OVA fantasy group run at another convention
Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 6:50 pm
Good news for Clay.
Last weekend I game-mastered two more sessions at a con in the town of Dreieich, Germany (www.dreieichcon.de). The second session was for OVA, a fantasy adventure this time, one that I had to completely improvise.
It's amazing what you can do with only the rulebook, character sheets, pencils, dice, and the right people around you. While I couldn't find enough players to actually get a game session together at the last couple of cons I attended (in September), this time my game table was full. I got six players for OVA alone, two guys and four women, anime lovers and others among them, and the game really ROCKED this time. This was what a con SHOULD be like, and I so wanna go back next year. Everybody had a good time. I hardly saw people laugh so hard during a game in a long time.
The game I ran was a light-hearted medieval fantasy experiment in the style of The Slayers or even Sorcerer Hunters. It went really, really, really well. I mean I just loved it, and it was so great to see all my players happy.
The one problem we realized at some point in the game was with Time Freeze. I had told my players that they could pick and combine pretty much anything from the OVA rulebook that made sense in a fantasy world with magic, and one player-character just happened to have the Time Freeze ability at +5. I think I am probably going to disallow that in future games. A character with Time Freeze 5 can constantly interrupt the flow of the story, since they can stop *EVERYTHING* for six seconds, do that indefinitely in non-combat situations and not even pay a lot of Endurance for it.
You have to imagine that I, as the group's GM, was right in the middle of describing a frenetic action scene, describing every move and step that characters used to stop a thief from getting away, for example. Then the Time Freezer guy came in and said, "No, he never even made it to the door because I stopped time for six seconds before that and placed my staff under his feet, so he will stumble." It basically comes down to a situation where the GM wants to do something, and the player with Time Freeze can veto it. Either Time Freeze should be harder to do, with rock-hard limitations placed on it, or not allowed altogether.
Other than that, the session was wonderful. Several players basically begged me to continue the game at another con, and stay in touch with them through e-mail so they could update their character sheets and re-use those characters.
I'll try to post a detailed summary of our adventure later. Fantasy OVA-style made us very happy, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of my con players bought the rulebook and the fantasy book after that.
Last weekend I game-mastered two more sessions at a con in the town of Dreieich, Germany (www.dreieichcon.de). The second session was for OVA, a fantasy adventure this time, one that I had to completely improvise.
It's amazing what you can do with only the rulebook, character sheets, pencils, dice, and the right people around you. While I couldn't find enough players to actually get a game session together at the last couple of cons I attended (in September), this time my game table was full. I got six players for OVA alone, two guys and four women, anime lovers and others among them, and the game really ROCKED this time. This was what a con SHOULD be like, and I so wanna go back next year. Everybody had a good time. I hardly saw people laugh so hard during a game in a long time.
The game I ran was a light-hearted medieval fantasy experiment in the style of The Slayers or even Sorcerer Hunters. It went really, really, really well. I mean I just loved it, and it was so great to see all my players happy.
The one problem we realized at some point in the game was with Time Freeze. I had told my players that they could pick and combine pretty much anything from the OVA rulebook that made sense in a fantasy world with magic, and one player-character just happened to have the Time Freeze ability at +5. I think I am probably going to disallow that in future games. A character with Time Freeze 5 can constantly interrupt the flow of the story, since they can stop *EVERYTHING* for six seconds, do that indefinitely in non-combat situations and not even pay a lot of Endurance for it.
You have to imagine that I, as the group's GM, was right in the middle of describing a frenetic action scene, describing every move and step that characters used to stop a thief from getting away, for example. Then the Time Freezer guy came in and said, "No, he never even made it to the door because I stopped time for six seconds before that and placed my staff under his feet, so he will stumble." It basically comes down to a situation where the GM wants to do something, and the player with Time Freeze can veto it. Either Time Freeze should be harder to do, with rock-hard limitations placed on it, or not allowed altogether.
Other than that, the session was wonderful. Several players basically begged me to continue the game at another con, and stay in touch with them through e-mail so they could update their character sheets and re-use those characters.
I'll try to post a detailed summary of our adventure later. Fantasy OVA-style made us very happy, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of my con players bought the rulebook and the fantasy book after that.