Today’s Excitement: Theros/BotG booster draft, Friday @ 7:00pm
Coming soon: Standard Magic Tournament, Saturday @ 6:30pm. $5 buyin. Prizes!
Iron Kingdoms RPG, Sunday @ 7:00pm
The newest thing in RPGs right now are Story Games.
What’s a Story Game? They’re basically a GM-less, co-operative roleplaying game where everyone work together to create a story. Most only run in single sessions, so there’s campaign mode; there’s also no time to waste in getting to the fun — you’ve only got a few hours to play the whole game so you have to jump through making characters fast and get right to the story. There’s also no way to “win” a story game — no treasure or weapons or favors to collect for the next game, because there is no next game. The players win if they have fun.
The best known Story Game is Fiasco, where players run through a Tarantino-esque heist gone wrong. Individual characters connive and screw each other, not to gain more loot, but to make an entertaining story of greed, revenge, betrayal and loss. TableTop does an excellent playthrough of this game at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXJxQ0NbFtk
Some other great Story Games include:
InSpectres — think Ghostbusters with the serial numbers removed
Polaris — tales of a dying race growing old and fading away
Microscope — a fascinating game about creating histories
Our personal favorite is one called The Quiet Year. In this game, the player’s don’t tell the story of individual characters, but rather the tale of the formation of a post-apocalyptic community. Everything the players do in the game is represented on a map, so at the end of play, you all have this map as record of the game play. A true masterpiece of game design.
We’re looking to start up a bi-weekly group to play Story Games. Anyone interested? What days/times would be good for you? Let us know and we’ll get it started!
