Memoir - Part The Last (For Now)

[theron]

So, Hero Games was dying and, largely, I didn't care.  I had multiple editions of entire Champions product lines, more than I needed, and I was generally pretty burned out on the game.  But when one of my old crew invited me to try out a Silver Age setting he'd been working on, I decided to give it one last go.  The "Fair City" campaign turned out to be one of the highlights of my gaming life.  From the outset, the game had a number of things going for it.  First, all of the players were experienced hands at Champions.  We knew what worked, we knew what didn't, we knew why, and we knew how to get around those things.  There's a lot to be said for player knowledge at the table, and even if we were all a bit rusty, we had enough collective knowledge to get us through any situation.  Secondly, everyone at the table fell into the category of "Genre Fiend."  All of us were focused on making the game feel like a comic book series, and the lack of working at cross-purposes allowed us to sit back and enjoy things for what they were.  Finally, we decided to try something different:  we disposed of any required maximum on character build points.  There was no limit.  There was no expectation that Disadvantages would balance.  Instead, we built the characters we wanted from the outset, as powerful as we wanted.  And thanks to factor #2 up there, it worked.  We had everything from a 800+ point Wonder Woman/Supergirl clone, to a 400+ martial artist on the same team and it worked.

Fair City ran for over two years, generally in once a month sessions.  During that time, we never worried about experience points, and never got bogged down by the "best" way to simulate a particular power.  I ended up writing an article based on our experience that I sold to Digital Hero, Hero Games' online magazine.  It was my first professional sale and still the best single article I've ever written.

(Speaking of Hero, they found some white knights in the form of long-time writer Steve Long and a group of his cohorts.  They rescued it from Cybergames, ditched Fuzion, and put the Hero System 5th Edition rules out in a remarkably short period of time, and have kept up a steady stream of product ever since.  As I write this, the Sixth Edition rules are in production for a release in August.)

After the Fair City game wound down, I went through another long spell of gamer doldrums.  I tried running a Mutants and Masterminds game for a group consisting of about half of the Fair City players and half new people I'd met on the internet.  It went poorly, and I'll probably write about it at some point, but not now.  I threw together occasional one-shots for marginal gamer friends, played some at a local convention, and taught my son the basics of Marvel Super-Heroes, but I wasn't gaming regularly.

In 2006, things picked up again, when I was invited to join a long-running group at Rice University.  Composed mainly of local alumni, they'd had a few vacancies open up, and one of my friends in the group convinced them to offer me a chance to sit in.  While D&D wasn't my first (or even third) system of choice at the time, I decided I could stand to get out and throw some dice once a week.  It took me a bit of time to pick up on the rules (the group tends to play D&D in a very rules-rigorous and game-ist fashion, due to only playing for three hours a week), but after a short while, I managed to fit in well enough.  And I discovered that a steady game with a good group, even with a system and play style I'm not always crazy about, is good for this gamer's soul.

The core group are also the madmen behind Owlcon, Houston's premier gaming convention.  Which has gotten me involved in running some convention rounds for the past few years.  Which is its own brand of crazy fun, and worth an entry of its own at some point.

While D&D is still the go-to system for the group, we have branched out lately, playtesting a homebrew system, and a Hollow Earth Expedition mini-campaign I'm currently running.

So that's it.  Thirty-plus years, condensed significantly.  If you followed it this far, you have my thanks and congratulations.  From here on out, less memoir and more writing about games I'm playing or plotting or want to play is the plan.

Comments

[srhall79.livejournal.com]

Some of this stuff I've read in one form or another, but it's nice to see the gaps filled in.

I'll be looking forward to what comes next (and I'll be reminded that I've really fallen behind in my blogging- a dozen things I want to write on, and I end up doing none of it).