Graph Paper Games

It's Friday and we are playing Mass Effect.  Rachel always gets her man.  The young bloods are ready to attack.  The old bloods show the kids how it is done. One of the many combats that night.  Black Widow looks on approvingly. My custom Geth Prime stalks the team.

I painted up my son's Drell Vanguard for the Mass Effect RPG. He's originally an Infinity miniature of some sort.  It's too bad he has the full helmet on, but beggars (and converters) can't be choosers.

Mass Effect meets Leverage. Sci-if caper goodness!  The plot featured the team tracking down an illegal cyberware operation working out of a high-end hospital.  The team went in undercover but ended up running into an old villain who recognized us and tried to escape.  One hovercar chase later, and we had captured him. Good session, although it was pretty chaotic at times.  It's a strange thing to say, but I have an observation that is in many ways my fault.  I usually host the gaming session in my basement with my big 4' by 8' gaming table, but this weekend I really didn't have the time to get everything cleaned up and ready, so we gamed at another player's house.  Space was cramped and there were a lot of players (including several young ones), and it was sometimes hard to hear the GM, and the whole layout contributed to the level of chaos.  I clearly need to get my house cleaned up before the next game!

A shot from tonight's game. Bar brawls, PC on PC conflict, and plot twists galore!

Last night we had the kick-off of the new Mass Effect campaign using a hacked version of the Cortex+ rules.  PC creation was done as a group (ala Fate ), with the GM guiding everyone through each step en masse.  So for example we would all pick our races, then be informed of the impact it has on your PC, and then pick a background, be informed of the impact it would have on your PC, etc.  By the time it was all done we had one gun-berzerker, two snipers, one engineer (me), one medic, one Vanguard (whatever you want to call them--I call him a Jedi), and one diplomat. Now one thing I saw during this process was a couple of players getting frustrated with the fact that they didn't know what would happen as a consequence of picking a certain option.  For example, say you decide your PC has the "Colonist" background.  What skills would you think you would get?  Tech?  Survival?  Medicine?  You don't know.  Some players started asking the G...