Role-Playing Games 3 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Fiasco

Fiasco is inspired by cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously wrong – inspired by films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. You’ll play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. It won’t go well for them, to put it mildly, and in the end it will probably all go south in a glorious heap of jealousy, murder, and recrimination. Lives and reputations will be lost, painful wisdom will be gained, and if you are really lucky, your guy just might end up back where he started.

FIASCO is an award-winning, GM-less game for 3-5 players, designed to be played in a few hours with six-sided dice and no preparation. During a game you will engineer and play out stupid, disastrous situations, usually at the intersection of greed, fear, and lust. It’s like making your own Coen brothers movie, in about the same amount of time it’d take to watch one.

Burning Wheel is an award-winning fantasy roleplaying game in which players take on the roles of vibrant, dynamic characters whose very beliefs propel the story forward. Starting with a simple D6 dice pool mechanic, this game intuitively builds on its core concepts. The rules detail dramatic systems for task resolution, advancement, trials of belief, tests of nerve, searing social conflict, dangerous sorcery, miraculous faith, and brutal, gut-wrenching martial combat.

Behind the dice, your decisions drive the game’s systems. Their choices tangibly affect every outcome—from glorious victory to ignominious defeat. But there are consequences to every decision, ramifications to every action. The choices you make close off one path, while opening another. This philosophy underpins the character creation system for Burning Wheel. And it’s not just a matter of pushing a point here, or nudging a number there: As soon as a player decides to make a character in Burning Wheel, he is confronted with decisions about the character’s past, ethics, beliefs, scars, goals and dreams. Questions whose answers affect not only the player’s character, but the shape of the story as a whole. Burning Wheel is presented in an easy-to-read writing style, with plenty of insight and advice from the designer. If you’re not careful, Burning Wheel will change the way you play roleplaying games. The Gold Edition combines both the Revised Edition’s Burning Wheel and Character Burner. It has been reorganized for clarity and updated by the author.

Gather 3-5 players, set aside 2 hours, and make up an unwatchable “foreign” film using a pile of index cards and your crazy brains!

Use this step-by-step guide to guffaw your group through non-chronologically remembering a wildly bizarre movie that you apparently just watched together! On each player’s turn they write a part or moment into the movie (oh, I mean remember a part or moment of the movie they saw, pardon me) and insert it anywhere into the timeline you’re collaboratively creating!

Kaleidoscope, a thorough stand-alone hack of Ben Robbin’s celebrated Microscope: a fractal role-playing game of epic histories, has been simmering on my back-burner for a couple of years. I want to share the laughs! Through these years Kaleidoscope has been streamlined and made more silly, seen play in numerous conventions up and down the west coast of North America and many living rooms and several cafes, receiving amused or (on one occasion) unamused looks from folks at neighboring tables, and eliciting many decibels of laughter from its players.

Out of Dodge is a four-person, “American Freeform” live-action game about desperate criminals on a car ride to nowhere. Perfect for your next road trip!

The game requires four players, a small space arranged like a car, and should take around 1-2 hours to play. It can be played by responsible people in an actual moving car. There is no Game Master, but you’ll need one player to prepare the materials.

This game includes mature language in the rules and generally deals with themes of betrayal and extreme violence.

Goblin Quest is a roleplaying game. As you play, you’ll tell stories about goblins trying to achieve basic tasks and meeting fatal misadventure as they do it. You’ll play the goblins, and you’ll steer them through (or, more commonly, directly into) adversity, and you’ll have a fun time doing it.

It’s not a game about winning; there are no points for surviving the longest, or achieving the most goals. The aim of the game is to have fun with your friends. Even if all the goblins fail in their quest, if you’ve had fun losing, that still counts.

Goblin Quest is designed to be played from start to finish in a single sitting – it should take around 2 hours to complete a story. The more players you have, the longer the game will take to play.

Dog Eat Dog is a game of colonialism and its consequences. As a group, you work together to describe one of the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific Ocean, defining the customs of the natives and the mores of the outsiders arriving to claim it. One player then assumes the role of the Occupation force, playing their capable military, their quisling government, and whatever jaded tourists and shrewd businessmen are interested in a not quite pacified territory. All the others play individual Natives, each trying in their own ways to come to terms with the new regime. The game begins when the war ends. Through a series of scenes, you play out the inevitably conflicted relationship between the two parties, deciding what the colonizers do to maintain control, which natives assimilate and which run amok, and who ends up owning the island in the end. The game will come in the form of a book, with the full rules, author’s notes that explain the design process, and a brief historical overview of colonization in the Pacific.

The first Dungeons & Dragons game was played back when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson chose to personalize the massive battles of their fantasy wargames with the exploits of individual heroes. This inspiration became the first fantasy roleplaying game, in which players are characters in an ongoing fantasy story. This new kind of game has become immensely popular over the years, and D&D has grown to include many new ways to vividly experience worlds of heroic fantasy.

The core of D&D is storytelling. You and your friends tell a story together, guiding your heroes through quests for treasure, battles with deadly foes, daring rescues, courtly intrigue, and much more. You can also explore the world of Dungeons & Dragons through any of the novels written by its fantasy authors, as well as engaging board games and immersive video games. All of these stories are part of D&D.

Fiasco

The Burning Wheel

Kaleidoscope

Out of Dodge

Goblin Quest

Dog Eat Dog

Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition)

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