Origins: A Great Event Showed Me What Was Wrong With My Game
I attended the Origins games convention for the first time last week. My overall impression is that Origins is a great convention and I had a great time while I was there. The city of Columbus Ohio (it was the first time that I was in the city as well) was easy to get around, has a great convention center, and some very friendly people. If you have never attended the Origins convention I will endorse it as an excellent gaming convention to attend.
While there I met up with John Arcadian and his crew from Silvervine games, and a fellow gnome at Gnome Stew where I contribute, and he introduced me to the crew from The Impossible Dream who produce the RPG Dread which is an awesome horror game that uses a Jenga tower as the central mechanic for conflict resolution. I do not have a crew, so I just introduced them to me and my non-crew buddy Jason. 🙂
Guess what happened after 21 hours of no sleep, a 9 hour drive, and 11 hours of convention hi-jinks that had left me utterly exhausted? I was asked to run, and agreed to run, a completely improvised Fudge game!
Since I have been busily working on my zombie apocalypse adventure for the One Month Fudge Adventure Challenge I went with that only I changed the setting to that of the convention instead of an abandoned home. I learned two things about my game because of this event.
- My damage/health system does not work. It does not work at all. That is fine though, because it inspired me to try a slightly different approach that I believe will yield better results while still accomplishing what I would like to see happen in the game.
- I have no need for attributes in my game. None what-so-ever.
How did the game go? It went so-and-so in a purely mechanics driven and rules sort-of-way. The game was an utter super success though from a role playing and storytelling angle and I loved it! More importantly, those who played in the game had a great time too! In fact, one of the players asked me to run another game the very next day. That did not happen, but that was because we just had so much to do at the convention. I was planning on running a Fudge game where the player characters were the zombies because of that request though, and I think I’ll have that ready for when I attend Gen Con where I hope to meet up with even more gamers from around the country (and the world).
It was a great time for me at Origins this year, and it also helped me improve my Fudge game! What can be better than that? Having a crew I guess. 😉
Did you attend Origins this year? Played in any good Fudge games lately? If so, leave a comment below and let us know about it.
I ran my “stranded in deep space” Fudge game at MidSouthCon last April (March? whenever it was). It went quite well. There was basically no combat at all in the game, and it was mostly about character interaction, although there was a fair amount of rolling Fudge dice to resolve various actions. I intend to get the thing written up for the one month adventure challenge.
rknop – Welcome to my blog, and thanks for commenting!
Combat games can be fun, but sometimes the best games are completely combat free. I’m trying to revise my system to move towards a non-combat centric approach myself.
I look forward to reading your adventure when it is made available for the challenge!
Pure Skill-based games are great! You’ll still need one attribute though: Health/Life/Damage Capacity/HitPoints, to check if your character is still alive or dead. 😉
On the other hand, pure Attribute-based game (with only a few Skills) are more exciting, in a terrifying way! You get that “Old School” feeling. Live by your brawn or wits alone! Yikes!
Looking forward to seeing both your adventures, SinisterForces and rknop! 🙂