Rethinking Game Night

Our Tuesday night roleplaying group has been hit or miss for quite some time now. Many people in the group are frequent business travelers and particularly during the summer convention season getting together can be difficult. And yet we continue trying to keep RPG campaigns going with predictable results. One guy misses one session and someone else the next. Then we don’t play for two weeks and forget half of what’s going on the adventure. Last week we said to hell with it and played Walk the Plank and Ticket to Ride instead. The result was one of the best game nights in a long time. Over the weekend I started thinking about our dogged insistence on clinging to RPGs when it hasn’t really been working out. Why not take a break and just play some board and card games for awhile? Those can be played with whoever shows up and finished in a night. Turns out other folks in the group were having similar thoughts and we played Ticket to Ride again last night. I think we’ll probably continue the trend until we’re ready to start playtesting the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. I’m betting the result will be us actually gaming more on a weekly basis, and I’ll still get some roleplaying in with my bi-weekly Spirit of the Century game.

Of course having said all that, I’ve been pondering how fun it would be to run a game set in the world of the comic Fables. For those who haven’t read it, Fables is about faery tale characters living in the modern world. They were driven from their homelands by a mysterious bad guy called the Adversary and now have to live among us. The comic has a lot of fun with classic characters like the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, Prince Charming, Goldilocks, etc. I think I could run a cool game in which players picked real world fables to play and then worked out living here has changed them. Maybe the trick would be planning out one story arc and just running it for 4-6 sessions and calling it good. The open-ended campaigns have not been working for us.

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