Actual Play

I just played my first game of role-playing over the internet today. I’ve played IRC-based role-playing games before, but these have centered on the text; this time we used mainly voice chat. I shouldn’t be surprised in this age of technology, but I am: it was easy. We wanted to use voice chat for communication and chose Teamspeak, mostly because all of us had experience with it. Apart from some hardware problems, voice chat worked like a charm. Video chat would probably have been even better, but voice chat seems easily sufficient. ...

Reservoir Hounds was a success, at least with some criteria (and some post-game lie). The game ran for less than an hour, but that wasn’t surprising as I was quite sure we wouldn’t hit the two-hour time limit we had. The concept of the game was simple: Reservoir Dogs turned into jeepform (if you haven’t seen it: a bunch of gangsters arguing why a robbery went bad, and who’s to blame). We had some simple mechanics for determining when the game ended, and a rule about determining what had happened during the actual robbery part. Basically anything that the players said had happened during the robbery had happened, unless someone disagreed. The rule was: anything the players say is true is true - unless they are lying. There was no objective truth, as everything was up to debate. ...

Yesterday we drove some nine hours to deliver stuff. Surprisingly it wasn’t few hours of talking and then endless hours of being bored. We got company and one of us promised that he would run a game for us while we were driving. I was a bit sceptical about it, but I also knew that they had done it once before. We created characters (took us almost four hours) and then played. The game master didn’t drive; the rest of us took turns. The game was Shadowrun, which is relatively rules-heavy, and very dependent on dice. (Dice in a car, brilliant.) It didn’t slow us down significantly. ...

I started a game of The Mountain Witch yesterday. I like this game particularly for being so easy to pick up and start with a moments notice. This actually describes the situation I was in very well: only a few hours before our scheduled gaming time somebody reminded me that I own the game, and they would like to play it. An hour before the game I searched for all my game apparels and read through the game quickly, reminding myself what this game was all about. ...

Last Sunday we played the third game in my series of political games. ‘Political’ does not here mean that they included political action by the characters, but that they had in them political situations reflected from history. Basically, I took historical situations and placed them in a hypothetical future realized in a dystopian cyberpunk-setting. The first two games were about Vietnam 2.0. In these games Vietnam was devastated by war and still collecting itself after Chinese occupation. The UN was trying to keep peace in a situation where part of the country was in Chinese and part in Vietnamese rebel control. We watched parts of Full Metal Jacket and Rambo to get to mood for a sweaty journey through a hostile jungle. The characters in the first game were independent contractors trying to rescue American construction workers that had been in Vietnam to aid in its reconstruction. The construction workers had been captured for ransom by Vietnamese rebels, led - ironically - by an ex-Chinese general. The company they worked for decided that the ransom was not worth it, so workers’ families collected enough money to hire some mercenaries. The game ended with a lot of dead rebels, a wounded general and rescued construction workers. ...

We were sitting in sauna and it was getting late when we decided that it would be a perfect opportunity to play a short game of role-play. Few hours of time, and no idea of what to play. One of us had an idea that we decided to test out: each participating player would decide one element of the game, oblivious of the ideas other players would add. I would then mix them together to form a game. ...