Geekfest 2.0

We made the second installment of our Bladerunner/Steel Beach type sci fi rpg session last Sunday.  This time around we had the two extra players we needed to supposedly make everything fit.

The story so far is that all communications from Io have been cut off.  I play a classic noire journalist type.  Some hyped up scientist dropped by my office with crazy tales of disappearances, conspiracy, and a trail of destruction following a certain bit of juicy data he’d gotten his hands on.  I set him up with a safe house and got him a connection that could launder his credit for a face transplant. 

Meanwhile, some famous architects are reported as having disappeared.  A tip leads me to tune into the police frequency and I find that a Vulture Squad (sorta like a S.W.A.T. team?) and their Men In Black cohorts are busting into a warehouse to find them.  I run into a competing journalist and try to get some more info but don’t come up with much.

The Game Master mostly had us one-on-one or in pairs this session.  I’ve got no idea what two of the players are doing, except I gleaned that one of them has a spaceship and a nifty robotic monkey for a “familiar.”  During interludes we all tried to impress each other with our esoteric mathematical knowledge.  Somehow we got onto talking about Gallois’s theorem and couldn’t get away from it until the end of the session when it was discovered that there was a third Firefly fan in the group.

At this point the game feels like a “stuck” adventure game.  I’m not sure where the story or action is… what clues to follow up on… or what I can actually do.  I can’t see through all the data to find the actual part of the game I can influence.  The first session was a planning bit mostly… and this one seemed to get our characters into position to meet.  But we haven’t all met yet and started the adventure, it seems….  I’m not sure why we couldn’t have all started on the same page, but maybe there’s a method to this madness.  The GM certainly seems engrossed in just about every minute detail of this whole story/world… maybe it’ll start to come together next time….

Industry Notes

Well, the RPG industry appears to have failed it’s saving throw versus girls and beer….  Meanwhile, all the other games subsist on the scraps from D&D’s table while the timing of the release D&D’s 4th edition could have a huge impact on everyone.

Interesting times!

Car Wars lives on in Steve Jackson’s GURPS.  The collision rules that were developed for Autodueling have been expanded and adapted in the Campaigns book just as the old Traveller rules for different atmospheres and gravities show up in there, too.  Most of original Car Wars archetypical handweapons have been resurrected as generic inate attacks in GURPS Powers– that’s much more user friendly than the monolithic equipment list that shows up in GURPS Characters. 

Of course, the original range modifiers that were borrowed from Car Wars are long gone… but GURPS still has one second combat rounds just like everybody’s favorite board game.  And even today, ideas that were pioneered in Car Wars still show up in GURPS.  The borderlined silly concepts of having multiple tire and power plant options each with their own percentage modifiers have in 4th edition GURPS become the way everything is handled: buy an advantage or disadvantage, and then layer on as many of the perks, quirks, limitations, modifiers, and enhancements as you like!

So, Car Wars lives on in a way and the ideas continue to be developed and adapted.  I think that was a major part of the appeal back in the day– it was just such a neat little package of ideas.  Problems that were solved during the rocky period of Car Wars’s rapid development in the eighties continue to be good solutions today– even in radically different gaming cultures.  Of course… these new games don’t fit into a nifty little plastic pocket box, but that’s another story….