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Tell me about your games

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Wendell_Burke:
Hey, Anyone out there feel like sharing what your current game is like? Maybe a little back and forth Q&A? I'd be interested to hear.

Sanctaphrax:
I've played in a number of games, but by far the largest and longest-running is Enduring the Apocalypse. As the name suggests it was originally about PCs trying to survive the gradual end of the world, but the focus has shifted massively over the years.

It started back in 2010. Wasn't my idea, actually; someone wanted to play an ultra-high-Refresh game and I got talked into running it. It was set in Berlin, and the basic concept was that the players were the morally-mixed power players of the city trying to deal with the post-Changes world. The PCs weren't a team, exactly, but the German government's magical intelligence service brought them all together to address imminent crises like an army of demons preparing to descend upon the city.

A lot has happened since then. Many players have left, and none of the original participants are still in the game except me, but the current three PCs have been stable for a long while. I've been using former PCs as villains, and honestly some of them make more sense in that role than they did as protagonists.

We recently finished a major story arc, which was about a G8 meeting where the spooky sides of the world's major governments hashed out an agreement to cooperate. The PCs were involved in the diplomacy, and also carried out a secret mission to decapitate the CIA so that the Library of Congress could take over the American side of things. They were very successful, but the summit ended on a down note as a now-villainous former PC managed to talk the various nations into letting him wriggle out of the consequences of his earlier misdeeds.

Since the game started at 18 Refresh, it naturally tends to go very big. Fight scenes with small armies of participants, people claiming dominion over regions of the Nevernever, weapon 10+ attacks being thrown around left and right, people casting rituals with massive complexity, high-stakes arguments with a whole bunch of independent sides. That kind of thing. The system has held up remarkably well under some pretty intense pressure.

It's not a particularly subtle story, but we've managed some interesting character arcs. One character recently half-died and came back, and is now on the path to picking up a Sword of the Cross after a deathbed conversation with Uriel.

I could go on and on and on, but it's probably better to let you ask if there's anything in particular you want to know.

Wendell_Burke:
That’s a really long running game! I had read that the game didn’t handle high power very well, but it’s good to hear that it wasn’t a problem for you. It sounds like it was a bit like a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade games in that it was more about the powers that control everything than your typical lower level character groups.
I’ve seen a lot of player characters that are more antagonist than protagonist, sadly.
Is your general play preference for higher power games? I’ve never gotten to play DFRPG so I don’t have any feel for the Refresh system and what it allows at the various levels.

Sanctaphrax:
I don't have a strong preference, power-level-wise. This is just what I ended up running.

One nice thing about high-Refresh play is that you can hit your players with all kinds of crazy stuff and just assume they'll be fine. I once had the largest non-nuclear explosive in the world go off next to an unsuspecting PC, and it actually made for a great scene.

On the other hand, there's a natural tendency for the bookkeeping to pile up. Character sheets get long, and hordes of mooks demand a lot of dice-rolling. Would be a bigger problem if the game wasn't PbP.

Wendell_Burke:
I tend to enjoy very granular games. I keep pretty extensive notes so long character records don't bother me, but I do see how they could become encumbering after a while. I haven't played pbp in a very long time. I like the Aspect system in the game and was particularly impressed with the city creation method. Just basic enough to be able to work through it in a relatively short time, but specific enough to build a good framework off of to expand on in the future. Both systems combined, I thought make rpgs more like film in how they develop the character of locations. I always felt that was important.

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