I'm fortunate enough to have found a good group that's stable enough to play almost every week. I think our record was 12 games in a row before someone got sick or had to cancel for some other reason. I did just loose a member as she's moving back to Washington, but I can still play with two people no problem.
Like Tore, a lot of my games include the old World of Darkness (the series was rebooted in 2004), with a majority of them being Vampire: The Masquerade chronicles. Never got into Werewolf: The Apocalypse the same way though, but I will say it's definitely a better written game and one of the more unique and insidious ones as there's definitely this feeling that you can win. Besides that I've also tried Wraith: The Oblivion but found the mechanics far too complicated to work properly and the game did cause some hurt feelings between players messing with each other as their shadows.
I actually haven't delved much into D&D because I tried a game when I was in high school call Exalted (also written by White Wolf) and just found myself getting bored and frustrated with all the rules and standardization in D&D. In Exalted if I wanted to run up a wall, black flip off while I swing up with my sword and split the enemy in half, the GM may give me a stunt bonus, but in D&D all I could do was stuff like "I swing my sword at it". In our last campaign I got a pair of boots that made me run really fast and tried to implement it into combat but everything I did either made my GM confused because she didn't know what I should roll, or she just flat out refused that action. Not sure if it's just a bad GM or if the game really isn't catered to that kind of Dragon Ball Z over-the-top fights.
Lately I've been picking up the New World of Darkness books which are actually really well written and fix a lot of the combat problems from their old games. There's this new defense trait which is the lowest of either your wits or your dexterity and it counts against your assailant. For example if you have a 2, the attacker has a -2 penalty on their first attack against you, a -1 for their second, and finally no penalties on their third. I really does help give the players an advantage (also along with successes only being 8,9, and 10's). I would really like to give Vampire: The Requiem a try, but I'm also intrigued by their Hunter game, which fixes many of the problems with Hunter: The Reckoning and relies more on group coordination, tactics, and cunning strategy.
|