The terrified scream in the title of this post is brought to you for two reasons...
Reason the first: After a morning coffee bender, I decided I did not have enough time-sensitive obligations in my life and decided to enter the April A to Z Blogging Challenge. How does this challenge work? you ask. Simply put, during the month of April, I shall attempt to post to this here blog every day except Sundays. Each blog post shall be brought to you by the letter for that day, beginning with A. In today's blog, "A" is for "AAAAAAAAAAIYEEEE!!!", which is, in part a cry of disbelief that I have decided to commit to this challenge... but I have.
However, "AAAAAAAAAAIYEEEE!!!" also has a less cop-outey meaning, which is actually relevant to the gaming subject matter included in this blog. For it is the sound my brain made yesterday morning when I decided to run a session of Gamma World on a whim, which began about 8 hours after the decision was made. Oh, and I had absolutely no prep time, because I was at work until about an hour before the game was scheduled to start.
Why would I do such a thing? Well, my regular D&D game night fell apart at the last minute, due to an unacceptable number of absences. When a number of my players who still wanted to do something brought up the snot green box that has been idling on my shelf since my birthday last fall, I thought... "Oh, sod it! who needs prep time? Let's play!" and so we would hurl ourselves into a world ruled by the cruel and capricious atom.
"A" is for "Atom."
Sounds like it might be fun and a lot easier for noobs to follow & pick up than D&D. Nice post for the challenge...can't wait for the other 25! :)
ReplyDeleteHey thanks, Varmit! The current version of Gamma World is actually a pared down version of the current version of D&D as far as the rules mechanics are concerned. Wizards of the Coast, which owns both franchises has definitely been trying to make their products more accessible to new players.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that makes Gamma World especially easy to pick up and run on a whim, however is that it leaves much of the character creation process up to the dice. With D&D, a player might say, "Okay, do I want to play a human barbarian, or a dwarven thief?" and then weigh the pros and cons of each for a while. With Gamma World, you roll two dice to establish your "origins" the numbers on the dice correspond to a list of possible mutant character types (rat swarm, pyrokinetic, android & yeti are all on the list) By leaving many of your initial choices up to the dice and paring down other options, Gamma World takes out a lot of the initial "think factor".
So, to make a short answer long... Yes. It is much more accessible to new or casual players, but just as much fun for those of us who play regularly.
Gamma World is without a doubt the best thing Wizards of the Coast has done in a long, long time. Whenever I run it, I generate encounters while the players are generating characters, just by picking out crazy monsters and the fights are always entertaining. The best was when our time-travelling spider teleported a mile up with an enemy, and then ended up landing safely.
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