Game Findings: Mage (First Level)

The gang got together to make characters for the new Mage campaign starting up. We've not played yet, but we've got our group together. There was a lot of confusion and vagarity in discussing magick, which is to be expected when you've got a bunch of folks who have never played the game before. It's not mechanically difficult, but the broad philosophy of designing your own paradigm of reality is something of a mind bender when you try it the first time.

Sans actual play though, I'm not going to discuss any of that. Instead, I'm going to focus on the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on, even if they didn't use my exact words: first level sucks.

Game Findings: Bad Attitudes

These are sad times for our gaming group. We're losing a core member to corporate relocation, and while we're all glad for him that he gets to move to a city he's always dreamed of living in and gets his moving costs covered, the table will just not be the same without him.

The show will go on, and the next campaign is already in the planning stages (run by someone else other than yours truly; I needed a little time off to deal with other things), but we collectively decided that it would be best not to start until our departing member actually finished packing and left the state. So in the meantime, I've been running some lighthearted, simple stuff. Extreme Vengeance, which I talked about earlier, was one of these forays. Last game, we tested out a different action movie system: Bad Attitudes.

What We Play

As you may have guessed from all the writing I do about the games I've run and the games I seek to create, I'm ever on the quest for a better game experience for myself and my players. Now my players are a lot that are largely happy to show up and game, but I'm the sort who sees the "just show up and play" as settling for mediocrity. I want to run the kind of game that has people thinking about it in the time between sessions, that has them showing up early and rearing to go, that truly captivates them. This isn't an ego thing. I'm convinced that when you've got a player base that invested in the game, you're going to get better play, and from that you get a better game experience for everyone.