Oh, hey there. It’s been a hot minute.
The holiday season is here in the US, and I couldn’t be less excited about it. I’m not great with extra downtime; it messes with the routines I’ve carefully forced myself into. On top of that, the holidays aren’t exactly great memories for me, so more time with them isn’t something I’m particularly happy to have. Thanksgiving being the day of my usual Hunter game was the icing on the cake.
By the way, Hunter is going pretty well. The playtest second edition is playing well. The only change I’ve really bothered with so far is the Initiative modifiers on weapons. I get their point in theory, but in practice, they feel like adding math that makes Initiative checks feel worse. Willpower risk, Tactics, and everything else that Hunters get access to feels right without being too wordy or crunchy. If I had to nitpick, I’d say that some of the Endowments (especially Castigations) are underwhelming, but my group of Lucifuge are making do.
Most of my players are new to Chronicles of Darkness, coming from systems like D&D 5th, but they’re not having too many issues with mechanics or the flow of the hunt. I have a tendency to go wide on the investigative sections, letting players try as many different and offbeat methods as they can think of to figure things out. A big worry was that this would be too slowly paced for players more used to action, but the Investigation -> Planning -> Combat loop is working out.
I’m taking the game as an opportunity to get out of my usual habits and tropes. Instead of my usual Strix and Slashers, I’ve settled into a series of ghosts and bogeymen (serendipitously) loosely based on urban legends. Ghosts used to be verboten in my playgroups, thanks to another Storyteller who was far too into high-ranking spirits, so I’ve only recently come around to using them. They’re so fun. They play so well with the new Haunted and Tainted Places rules. The rulesets give me the opportunity to try to actually put players through a haunting in an action-horror game, and I love it. The hardback I Kickstarted can’t come soon enough.
At this point in time, I’m running Hunter and playing in two other games. Our Monday group picked up our old Shadowrun campaign, and that’s been an absolute blast. Our characters are all terrifying monsters led by a Banshee Adept who is just barely tolerating them, and it’s a blast. Shadowrun is a crunchy and difficult system, and our GM is running it both super smoothly and at full throttle. I’m playing the aforementioned Banshee, abusing their regenerative ability and speed to run enemies over with point-blank gunfire. It’s a build strange enough that getting back to playing him meant reverse-engineering my character sheet to understand what the hell I was doing, but it’s working.
The other campaign I’m playing is a heavily-modified D&D 5e campaign with enormous influences taken from Bloodborne. I rolled a Feral Tiefling Blood Hunter. He jumps from high places and slams a scythe on eldritch horrors; it’s a good time. Shout out to the Twilight Cleric that makes my Hemocraft self-damage non-existent. The constant free temporary HP makes Blood Hunters feel like cheating.
The games couldn’t be more different from each other, but there’s a big similarity across them; every GM thinks they’re screwing it up. I feel like I’m dragging the investigative sections on too long, though my players say they enjoy the change of pace. The other two GMs are unhappy with the speed of combat. As a player, I don’t mind. Shadowrun combats can drag as players and enemies use Initiative Passes to take more turns per turn, and 5e combat has a tendency to feel spongy after a few levels. At a point, you run into a Ship of Theseus issue — how much can you modify and streamline a system before it no longer resembles that system?
As for my issue, part of the problem is that our most investigation-based character has been absent for a few sessions. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t mind as much as I could. Getting the players to try to apply their knowledge in unusual situations is interesting, at least to me, and it keeps things from being easily solved via Chronicles’ version of a good Arcana check. I’m just worried that making entire sessions devoted to investigation may not be the most entertaining to my players.
If there’s a lesson here, I suppose it’s that no matter how much experience you have in something, it’s easy to fall into the vortex of self-doubt. All three of us have been running games on and off for a decade, and we’re finding things to worry about. You can’t avoid worrying completely, as collaborating on something creative is inherently stressful, but if your players aren’t having fun, they’ll probably let you know.
Soon: a new year, new stuff to write about, and probably more complaining about digital card games (go away forever, Absolute Tolerance).
Until then.