What is floating your RPG boat at the moment?

[Rob Lang]

I do love a boardgame too. It's more relaxing for me as I don't have to spend the evening inventing stuff out of my head. My son (who is now 6) can just get his head around Catan but you can't be a mean player else he'll just not play.

My favourites at the moment are and old fashioned , which we play Co-Operatively.

[Onix]

[DOC_Agren]

Well my RPG is:
my long term (87to now) Top Secret/SI (with massive houserules) campaign set in a near copy of the real world.. with 4 diferent play groups.. 1 plays regularly the rest off and on. But there much history with the campaign. Including spinning of 2 alternative settings (1 a near future mod, that well spun off) and 2nd the Bizarre world (Magic is real, Supernatural is Real) best line from that 1 is Don't go swimming with the Sparkling Gargoyle

Playing well we have a somewhat regular Dark Heresy Campaign.

On and off: Gamma World mix of edition 1, 2, and 3; Bureau 13 modified to GURPS 3rd; WEG Star Wars (just wrapped up a section of a campaign set in the sametime frame as Starwars Rebels; and Next week we will be revisiting ICAR if the weather holds.

[kylesgames]

Since last writing, I've been "suckered" into running a Degenesis: Rebirth campaign. It's fun, though there are some minor balance issues: right now we have two Anabaptists, a Neolibyan, a Chronicler, a Spitalian, and a Scrapper, and I pray we don't expand to having characters from a more diverse background, because the party's hard pressed to find reasons to stay together as-is. I've been having an Apocalyptic travel with them—she's a traveling trader/fortune teller on the surface, but she's also perhaps the most dangerous in combat because of a fluke of character creation (incredibly high Body attribute, plus Brawl and Toughness mean that she's practically immune to incoming damage, but can attack with a +3D custom Blade Bracelet. If she spends Ego points, she exceeds the maximum number of dice to roll, which gives her free successes).

Unarmed combat is weird in Degenesis; it's practically ineffective against armored foes, but it's one of the best ways to blitz people in melee; if you're willing to go lethal and use a blade bracelet, it's even more dangerous; the concept of being attacked for 7+ damage at least twice a turn on average is terrifying.

[madunkieg]

Tokaido: the game about taking a four-day vacation travelling down a road in ancient Japan. I have taught it to many people over many games, but only won once. No matter. The game is so zen-like and consequence free that I've enjoyed it every time.

Over the last while, I haven't been able to do much role-playing because I was just too busy, but I could sneak away for the occasional boardgaming night.

[kylesgames]

Tokaido sounds cool. Just watched the Tabletop episode, and it looks like a blast.

I'm still doing Degenesis stuff for pretty much all my time, which is moderately annoying since I need to be finishing up my own work and getting Street Rats back on track (I've been doing a rewrite of the core mechanics to make it more high-stakes).

Right now my unofficial supplement for Degenesis is 58 pages (26,000 and change words) long, and I haven't even begun to tackle some of the stuff I want to do like expanded melee combat rules and fleshing out some of the factions, which will probably be stuff for another project. I got a little bit of mission creep, and instead of just making some items (I'm now to 42 items, each of which has a paragraph or two long description), I wound up embarking on a project to make sample NPCs for every faction in the game.

I'm about a quarter of the way through on that, I think, and I also completed a bestiary. I've also written a couple character development rules, like skill specializations (which seem to be mentioned in the core rulebook, though they don't actually seem to exist in the rules), and I think all-in-all it's been a great exercise in building my game design muscles by working a lot with a system that I didn't create. More importantly, I've been working with the mechanics at a lower level than I ever have before: when I made AUGC for Eclipse Phase I made pretty much no low-level interfacing rules, just rules for specific circumstances and combat.

Now I'm writing things that hook directly into the core of a game and interface with broad focuses, including the addition of non-combat abilities that are worth getting in a game where not being combat-focused is often a death sentence if you look funny, or creating mechanics that extend a core functionality, and I like it.

Open Legend has also been doing a fair bit of my gaming time, but not quite as much; it's got a very emergent play structure, with about 99% of the things I can think of already modeled, and while I'm working on a setting for it it's not as much of a joy to work with because it doesn't have as much granularity to the system and there are fewer rules I have to work around.