First time running Liminal

I was pretty nervous.  I'd never run this game before.  I'd never run a game online before (and it was only my second time playing an RPG online).  I'd never run for this group of players before, and one of them was the GM for one of the best games of Call of Cthulhu I've played.  The game book had only showed up a couple of days earlier so I was still effectively running off the quickstart PDF.

However...

The system underneath Liminal is easy to get to grips with.  Roll 2d6 plus skill level and any additional modifiers against a target number, normally 8.  Two dice means less swingyness than a straight roll without normalising the probability curve too much.  A PC rolling their speciality skills is going to succeed most of the time.  And in line with my previous comments on embracing failure, the game gives several options for what happens on a failure.

The only points where I felt I tripped up on the rules were criticals and combat.  With critical successes, I wasn't always sure what to tell the player on top of what I was already going to give them for a success.  With combat, I think I just need a thorough read of the rules now that I have the book.

Some of the characters' special skills and traits were a little vaguely worded.  I'm not sure if this is intentional.  On the one hand, it's nice to have clear guidance on what an ability is supposed to do.  On the other hand, having a bit of flexibility to make it work the way you want in your game isn't a bad thing.  We rolled with it.

The quickstart provides a set of four pre-gen characters and an adventure tailored to this specific party, the rather unexcitingly titled 'The Dead'.  If I offer this one at conventions I might instead go with the name of the crew, 'The Fang Gang'.  Name aside though, the adventure is well put together to make use of the characters' various skills and is very solidly grounded in modern day London, to the point that we were using the satellite images on Google Maps for locations.

(This turns out to be one of the advantages of online roleplay - being able to all have Google Maps open, plus dropping links in the chat with useful details.  For convention play I'll have to print out some of what we used in this game.)

In around two and a half hours of play we got to the halfway point in the adventure.  Once I'm more up to speed on the system and know the adventure better I think it'll go faster and I'll be able to fit it in a 3.5 hour convention slot.  I'm running it again next Sunday so I can see how it goes with a different group and a slightly more experienced GM.  And the first group will be back for part 2 at some point.

I thought I would love this game and I do.  I've previously run urban fantasy using The Dresden Files RPG, which is excellent but just a shade too complicated for my tastes.  Liminal is a slimmed down system that gets the job done, doesn't require specialist dice, and is easily adaptable to the urban fantasy setting of your choice.  Vampires, for example, are easily customisable to whichever version of vampire mythology you want (except the stupid sparkly ones, I'm glad to say).

Liminal has gone almost straight to the top of the 'games I want to run' list, with only Delta Green ahead of it.  I'll be working on a campaign soon.  If you want to try it yourself, the quickstart pdf is available free from Modiphius.  (Obviously don't read that if you're playing my game.)

As as for the online aspect...

I figured what worked for the Coriolis game would work for me, and set up a Discord server.  Googling supplied me with a link to the Sidekick bot, which easily handled all the dice rolling requirements.  Apart from a bit of panic earlier in the day when Discord itself went down, and some minor issues getting everyone connected to the voice channel it went very smoothly, and the ability for everyone to change their nicknames to their character names made it easier to keep track of what was going on.

Overall it was great, and while Discord is never going to fully replace face to face gaming for me, having it as an additional option to faciliate gaming with people I otherwise wouldn't be able meet up with is excellent.