13: FLOOD
There are So Many Games.
When I started, there were already lots of odd little games but they had to get into magazines and stores for you to hear about them, and there were just a handful of games big enough to get a monthly column in White Dwarf, and this was just before they were phased out as Games Workshop started ramping up production of their own RPGs, producing core sets for Golden Heroes and Judge Dredd as well as hardback reprints for Call Of Cthulhu, RuneQuest and Paranoia, and then the rulebook for Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play. And that was just one publisher.
Nowadays there are new games all the time. Even with the ones I somewhat keep up with I can go an entire edition without getting it to the table.
And this is fantastic. Except when I’m trying to find players.
Bonus round:
Improvise - I improvise more than I prepare, but I work from a basis of familiarity and try to avoid going into a session with a completely blank page - if nothing else I want some bullet points and a reminder of where we were last week. Improvisation games like those in Whose Line is It Anyway? run with prompts to riff off.
Doom - Some games have a feeling of impending doom. Some games influenced Doom. Some games feature Doctor Doom - indeed, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying lets GMs affect results with the Doom Pool.
Pool - I like dice pools over single dice. And some games with narrative points have shared pools for them, like Momentum in 2D20 and Storypath. It encourages contribution and team effort. Thankfully I’ve never had to do something like it with a player who would hog it all - in fact most players are reticent to use shared pools to avoid seeming greedy.
Designers & Dragons on boom and bust publishing
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