A 22 session freeform is always going to be a big ask :P I assume that is a typo.
I didn't like the ending of Clockwork Heart - but I was struggling to find a better way to do it. Combat and large time critical action scenes suck - particularly when players start second guessing and changing their actions half way through. There needs to be a better way to do combat, but I haven't seen anyone manage it yet.
Doing action scenes is tricky and maintaining flow is almost impossible. At least in a person by person statement everyone gets a say, even if that is to run away. in the end all you can hope is that people have felt like they had an effect.
Second guessing is always going to be a problem with certain players and we just have to work with it.
To my mind the game lacked a bit of polish but given current situations it is not suprising. I would be interested in reworking it and running it again with a group.
The card system works with smaller groups, see comment below. But yeah, I sat down with Bear after the first session and talked about ways to improve it, but didn't come up with anything good. Worth having a further chat about it.
Re: inadequate Pico Vault character sheets. I'm pretty sure 90% of the character background was copy/pasted from the Doctor Who Encyclopedia. It was all around a game where no real work or development had been done beyond the initial concept.
I think that enough that I was running a series of freeform workshops last year. However, when life got in the way, one of three participants only ever turned up once, and the other two didn't bother to inform me when they couldn't make a scheduled meeting, I said, "Sod this, I've got too much going on to chase them," and left it at that. I'd be willing to do it again, but the type of games I write require huge amounts of work, so getting newbies to actually see through a series of workshops run by me... Well, I haven't found a means to convince anybody it is necessary until they try writing a game themselves and either fail to get it done or see it go down in a huge ball of flame.
(And on the odd occasion that a newbie runs a brilliant, near-perfect game first try, that writer isn't the one who needed a workshop.)
I did discuss the possibility of getting it going again with one of those potential writers. It might happen.
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I didn't like the ending of Clockwork Heart - but I was struggling to find a better way to do it. Combat and large time critical action scenes suck - particularly when players start second guessing and changing their actions half way through. There needs to be a better way to do combat, but I haven't seen anyone manage it yet.
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Second guessing is always going to be a problem with certain players and we just have to work with it.
To my mind the game lacked a bit of polish but given current situations it is not suprising. I would be interested in reworking it and running it again with a group.
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Is there a time when I can drop around a talk with you about some stuff? Do you need a bit of a break before considering things like this again?
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I think that enough that I was running a series of freeform workshops last year. However, when life got in the way, one of three participants only ever turned up once, and the other two didn't bother to inform me when they couldn't make a scheduled meeting, I said, "Sod this, I've got too much going on to chase them," and left it at that. I'd be willing to do it again, but the type of games I write require huge amounts of work, so getting newbies to actually see through a series of workshops run by me... Well, I haven't found a means to convince anybody it is necessary until they try writing a game themselves and either fail to get it done or see it go down in a huge ball of flame.
(And on the odd occasion that a newbie runs a brilliant, near-perfect game first try, that writer isn't the one who needed a workshop.)
I did discuss the possibility of getting it going again with one of those potential writers. It might happen.
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