RPG February 23

Read
I have mostly been reading Band of Blades as my daughter and a couple of her friends want me to run it this Saturday. I love the setting and premise, the idea of playing a whole mercenary company is fantastic, but I'm still not sure about the Blades system.

Play
Sentinel Comics continues sporadically. Still enjoying it when we get to play.

I played in a Mutant City Blues game on Tuesday. In MCB you play cops with superpowers investigating crimes by other supers. The investigation has been good, but I think the Gumshoe system is the system for people who don't want a system. Maybe my opinion will change when we play part 2 next week.

GM
I ran a one-shot fantasy adventure called the Sky Blind Spire at the local bookshop. It went really well. I was going to run it using Cairn but I couldn't be bothered converting the monsters so I used The Vanilla Game instead. It's not quite Into The Odd lite but it's close and it worked really well.

Read

• The One Ring 2e. It's a fairly complex game, complicated further by a slightly baffling book layout, but it all works in favour of that LotR-specific brand of noble, heroic, and possibly-doomed quest against terrible darkness. I've started to put together a one-shot to give it a go, but don't know when I'll get the chance to run it.
• Dragonbane. I late-pledged on this during the OGL controversy, because from the Quickstart it seemed like it would be relatively easy to port D&D players over to. Having now read most of the full (beta) rules, I suspect it might be a little trickier than I thought at first glance, but I like it a lot. I still think if I was going to try and port over mid-campaign, this would be the one.

Play

• Nothing, right at the moment; the one game I was just a player in ended a couple of weeks ago, and that group is taking a little break while the next GM winds up for an Avatar Legends campaign.

GM

• D&D 5e, as always; Curse of Strahd has about half a session left in it - they killed the Big Fella last week, so it's wrap-up time, then on to the bits of Rime of the Frostmaiden that I like.

Read

I got the still-in-layout book for Salvage Union through the Kickstarter but haven't had the tone to read through it yet – I'm mostly interested in mechanical changes from the beta release(s) so I can update my Foundry system.

Play

Nothing at the moment – my 5e GM has had to take a back seat for personal reasons, so the group is shifting over to…

Run

Scum & Villainy, which I held a Session 0
Zero for at the weekend. Looking forward to getting into the first job – trying to figure out whether to ruin then through the engagement roll or just drop them straight into trouble. Leaving towards the latter, though it does take some agency away from the crew right at the start, which I'm not certain about.

My Avatar Legends campaign is ongoing, but I feel like I need to do something to give the players a kick up the arse. They've been very reluctant to get into the actual conflict that's unfolding around them, so far, so I might have to kidnap somebody's (character's) dad or something.

I'm still getting my head around the Blades set up but my understanding is that you don't prep trouble for your players you let them get themselves into trouble. Which is to say, don't skip the engagement roll.

If they fail the roll, then you drop them in the shit just like you are thinking now.

The S&V book implies that the first mission should be a "drop them in it" intro thing, but for the sake of learning the rules I'm thinking it might be worth doing the engagement roll.

My Avatar Legends [players have] been very reluctant to get into the actual conflict that's unfolding around them, so far

I don't understand this. Why play an RPG is you're not going to engage with the conflict? What are they spending every session doing?

I played in a Mutant City Blues game on Tuesday. In MCB you play cops with superpowers investigating crimes by other supers.

I feel certain that you'll know about this already, but Moore's Top 10 comic run might provide some inspiration if you need it, if only because in Top 10 everyone is a 'science hero'.

I don't understand this. Why play an RPG is you're not going to engage with the conflict? What are they spending every session doing?

It's not that they're not getting involved, so much as they're just not picking sides. I just need to kick away some support structures that they rely on (and who've also been sitting on the sidelines) so that they're pushed into action.

A mean trick is to show that their inaction has made things worse. This is good though, because it maintains their agency.

Like in Star Wars my players decided that they were opportunistic freelancers so neither the Empire not the Rebellion were a good fit for them. So I was just going to give them lots of incidental jobs each of which they would notice, if they paid attention, benefitted the Empire in some way. If that wasn't enough to make them join the rebels the Empire would start to make use of them as reliable third parties and the rebels would before long consider them collaborators.

That's great.