NWARG Game Day

The Northwest Arkansas Roleplaying Gamers puts on a quarterly game day. It's sort of a one day mini-con where people throw out pitches for one-shot RPG sessions they'd like to run, and then if enough people express an interest they run them. From what I've seen on the boards there's usually only a couple of games being run, but the people who attend always seem to have a good time.

This past Saturday was the first time I was able to attend, and I am glad that I did. There were two games being run, one was "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!" (shown above) and the other was "3:16 - Carnage on Pandora." I don't know anything about the former other than the name and that it was being run by a guy I've gamed with a couple of times who is a fun guy to game with. I played in the second, which was a sequel to the recent movie Avatar in which we played part of a force sent back to Pandora to secure unobtanium, and teach those blue monkeys a lesson!

The game went quickly, but was a lot of fun. Lots of mindless mayhem which ended with our winning the day for the forces of capitalist imperialism in something close to a replay of the finale of the film, but with us grunts better prepared to deal with traitorous grenade wielding avatars than was the previous garrison.

Once again, a complete session of the game went by in about two hours. If you have limited time for roleplaying then 3:16 just might be the game to try given how quickly it plays. It's a straight up bug hunt at the beginning, but after a couple of plays I'm starting to see how it could develop into something a bit more interesting by the end of a campaign, with characters really starting to question just what it is they are doing.

If you want to participate in a future game day you can check out the NWARG forums.

Roleplaying Night - Round 1 - 3:16

We had our first RPG night tonight, and overall it went pretty well. Our first game was 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars. I picked this game because it was an extremely simple system requiring minimal GM preparation, and looked like a perfect way to get my feet wet after over a decade since running anything with more than a single player. It worked just about as well as I'd hoped.

There were a few things I'll do differently if we come back to it again. I should have planned out a couple more encounters so that they weren't quite so similar. I had come up with an initial encounter idea, and an idea of where I'd probably end it, but decided to leave it up to the players on how to get there. It worked, but probably would have worked better if I'd done a little more prep work so that the encounters felt a bit more varied.

The game itself ran very quickly, taking only about two hours. I'm reasonably sure that at least three of my four players enjoyed the session. The fourth claimed he did, but I don't know him well enough to tell whether or not he was just humoring me. I still think the game was an overall success based on the reactions of the other players. I definitely recommend it to anyone interested in running a simple game focusing on a straight up bug hunt in the style of the movie version of Starship Troopers.

I'm now looking forward to giving Dogs In The Vineyard a try, hopefully in two weeks.