optimisticFigured I should bring folks up-to-date on the weekend stuff.
Both the Friday night and Saturday gaming groups got to playtest the All For One: Régime Diabolique scenario for CanGames, "Une Abondance de la Folie", and the two groups had somewhat different experiences with the game, to say the least.
The Friday night gamers showed up around 7:10 pm, and we got into the game rather quickly, though David (the relative newbie to the group) asked some interesting questions during the 10-minute period of going through the game mechanics and stuff. The game session ran almost five (5) hours long - an hour over the time that is scheduled! - and I discovered through the play of the adventure that the scenario had some terrible hiccups and a few glitches in it. (This is not to be unexpected when writing and playtesting adventures for conventions, hence the reason for doing it, but still...) Suffice it to say, while the Friday gamers had a good time with the adventure and got to constructively critique and bash it to pieces, it was not a pleasant experience for me (other than in a learning sense) at all. Useful, but not pleasant. I spent most of Saturday re-writing, cleaning up, and otherwise tightening the scenario and some of the game stats needed to be altered before running the adventure again on the Sunday gaming group.
My friend from Smith Falls,
knightbane, was supposed to come up and help game the scenario playtest on the Sunday, but couldn't make it out (again) unfortunately. The Sunday gaming group showed up at their usual time, and we got into the scenario, each of my three players having to take on the role of two of the player characters. Tammy had fun asking questions about the game system as if she were a newbie at the table, and I realised I needed to add some basic material about the magick system of All For One, but that part of the process went well. The playtest of the adventure went smoother than I had expected, to be honest, and while there were still a few wrinkles to it, I managed to get the adventure just around four (4) hours in length (and that's with 3 players taking on the role of 6 characters). There will be some more tweaking that I will need to do for the adventure, but I expected that. Heck, I expected a lot worse, to be honest, and I have to say that I was gratified to have the scenario work out pretty much as I hoped it would after the Saturday re-writes.Other than spending a bit of time Sunday night doing a quick set of notes on material to add to the All For One adventure, I took the night off gaming, and just did a bit of palaeontological reading, and some sorting of new CDs that I've been meaning to get to. Both gaming groups have agreed to do the playtest of the Primeval RPG scenario that I'll be running at CanGames this coming Friday and Sunday, as they want to get the playtesting out of the way and get on with the game campaigns. I'm looking forward to that.