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May. 27th, 2009 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theronLast night was my first attempt at GMing Hollow Earth Expedition, from Exile Game Studio. It's a game I've owned for a while and wanted to run, and a break in our usual Tuesday night D&D campaign is affording me the opportunity to run a short arc for the crew.
A few observations on the game. First off, I'm very impressed with how quick character creation is. I largely went with character write-ups out of the book, but for one player request, I made one from scratch. To my surprise, it took little longer than transcribing the existing characters onto the fillable character sheets. Second, the special Ubiquity Dice I picked up for five bucks a tube more than paid for themselves. Third, the "Taking The Average" rule is a thing of beauty. I ran the latter half of the game with just one die for the occasional odd roll, and it went beautifully. On the other hand, I'm not entirely happy with the GM's Screen. I was initially impressed with its heft and look, but the tables reproduced are a somewhat eclectic mess, and there's a significant amount of space taken up by a logo and product indicia that I covered with some much more useful tables.
I do see some things that will need to be addressed upon further play. I'm adopting a house rule that requires me to actually roll (rather than take the average) on high-defense opponents, to give low attack characters a theoretical chance of hitting, without having to constantly resort to style points.
The called shot rules work fine, once you wrap your brain around them, but they caused more than their share of cognitive dissonance, and I'm probably going to write up an explanation to refer to in future sessions, until we get the hang of it.
Additionally, as I have the only copy of the game, I need to provide more clear-cut guidelines on which skills and talents serve which particular purpose.
But overall, the game went well. The Hollow Earth was discovered. Dinosaurs were fought. An outpost of Spanish Conquistadors encountered under friendly terms. And when we last leave our heroes, Dr. Archie Quick was being threatened by a plesiosaur.
Not bad for a first run.
A few observations on the game. First off, I'm very impressed with how quick character creation is. I largely went with character write-ups out of the book, but for one player request, I made one from scratch. To my surprise, it took little longer than transcribing the existing characters onto the fillable character sheets. Second, the special Ubiquity Dice I picked up for five bucks a tube more than paid for themselves. Third, the "Taking The Average" rule is a thing of beauty. I ran the latter half of the game with just one die for the occasional odd roll, and it went beautifully. On the other hand, I'm not entirely happy with the GM's Screen. I was initially impressed with its heft and look, but the tables reproduced are a somewhat eclectic mess, and there's a significant amount of space taken up by a logo and product indicia that I covered with some much more useful tables.
I do see some things that will need to be addressed upon further play. I'm adopting a house rule that requires me to actually roll (rather than take the average) on high-defense opponents, to give low attack characters a theoretical chance of hitting, without having to constantly resort to style points.
The called shot rules work fine, once you wrap your brain around them, but they caused more than their share of cognitive dissonance, and I'm probably going to write up an explanation to refer to in future sessions, until we get the hang of it.
Additionally, as I have the only copy of the game, I need to provide more clear-cut guidelines on which skills and talents serve which particular purpose.
But overall, the game went well. The Hollow Earth was discovered. Dinosaurs were fought. An outpost of Spanish Conquistadors encountered under friendly terms. And when we last leave our heroes, Dr. Archie Quick was being threatened by a plesiosaur.
Not bad for a first run.