Actual Play – Gamma Patrol Pocket Edition at GPNW (6/29/2013)

Gamma_PatrolFacilitator: Seth
Players: Me, Seth, Dan, Devon, Jonathan, and another gentleman whose name I have forgotten.
System: Danger Patrol Pocket Edition
Variant: Gamma World Setting

We were wildly divergent people, protected an unknown village from wildly divergent threats.

Thoughts on this game

I don’t really get Gamma World at all. I haven’t played in the setting before, so I was new to it, but it just seemed all over the place on the gonzometer. There was some apocalypse 1000 years ago and mutants, aliens, and robots have cropped up and everything is crazy. I could never seem to get my barrings in the setting.

The system as presented didn’t give us any hooks into each other, into our adversaries, or into the village we were protecting. So, I kept wondering why we were doing anything that we were doing.

I left the game feeling frustrated because I couldn’t invest in anything. There was a general lack of role-playing (most of what we did was describing events in the world “So my guy uses his laser eyes to blow up the leviathan” followed by “Okay, leviathan bits are everywhere” rather than much in character dialog or exploration). Combine that with a pretty alien setting and I just couldn’t get into it. I left feeling like I had been a pretty poor contributor.

Of note I think Seth was a great facilitator and was clearly trying to fill in all these gaps as we went along. He was the one pushing for more story and more connective bits between the characters.

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