Games Night: Otherpool, Session 1

Patrick has already done a great job of summarising what happened in last night's game. So really all I want to add are a couple of thoughts about playing Marvel FASERIP and then I thought it might be interesting to share my character's stats.

There are, I think, three things that jump out at me about the system. First of all, the random character generation really works. It might be spread out over a number of pages, and a lot of them are text heavy, but it is nicely directed. There is a good flow to it. I'd be interested to know what influenced some of the weightings with the random tables (particularly in the initial character class). Since this blog was initially set up with at least half an eye on the maths of tabletop RPGs, I'd also be curious to know just how many possible heroes one could roll up - or what the likelihood, say, of a person rolling the stats for Thor or Wolverine is.

Secondly, I found the dice rolling refreshing. Don't get me wrong: especially after this year of so much OSR and retroclone goodness I am a fan of d20s and having a gaggle of various Platonic solids in front of me each with their own place and time. But there was something neat about just using two d10s to get everything. And while the big table on the back of the book looks complex at first, in reality it isn't. It just works. Roll d100, compare the roll (row) with your ability level (column) and the colour in the box tells you how well you succeeded. Maybe look at another little table to tell you whether or not there is anything special. Done. Fast. Great.

Finally: I like the way little things about the system really support it being "comic book-y". Health is recovered, in general, very quickly. The class benefits and disadvantages are simple, but really strongly support the character types that you're trying to be (for example, mutants always increase one power by one rank, but they have to start with popularity of 0). Karma is a great way of steering things, and declaring the minimum spend required to use it works too - no abusing the system.

I've said a lot about the system there, and virtually nothing about the setting. We're planning to play on G+ next week, so assuming Patrick summarises the second session in a style similar to his first (please please please), I'll write something about the setting next week.

But after the jump... Sergeant Shoxx!