War. War never changes.
Well, I suppose it's been a little while. I blame school. I suppose I also blame my flighty personality and the difficulties of trying to grandfather in an older game to a newer system model. It was part of a grand experiment, and we may yet come back to the adventures of our Corvis heroes, but for now I think it's time to move forward.
Waaaaaaaaay forward. I am going to be starting up a new game, this one set in the Fallout universe. After looking around at some options, I decided to use the World of Darkness system instead of the d20 system, for a number of reasons. With WoD there is not such a huge functional discrepancy between someone who's gained a lot of xp and someone who hasn't. This solves two problems at once - it means that people who can't come to very many sessions aren't going to be left out in the cold, and it means if someone dies, the penalty for re-rolling isn't nearly as bad as the game marches on. It also means that the game should be more steamlined, with less number-crunching and more role-playing. Finally, the modern bent of the WoD core rules should translate without much effort to Fallout. All I'll need to do is stat out some of the main beasties and make up a random encounter table and we can get underway.
Which leads me to the next major point - the game structure. It'll be reminiscent of the Corvis game in that there will be a hex map. The characters will start in a Vault and will have a blank map to explore in whatever manner they choose. I'm still trying to work out the specifics, but Robby made a good suggestion to have them be able to move a certain amount every day, but give them ability to force march and rack up exhaustion penalties to get a little further. I'll probably do it in 12 hour increments, where the characters can move 2 or 3 spaces every 12-hour period, with a force march letting them go 1 additional. For every time period they traverse the Wastes, I'll roll on the random encounter table, twice for a force march. Much like Fallout 1 and 2, this could be good or bad - maybe they get ambushed by radscorpions, or maybe they find a crashed alien spaceship. Regardless, travelling through the Wastes is often dangerous and certainly unpredictable.
Finally, I think there will be the option for a revolving storyteller. Robby has expressed interest in running at least some campaigns, and I certainly have ideas of my own. I think everyone, storyteller included, will make and play a character, and if someone has an idea they want to run for a few games, we can work that in. Ideally this means that there can be more games, since the requirements both for players and STs are more fluid.
We'll see how it goes, but I think I'm already off to a pretty strong start, and am really excited to see how this plays out.
