A Few More HEX Thoughts
Jun. 10th, 2009 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theronLast night's session went well. I'll wrap things up in some form next week, and I'm not sure whether I'll return to the system at a later date or not. What I'm finding is that what's working for me in this game is only sort of connected to the game system. Granted, that's not a huge revelation. By my way of thinking, in any successful game, the synergy between GM and players and the adventure is far more important than the system. Ideally, the system should facilitate what the players want their characters to do and help the GM allow it to happen. Generally speaking, HEX's Ubiquity System stays nicely in the background, which is what I want it to do. But last night, as I tried to run things in a bit more of an over-the-top, cinematic fashion, I found myself discarding it completely. Now, I'm an experienced hand, and I'm not concerned about throwing away the system to give the players a good time, but in a playtest, this seems somewhat suboptimal.
There was another thing I noticed, something that makes me wonder if it's just my approach to the genre running up against a different set of play expectations. I ran an adventure I found on line "The River of Death," written by a couple of the more prominent posters on the HEX forums. While the plot and scenes were great, providing me with lots of coolness, the GM's notes contained a LOT of nit-picky mechanical stuff (which I duly discarded as unnecessary). Things like directions for playing out a chase that devolved into trying to accumulate more successes on die rolls than the opposition, when the whole thing could be carried out via narrative. Because, honestly, if the PCs lost the race at that stage of the adventure, there wouldn't be an adventure. There would have just been the PCs getting eaten by dinosaurs and/or ape-men. Which is, to me, the antithesis of a good pulp adventure.
The other thing I noticed was that the authors seemed to envision this adventure as being suitable for three game sessions, with suggested cliff-hanger breakpoints. For me, it lasted about two and a half hours, with everyone happy, and no one feeling slighted on the adventure. Even if I'd used all of those number-crunching guidelines, I don't think I could have gone more than four hours. So clearly, someone is playing the game differently than we are.
I do want to end this on a positive note, which requires a bit of explanation of the Tuesday Night group. With one exception (me), all are current or former Rice students. The core group has been gaming together since they were undergrads, over twenty years ago. The newer guys are current students or recent grads. The age range is from about 21 to 45 (I'm the old man). The old guard have played lots and lots and lots of games. The new guys are pretty much exclusively D&D and Star Wars d20 players. So, in many respects, HEX was a bit of a revelation for a few of them, a break from Class/Level gaming. Our youngest player was absolutely enchanted with the notion of spending XP to buy just the things that his character needed, rather than leveling up and then taking on a new list of items. Don't get me wrong, I like D&D (a lot more now than I did five years ago), but it's nice to expand their horizons a bit.
There was another thing I noticed, something that makes me wonder if it's just my approach to the genre running up against a different set of play expectations. I ran an adventure I found on line "The River of Death," written by a couple of the more prominent posters on the HEX forums. While the plot and scenes were great, providing me with lots of coolness, the GM's notes contained a LOT of nit-picky mechanical stuff (which I duly discarded as unnecessary). Things like directions for playing out a chase that devolved into trying to accumulate more successes on die rolls than the opposition, when the whole thing could be carried out via narrative. Because, honestly, if the PCs lost the race at that stage of the adventure, there wouldn't be an adventure. There would have just been the PCs getting eaten by dinosaurs and/or ape-men. Which is, to me, the antithesis of a good pulp adventure.
The other thing I noticed was that the authors seemed to envision this adventure as being suitable for three game sessions, with suggested cliff-hanger breakpoints. For me, it lasted about two and a half hours, with everyone happy, and no one feeling slighted on the adventure. Even if I'd used all of those number-crunching guidelines, I don't think I could have gone more than four hours. So clearly, someone is playing the game differently than we are.
I do want to end this on a positive note, which requires a bit of explanation of the Tuesday Night group. With one exception (me), all are current or former Rice students. The core group has been gaming together since they were undergrads, over twenty years ago. The newer guys are current students or recent grads. The age range is from about 21 to 45 (I'm the old man). The old guard have played lots and lots and lots of games. The new guys are pretty much exclusively D&D and Star Wars d20 players. So, in many respects, HEX was a bit of a revelation for a few of them, a break from Class/Level gaming. Our youngest player was absolutely enchanted with the notion of spending XP to buy just the things that his character needed, rather than leveling up and then taking on a new list of items. Don't get me wrong, I like D&D (a lot more now than I did five years ago), but it's nice to expand their horizons a bit.