What Comes Around…

The June post was supposed to be about the classic 1984 Marvel Super Heroes RPG from TSR.

Only this isn’t June, and this post isn’t about Marvel Super Heroes.

See, I’m several weeks late in writing about games, because I’ve been too busy playing. Normally I’ll host a game night and run a one shot scenario of whatever game I want to write about next. I’ll dust off the old rulebook, reread the system, write a short
scenario and make some characters, and that was going to happen in early June.
Only it didn’t.

Several months ago I was invited to join a regular weekly gaming group. This group has been together for years, some of them have been playing together since the 90’s,and they’d been meeting every Monday night at the current location for almost a decade with a rotating lineup of friends coming and going from year to year with a peak of 13 players and the group divided into two games in separate rooms, to the current lineup of 7 players. Of this group right now, only 2 had been, like me, playing since childhood in the early 80’s. The rest ranged in experience from starting in the 90’s as 20 somethings with 3rd edition to guys who’d only been around for a couple years and only played pathfinder.
So naturally, I proposed to run Basic D&D and the Keep on the Borderlands.

The newer players were confused by the lack of rules, noting the massive difference from Pathfinder. But what it lacked in detailed game mechanics, we made up for in role playing. This mini campaign was some of the most entertaining times spent in Caves of Chaos since 1984.
As kids we weren’t playing this module for anything other than to clear out the caves and pile up the loot. But as adults, the expectations of story and detail are much higher than this classic module could offer, so modifications and improvisation created a detailed plot and tangled inter party drama that eventually led to a player vs player brawl that left two characters dead and the rest wanting only to flee the caves and retire back to the comforts of the village and live off the loot gathered at that point.

And so we’ve wrapped that portion and are about to embark on something new for all of us, 5th edition. As a matter of fact we’re even adding another player (one with ZERO experience BTW), bringing the new total to 8 players and me the DM. So we’ll have every combination of player experience going into this new game, players who’ve played almost every rpg ever made, to a brand new guy who’s never rolled a D20.
We’re running the new starter set box next week, comparing the original boxed set to the newest version. Hopefully with all of this playing I’ll be able to find the time to write about playing sometime soon. I might even get around to running that Marvel Super Heroes Game.