I would love to play Blades in the Dark some time. You play as a group of criminals and ruffians in a basically fantasy-Victorian setting. During the setup to a heist, you decide (among other things) how much equipment you have…but not what it is. The game eliminates much of the planning by assuming you’ve already done it. When you encounter a problem during a heist, let’s say a guard, you’ve already taken care of it…but you need to play out how it happened (bribery, blackmail, threats, whatever) in a flashback.
Basically, think about playing out Ocean’s 11 or Mission: Impossible, but as a sociopathic Cutter with so very, very many knives.
Everyone Is John is a fun beer & bretzels RPG. Each player plays one of the voices in John’s head ; each with its own secret list of wants and skills and can take over John’s body when he’s either hurt or bored by spending one point of their non-renewable Willpower points. The GM plays John, obeys his voices’ commands to the letter & describes what he sees, what happens and so on.
Ninja Burger has the players run employees of the eponymous franchise who pride themselves on delivering quality meals inside 30 minutes without ever being seen. Aside from the silliness of the premise and the fun of coming up with stupid infiltration scenarios leading to a successful stealthy delivery (and earlier than the competing Samurai Burger chain to boot, of course !) ; the game features a robust honour system whereby if the GM/Sensei decides that a given ninja has brought dishonour to his Burger Franchise or otherwise lowered the quality of their delivery meal, said ninja must chop off one of their fingers as penance and the player running them must also stop using that finger for the remainder of the session. IRL, that is.
Speaking of GURPs, I would occasionally visit the old RPG group on usenet back in the day. One long running thread was create the most interesting/amusing game by combining two GURPs books. One I remember was Babylon Many (Babylon Five and Bunnies and Burrows).
It’s really good, but while it’s got a lot of smart stuff going on, it didn’t really jump to mind as “unusual”. Except, I guess, in the sense of “unusually good.”
I played it as a one-shot once and wasn’t super-impressed by it; that may have had to do more with the group than with anything else. (By contrast, the group I played Kids on Bikes with was one of the best groups I’ve ever played a game with, under the best one-shot GM I’ve ever played with).
I’d love to play it with a spectacular group sometime and really put it through its paces.
I love Ninja Burger. I once had a fat ninja disguised as Elvis, I swung a microphone around like a chain weapon. I didn’t even make that character up, I think that character concept was randomly generated (or I found an Elvis impersonator suit as ninja gear during the game). I can’t remember because it was years ago.
I also loved how if you rolled snake eyes on the dice, you temporarily turned into Snake Eyes (from G.I.Joe) and got free grenades but you couldn’t talk.
It’s possibly my favorite RPG to run as a one-shot. It’s almost more of a board game without a board than a real RPG but it is so fun.
When I go to a professional development, I like to time the speaker, from the time that they start speaking to the time that they say something even arguably useful. Often it’s more than an hour.
With one-shots, I do something similar: if we start the game, and it’s more than twenty minutes of setting and rules explanation without making any interesting choices, it’s problematic.
When I played Blades, it was nearly an hour before we could start doing anything. And even then, when we came up with plans, the second act of the game was so important to reach that the plan for the first act felt superfluous: no matter what we planned, the second act would unfold in essentially the same way.
I don’t know that this is a flaw in the system, so much as maybe someone who could polish their one-shot skills; still, it wasn’t my favorite.
There is a CERTAIN amount of setting communication necessary to grasp the system, but it should take like 5 minutes or so, not 20, so I’m not inclined to give the GM a pass here. I’m pretty sure I could teach setting and rules in 15 minutes or less. Add in maybe 10 minutes for character and crew creation, tops.
But mostly that just sounds like a bad oneshot - Blades isn’t intended to be played in “acts” at all - it’s supposed to be more like a sandbox, where the Crew can pick what they want to do and how they want to do it and who they want to screw over while doing it and gain reputation and turf and money and stuff. The game ships with a starting situation that’s basically “There are some warring gangs, and one of their leaders asks you to his office and says “You’re with us or against us, what’s it gonna be?”” and that gets you RIGHT into meaningful decision making.
So yeah; It was probably… well, not even the group so much as the GM and his choice of “one shot”.
Yeah, that sounds about right to me. IME one-shots usually do take at least 15-20 minutes to go over everything, but a lot of GMs, especially if they’re trying the system out themselves for the first time, overdo this part.
I should be careful about my criticism, however, since I rarely run one-shots myself. Gift horse and all :).
Heh. I read the OP, saw Fantasy Wargaming and thought “I need to defend that game.” Scrolled down to see I did. I will still defend the 100 pages of background discussion before getting to the rules. (I think the last two decades of RPGs and scenario writing have addressed a lot of the issues with the state of RPGs it brings up in those 100 pages.)
Back to the OP, I’ll toss out Fellowship. Each player is essential a paragon of a fantasy trope, but there is a huge amount of room to put a unique spin on that trope. For example, one trope is the orc, but that doesn’t mean you have to be an orc. You pick from a selection of traits commonly associated with orcs, like an Iron Stomach (you can eat literally anything) or Brutally Cunning (allows use of the fighting analog skill [Blood] in place of Courage for some tests). Your orc doesn’t need to be a tribe of 6-foot tall green-skinned brute with an underbite. It can be an industrial society of gnoll-looking creatures or a demon spawned race of warriors. Similarly, halflings could be a shire of hobbits, a gaggle of kobolds, or a murder of deceptively bloodthirsty gnomes.
Each player has a different trope they are responsible for. And when I say “responsible for,” I mean it. Your character is in charge of not only their background, but the background of all their people. When somebody asks about the background of your people, you get to build that little part of the setting. “Hooker, what kind of society do vampires have?” “First off, they take great offense at ‘vampire.’ It’s pejorative. They prefer call themselves ‘The Bloodless’ and live among the Orcs, who Billy established as the dominant species in the world. They generally serve as torturers and executors, because they feed off the pain and suffering of others. Most Bloodless society is zealous about hunting down Bloodless that inflict pain on others outside of the justice system.”
I’ve heard some mixed things about Fellowship - specifically that some of the “tropes” felt very locked into more traditional interpretations than others. That’s very much second hand though, and it’s always been a game I’ve sortof been interested in hearing more about.
This is the first time I’ve seen it presented as granting substantially more narrative control to the players than the “average” Powered by the Apocalypse game though. (I mean, if you go back to Apocalypse World, each playbook is more or less “in charge” of their schtick already.)
I had that book. The equipment lists and historical background information were pretty impressive. It wasn’t something I was interested in playing since it’s a wargame, not an RPG, and I’m generally not into that sort of thing. But a great book regardless. I wonder if I still have that thing boxed up somewhere…
It’s not my ideal game, but I’m glad I tired it. I can totally see how it would be somebody’s jam. For reference, here’s the ‘move’ where you get control of your corner of the world:
There’s a lot more in the full book than that, but that’s the flavor of it.
As for locking tropes into traditional interpretations, there are plenty of tropes to work with. Each can also grab a power from another class, which can distinguish them a little more.
