Virtual Grogmeet 2021

Once again I had to skip the Thursday night pub quiz, as that's my home group's game night, so Virtual Grogmeet didn't start for me until the Friday night.

Game 1: Blades in the Dark

My home group played a few weeks of Blades in the Dark a few years back.  (I don't know how long.  Time has lost all meaning.  I just know it was in the Before Times.)  I loved it, but it didn't last very long and we never played it again.  So while the game options for Friday night made it a tough choice, Blades ended up being my top choice.

Having played a Leech in our home game, I wanted to try something different this time, so went for the Hound.  On seeing that my equipment included a trained hunting animal, I considered various options, before concluding that the other party members were correct and it could only be that classic piece of RPG equipment, a Small But Vicious Dog.

With several new and inexperienced players in the group, the GM started us off with a kind of training mission to get used to the mechanics.  We had to deliver a handcart full of brandy to a contact at the docks, and succeeded through a combination of bribery, explosives, and accidentally summoning the ghost of a guard's dead mother.

Then came the heist proper, tracking down a socialite and stealing some stuff from his mansion.  Which we managed to effectively turn into three different heists, as the Leech and the Spider attended a party with fake credentials, the Hound and the Lurk broke in dressed as waiters, and the Whisper used the ghost field to get inside.  Kudos to the GM who managed to keep track of these three different approaches and ultimately reunite us in a comedy moment that saw all of us standing in a line trying to hide behind the Spider.

The Hound and the Lurk had planned to leave the same way we came in (through an open bathroom window) but given that the Leech had managed to poison most of the party guests with laxatives, there was, shall we say, something of a queue?  Still, this did mean that pretty much any exit route was now viable, with most potential witnesses being very much otherwise occupied.

It was great to get another shot at this fantastic game and I really hope I can find more opportunities in the future.

Game 2: Liminal - The Reid Legacy

I originally pitched Bad Blood, my current favourite of my own scenarios, but then noticed the time slots.  Three hours.  Bad Blood takes four hours to play.  Normally, so does The Reid Legacy, but there was a section of that one that I reckoned I could cut without impacting on the game play.  I wasn't sure it was enough to cut out an entire hour, but in the end we only overran by 20 minutes - which wasn't bad, under the circumstances.

There's something that many of us have observed in RPGs over lockdown.  People really enjoy roleplaying doing things like going to the pub.  On this occasion they managed to resist the lure of the pub, but did end up spending some time in a cafe having coffee and cakes.

Other than removing an unnecessary encounter, my other approach to speeding things up was make certain NPCs a bit chattier, meaning certain clues got passed on earlier in the adventure and the characters were able to put the pieces together and get to the final location a lot faster.  It's been an educational experience running with this tighter deadline, and ultimately I think I've got a better adventure out of it.

Game 3: Edge of the Empire

Apparently liking this version of Star Wars more than the WEG d6 version is some kind of grognard heresy, but I've played a bunch of different Star Wars games and FFG and the funky dice is the one I like best.  I wasn't sure what it would be like as a one-shot, as it can be pretty complicated, but by not including the talent trees on the pre-gen characters, the GM managed to remove a lot of the crunch and we could mostly focus on the skill system.  Not something I would have thought of (my first instinct when looking at my character sheet was to look for the talents) but this turns out to be a good way to simplify the game for new players who've already got the weird dice to worry about.

This game served as a good reminder of the benefits of leaning into the cinematics when playing this game.  I played the pilot, and at one point during a chase had the option to either take the safer option of trying to outrun our pursuers or to take the risky option of flying through a narrow gap between some buildings to outmaneovre them.  As I said in the game, what's the point of having a Corellian freighter if you don't at some point fly it vertically through a narrow gap?  So that's what we did.

The Roll20 implementation seems pretty solid for this game, with the only downside being that the GM needs to set the difficulty for dice rolls.  Which is fine under normal circumstances when everything is the same difficulty, but once things get more complicated this can easily lead to situations where the players are rolling before the GM has set the difficulty pool and getting the wrong dice.  While both VTTs I've played Star Wars on handle it well, I think Foundry might just have the edge for this game.

Game 4: Liminal - The Curious Case of the Casket Girls of New Orleans

A rare opportunity to play Liminal myself!  The GM has been talking about this scenario for a while (partly to crowd source for the British part of the adventure) so I was keen to see how it was going to go.  While Liminal is primarily focussed in British myth and folklore, New Orleans turns out to be a great choice if you're going to take the game outside Britain, with a ton of its own folklore that ties in well to the Liminal setting.

The game lasted slightly longer than the intended three hour slot.  Two hours longer, in fact, but fortunately it was the evening slot and none of us needed to be anywhere else.  This was the first time this adventure had been played, so understandably we did quite a few things the GM hadn't anticipated, particularly when it came to interrogation, although of course also because of the aforementioned desire to roleplay going to pubs.  There was no way any of our characters were going to take a trip to New Orleans without trying out the local food.

Hopefully the GM is working on Part 2 of this adventure, because this definitely wasn't a one-shot, and not just because it took five hours to play.  Without giving any plot points away, at the point where the game finished there was clearly a lot that the characters still needed to do, and I hope we'll get the chance to do it some day.

Reflections

There were four games of Liminal run at this convention and only one of them was mine.  Hooray!  More people should run this fantastic game.

There are more games happening this afternoon and evening, but I decided four games was enough this time.  I did tune in for the 'First, Last and Everything' zoom chat this morning though, as this required no effort on my part.

It's looking increasingly like I'm actually going to have to drag myself up to Manchester at some point, which at £70 for the train or three hours plus in the car, is not a particularly appealing prospect.  Clearly we're going to have to make the less northern conventions as exciting as this one.