Mutants & Masterminds - or, Gaming at the End of the World, Part 2
So Saturday morning came. And of the seven people who'd either won seats at my table or agreed to sit in ... two showed up.
This was not going to work. Now, as it turns out, that was sort of okay, because I was able to scrounge around and find some terrific players to join the game. (Some other people had won seats at a session where it was the Game Master who hadn't shown up.) Now, even so, it was far from ideal; they didn't get to play in the game they really wanted, and some people who would have liked to play in my game, but didn't make the lottery cut, didn't know to show up. Also, starting 45 minutes late was one of the things that kept us from finishing the adventure.
In particular, I had a guy playing the seasoned Pathfinder who walked in cold. He did as good a job as he could, but he didn't quite understand that the character wasn't quite a PC, and he decided to play him as an obnoxious twit. Which, again, worked out all right. When it was revealed that a character might be the Pathfinder, or might be the fiendish shapeshifter, all the other characters just loosed their attacks on him. "Either way, it's a good idea."
Scuttlebutt around the convention suggested that this problem --player no-shows-- was rampant. Two GMs just kind of gave up when their players didn't show, and two others managed to scramble to find fresh players.
PaizoCon uses a lottery system to determine who gets a seat at those kinds of events. The lottery procedure places an undue value on winning table spots. People win their third and fourth choices, which they're sort of ambivalent about attending, but don't want to just release them without some compensation. There's no price to pay for requesting a seat, and no penalty at all for failing to show up.
It would be nice for Paizo to emphasize that it's not cool to win a seat at a gaming table and then just not show up. It keeps other interested parties from playing games according to their interests.
--+--+--
Now, back home in Iowa City, I'm part of a little group of gamers who take turns running what adventures we please. Nigel is running a superheroes campaign using the (twisty little passage called) d20 Aberrant, Brian just got finished with a 7th Sea adventure, and Dan is running a straight D&D 3.5 campaign.
And I decided I liked Mutants & Masterminds / Warriors & Warlocks so much that I'd use that system. After a little bit of negotiation, we decided to set the campaign in a post-apocalyptic world. Kind of like Gamma World or something. And I thought that "opening a portal to a hellish Chaos dimension" would be a nice way to blow up the world, and, to make matters worse, the portals are still open, and one of the effects is that they jam the use of semiconductors: any technology based on transistors just Does Not Work. Which is to say, a lot of late 20th / 21st Century tech is just so much complicated junk.
So, I started looking through Gamma World, an old grognard of a post-apocalyptic game, and I realized that every single one of the adventures , from Iron Legion to the Alpha Beta Gamma Delta series, every single adventure had, at its core, "explore a forgotten outpost of the Ancients", of the pre-apocalypse society. There's all these mutated animals and secret societies, and all sorts of options for adventure set in and among the surviving milieu, but no, every published adventure has to do with fighting long-addled robots and confused computer systems in order to get blaster pistols or miracle cures to mysterious illnesses or the encrypted sequence that will unlock the electronic library of forgotten lore.
We didn't want to play that storyline. Which is why all the tech is locked down in my campaign world. Instead, we're more or less playing Thundarr.
This was not going to work. Now, as it turns out, that was sort of okay, because I was able to scrounge around and find some terrific players to join the game. (Some other people had won seats at a session where it was the Game Master who hadn't shown up.) Now, even so, it was far from ideal; they didn't get to play in the game they really wanted, and some people who would have liked to play in my game, but didn't make the lottery cut, didn't know to show up. Also, starting 45 minutes late was one of the things that kept us from finishing the adventure.
In particular, I had a guy playing the seasoned Pathfinder who walked in cold. He did as good a job as he could, but he didn't quite understand that the character wasn't quite a PC, and he decided to play him as an obnoxious twit. Which, again, worked out all right. When it was revealed that a character might be the Pathfinder, or might be the fiendish shapeshifter, all the other characters just loosed their attacks on him. "Either way, it's a good idea."
Scuttlebutt around the convention suggested that this problem --player no-shows-- was rampant. Two GMs just kind of gave up when their players didn't show, and two others managed to scramble to find fresh players.
PaizoCon uses a lottery system to determine who gets a seat at those kinds of events. The lottery procedure places an undue value on winning table spots. People win their third and fourth choices, which they're sort of ambivalent about attending, but don't want to just release them without some compensation. There's no price to pay for requesting a seat, and no penalty at all for failing to show up.
It would be nice for Paizo to emphasize that it's not cool to win a seat at a gaming table and then just not show up. It keeps other interested parties from playing games according to their interests.
--+--+--
Now, back home in Iowa City, I'm part of a little group of gamers who take turns running what adventures we please. Nigel is running a superheroes campaign using the (twisty little passage called) d20 Aberrant, Brian just got finished with a 7th Sea adventure, and Dan is running a straight D&D 3.5 campaign.
And I decided I liked Mutants & Masterminds / Warriors & Warlocks so much that I'd use that system. After a little bit of negotiation, we decided to set the campaign in a post-apocalyptic world. Kind of like Gamma World or something. And I thought that "opening a portal to a hellish Chaos dimension" would be a nice way to blow up the world, and, to make matters worse, the portals are still open, and one of the effects is that they jam the use of semiconductors: any technology based on transistors just Does Not Work. Which is to say, a lot of late 20th / 21st Century tech is just so much complicated junk.
So, I started looking through Gamma World, an old grognard of a post-apocalyptic game, and I realized that every single one of the adventures , from Iron Legion to the Alpha Beta Gamma Delta series, every single adventure had, at its core, "explore a forgotten outpost of the Ancients", of the pre-apocalypse society. There's all these mutated animals and secret societies, and all sorts of options for adventure set in and among the surviving milieu, but no, every published adventure has to do with fighting long-addled robots and confused computer systems in order to get blaster pistols or miracle cures to mysterious illnesses or the encrypted sequence that will unlock the electronic library of forgotten lore.
We didn't want to play that storyline. Which is why all the tech is locked down in my campaign world. Instead, we're more or less playing Thundarr.
Click to view