Troll Lord Games

It's no use fighting it. I just don't see things the way I used to. I don't know when it began but there has been a gradual shift in how I see gaming. I don't even call these types of games RPG's any more. I refer to them as Adventure Games since I feel the role-playing part is a misnomer.

I'm more about the game aspect. Mechanics, systems and such than I am the story-telling aspect. I play a game with some story elements involved, have begun using mechanics for social interaction and just lightly touching the so-called 'role-play' aspect. And I am happier with this. C&C handles this type of play as well as it does others but I just have lost interest in playing any other way.

Sure, fluff and setting has it's place and are fine but I am more interested in the hard aspects of the game more than I am the soft aspects. Maybe it's age, maybe my new job has influenced this shift since I work more with hard concepts and design than I used to.

I just never saw this coming.
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The Lord of Ravens
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Nothing wrong at all with a shift in tastes and desires in your gaming wants... hell, someone can love pizza and just get so burned out on it during college that they would rather have a good steak and potato for a long while after.

Seriously, doesn't sound neccesarily like a bad thing, just a perspective that's different for you at the present time.

Just keep having fun, that's all that matters!

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John "Sir Seskis" Wright

Ilshara: Lands of Exile:
http://johnwright281.tripod.com/

High Squire of the C&C Society
www.cncsociety.org

I doubt its a true change rather than realizing what you have really been doing all along.

The mechanics are at the heart of every game session. Everything revolves around those rolls and what the rules say you can and cannot do. CK's may try to ad more role play to cover up the mechanics, and that can be good, very good, but most players don't really get into "roll play", they are more into the results of the mechanics. IE did they hit? Did they kill it? What treasure did you roll up?

So games are more about mechanics with a veneer of role play laid over them. Some game groups go for a very thick veneer.

As to using rolls to determine role play outcomes, I do it to, depending. Usually the player will give some kind of indication as to how their PC approached some kind of negotiation, I will then decide to either roll, or it works.

Even if its a true change for you, good. Its good to know where your coming from as a gamer and as the CK. Helps you play or run a game to your strengths.

I wish I was more of a "role play" CK, and player. I know I can be, but I just don't have the creative energy to do it, at least not as the CK. I wish I was a CK who is good with voices and good with taking on and casting off various personae, but I am not.

I am a mechanics CK who does his best to put a story around those mechanics, and I believe I do a fairly good job. Its all we can do, right?
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The Ruby Lord, Earl of the Society

Next Con I am attending: http://www.neoncon.com/

My House Rules: http://www.freeyabb.com/phpbb/viewtopic ... llordgames

I think such shifts are fairly common. In the end, RPG's are about giving us entertainment whether it be through the storytelling or the number crunching.

Thats the one good thing about gaming, we can shift as needed.

At the heart of it all, everyone is a rule junkie. They have to be. You need to know what you do not like, to know what you do like, and what you will allow, compared to what you will not - those are all rules. They might, superficially, feel like something else, but even a game based entirely on roleplaying fluff has rules... someone makes the decisions on the outcome.

So, welcome to the obvious.

.
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John Adams

Treebore wrote:
I wish I was a CK who is good with voices and good with taking on and casting off various personae, but I am not.

I don't know if you could say I'm good at it, but I'm one of those CK's who does the voices, makes weird faces, gimps around the table and lets out growls, shrieks and screams as needed.

Some sessions leave me hoarse.

DangerDwarf wrote:
I don't know if you could say I'm good at it, but I'm one of those CK's who does the voices, makes weird faces, gimps around the table and lets out growls, shrieks and screams as needed.

Some sessions leave me hoarse.

Heh. Me too. My brother is a working actor, and I've never had any desire to be one myself, but when it's game time as the GM, something jut comes over me -- the spirit of storytelling fun, I guess.

That said, DD, I wonder -- have you ever noticed that when you have an off-night and decide not to do "the full Shakespeare", so to speak, that your players get disappointed? We spoil them, I fear!
As to the original post, I agree with the majority of posters -- so long as fun is had, it's all good. C&C, in particular, is a game system which can adapt to various playstyle shifts, and shifting between styles as well.

Just have fun, pal!

TheNewGuy
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"But if your hand touches metal, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet, I will end you"

Julian Grimm wrote:
It's no use fighting it. I just don't see things the way I used to. I don't know when it began but there has been a gradual shift in how I see gaming. I don't even call these types of games RPG's any more. I refer to them as Adventure Games since I feel the role-playing part is a misnomer.

I'm more about the game aspect. Mechanics, systems and such than I am the story-telling aspect. I play a game with some story elements involved, have begun using mechanics for social interaction and just lightly touching the so-called 'role-play' aspect. And I am happier with this. C&C handles this type of play as well as it does others but I just have lost interest in playing any other way.

Sure, fluff and setting has it's place and are fine but I am more interested in the hard aspects of the game more than I am the soft aspects. Maybe it's age, maybe my new job has influenced this shift since I work more with hard concepts and design than I used to.

I just never saw this coming.

I have recently come to almost exactly the same realization myself!

I too pondered about this issue recently, but I felt quite the opposite. I want rules, but they must not be such to cover all the possible aspects, and they should be easy to recall and rationalise. I also want a game which is easily customisable, yet not "heavy". Quite conflicting desiderata. When I play I want rules, and I want the game to feel as a game, but I also want to be able to put a "layer" of roleplaying, and to do this, the rules must be "light".

D&D3.x would be ideal in the above respects, if it were not for obsession with ruling on everything, and on the implementation of the fexibility aspect.

Until now, Warhammer Fantasy RPG 2e is my favorite game in this respect; it offers a perfect blend of rules and flexibility, without being overwhelming.

I wish C&C was the same, but to me now it stands into a middle ground in which it has not all the rules, nor the customisation, I want; on the other hand, its core is light and I LOVE it. But I do not have as much time as before to tweak things to my leisure. If only the CKG was out...

This is what interested me into 4e, which promises to be flexible and complete, yet not overwhelming. I do not mind crunch, if it is easily manageable and it lends flexibility to the game.

rabindranath72 wrote:
I wish C&C was the same, but to me now it stands into a middle ground in which it has not all the rules, nor the customisation, I want; on the other hand, its core is light and I LOVE it. But I do not have as much time as before to tweak things to my leisure.

Several months back, our group came to the same conclusion. It was then that we migrated back to 2nd edition being our primary game while we started looking at other systems.

We only recently picked up WFRP, which seems to fit us extremely well in both rules and fluff. Now, our little foray into4e seems to have captured what the players are looking for pretty well too.

TheNewGuy wrote:
That said, DD, I wonder -- have you ever noticed that when you have an off-night and decide not to do "the full Shakespeare", so to speak, that your players get disappointed? We spoil them, I fear!

Yeah, they seem to expect the full treatment every session now. damn their sense of entitlement in expecting to see me make a fool of myself.

DangerDwarf wrote:
Yeah, they seem to expect the full treatment every session now. damn their sense of entitlement in expecting to see me make a fool of myself.

My players are like that about props and minis.

I paint minis and build terrain/scenery for fun. Several times I have spied the perfect figure for a given PC and just painted it up because I felt like it. Now, the players say "Hey! Are we getting new minis for this campaign?" To be fair, the minis stay with me, and more than once a player has bought a fig and even paid me to paint it (a token fee of $5-10). Also, they are at least half-joking. Still, the really do expect me to have somewhere in my inventory a figure just like what they want to play. I probably have several hundred painted pewter and plastic figs (NTM at least as many waiting their turn for painting), plus a couple hundred WOTC pre-painteds. I tell them "Take a look on the shelves. You like it, you can use it. You break it or mess it up, you bought it. Painted figs start at $25."
The scenery is less of an issue, but it happens. I'll put out some rocks and trees for wilderness encounters, but I don't have entire fortresses or towns or enough Hirst Arts dungeon corridors to map out the ENTIRE crawl, etc. (I wish I did, but time and storage space is limited).

Back on the original topic, I like the RP and fluff, which is why I like a lighter rules system. That said, I dislike it when a rule exists and it is inconsistent or arbitrary. C&C works well for me, but I have -like many folks- house ruled a lot of things (weapons & armor, character feats, etc.). I like a game where if there isn't a rule already in place, it's easy to adjudicate on the fly and have it make sense in relation to the other rules. SIEGE is a great choice for that. I also have some power gamers in my group that min-max everything so I like it when some stuff is left abstract. That way, there isn't the "one true build" that is statistically optimized. Players can make choices about things like weapons and armor based on their characters, not stats.



WFRP 2e is an AWESOME game and I love running or playing it. The only "drawback" (if you could call it that) is that the system as written is very tightly tied to the Old World setting. You can take the basic mechanics and use it elsewhere, but a lot of the careers, spells, and creatures are very "Old World" IMO. We recently wrapped up a Marienburg-based game that ran for a year or so. It was great. But at that point, I was ready to take a break from "Grim & Perilous" and do something more heroic.

Don't worry about it, Julian--if you're happy with the new style and your players are happy with it too, then it's a no-brainer! I personally enjoy the "role-playing" over the mechanics, but I've heard that's just because I'm a girl... (seriously, I've played with some female players who were all about the hack-n-slash) My cousin Leslie (despite the spelling, she's a girl not a guy), whom I subjected to D&D/AD&D when I first bought the game back in 81-ish, married a gamer; he runs the games heavier on the mechanics than the role-play himself, but he tries to keep the "feel" by using exterior props for the players. They play on a a heavy wooden table and drink from tankard-style glasses like they're in a tavern. Everyone has a good time. And in the end, that's all that matters!
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Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.

DangerDwarf wrote:
Several months back, our group came to the same conclusion. It was then that we migrated back to 2nd edition being our primary game while we started looking at other systems.

We only recently picked up WFRP, which seems to fit us extremely well in both rules and fluff. Now, our little foray into4e seems to have captured what the players are looking for pretty well too.

I'm looking at 4e for the same reasons. Not that I am dropping C&C anytime soon but I may be picking up Keep On the Shadowfell to see what I think.
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The Lord of Ravens
My blog

I honestly don't think my gaming has ever really changed. I've always preferred rule-light game systems for playing, with the exception of Classic Traveller (as I am a bit of a gearhead). Rule-heavy game systems have a purpose though: to steal stuff from for the rule-light games. Rule-light games are still out there, but are becoming increasingly uncommon as the gamers become accustomed to having the rules dictate the action instead of a game master.

I've always been into game mechanics. Indeed, I believe to understand any game you have to understand the underlying mechanics and how they work. Dungeons & Dragons, up to 2d Edition, had many disparate mechanics which made learning the game somewhat difficult, but not impossible. Roll high on this chart, roll low on this one. Use a d% here, use a d20 there. Original D&D turned out to be a bit of a mess, but despite the mess, it worked, and worked well. I understood the game by understanding the mechanics.

Then I saw RuneQuest. It had one major mechanic, and that mechanic determined everything. But, the system was very different because it didn't have defined archetypes like D&D. In spite of this, it worked, and worked well. So well in fact that multiple games sprung up from the basic framework which was detailed in sixteen pages. The game was insanely easy to understand.

Castles & Crusades blends the two above together, taking out the eccentricities of the D&D rules and leaving the archetypes, while keeping the one major mechanic paradigm of RuneQuest. The best of both worlds, and perfectly suitable for the type of playing I do. Though, I do have major elements of a RuneQuest translation of the d20 rules ready for use (you can create characters and do have a few critters to fight, but no magic items). I should get back to that.
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My small homage to E.G.G.

My wife and I have been discussing this and we came to an understanding on this. She likes playing, I like playing with the system. It's a thing that has to do with the fact I like tweaking things and that my job is about playing with numbers and getting the best possible effect. (Or most spectacular machine crash in some cases. )

She also said something that floored me. I hope you are all setting down. and I quote:

[quote=Mrs. Grimm]

We didn't get to dig into third edition enough to know how it really works for us. We did what? A few months of gaming at mid levels and no feel for early or later ones. I think we need to go back and look it over.[/quote]

So for this weekend we jump into 3e. Not 3.5, 3e pre-revision we're deciding how we want to play which is a hybrid SIEGE/D20 of some sort. We'll see what happens I guess.
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The Lord of Ravens
My blog

Makes sense to me! I wouldn't have the house rules I do if it didn't!
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The Ruby Lord, Earl of the Society

Next Con I am attending: http://www.neoncon.com/

My House Rules: http://www.freeyabb.com/phpbb/viewtopic ... llordgames

So, I have spent the past few hours digging through my books and came to a couple conclusions 1) This is doable, Especially using just 3e. The revision did alot of things to mess up the system. As well I'm sticking to mostly core, the orginal class splats and some FR stuff. 2) This may be a good break venture. See where I really stand and what works and what don't. I am actually looking forward to this.

Finally if anyone has a copy of the original Mad Irishman 3e spell sheet Please let me know. I have lost mine and I don't like the revised version of the sheet he has up now.
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The Lord of Ravens
My blog

Julian Grimm wrote:
So for this weekend we jump into 3e. Not 3.5, 3e pre-revision we're deciding how we want to play which is a hybrid SIEGE/D20 of some sort. We'll see what happens I guess.

Thumbs up! 3.0 (just core) is a workable system. Not many feats, less focus on minis-based combat (in fact, I did not use minis at all). Let us know how it goes!

For my recent d20 Conan games, I did a consolidated skill list, based on what I saw of 4e, Pathfinder, and one or two ideas from C&C secondary skills. It takes the Conan skills (which are 3.5 I believe), however you can use it for 3.0.

Actually, it might work for C&C, too...

You might find it useful:

[quote]Code:

I started a thread on the D20 experiment Here.

I would like this to continue on the path of gaming philosophies changing with time and experience.
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The Lord of Ravens
My blog