to the table that I've never played.

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