Newbie DM

I was invited to play Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by my friend Mark, from the Dice Monkey blog and the Marvel-centric Plot Points blog.  The game was run on Google+ hangouts, and since I had never played Marvel before I jumped at the chance. I have a lot of friends who have been a part of the design team, so it’s a game I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Because superheroes.

I have to say that with all honesty, I need to play the game a few more times to really get it.  I’m not very familiar with the rules, and seeing how every other player was experienced, I didn’t want to slow down the game too much by stopping to ask questions. If you’ve never played Marvel, the game uses a dice pool system to resolve actions.  I’m not going to try to attempt to explain the game here, because I’d do a poor job.  I still haven’t exactly gotten it.  But if you come from a D&D mindset like me, this is a pretty interesting way of looking at the game:

In D&D, my character sheet says I can do X.  In Marvel, I want to do X, so how can I get there using my character sheet?

Another issue I had was that the game is set in Marvel’s cosmic universe, and I have very little knowledge of that whole side of Marvel, but Wikipedia can take care of that. Anyway, the point if this post is to show you guys a video of the game in action, captured by Mark as he was running it. Also, there is a REALLY, REALLY great dice roller extension available for Hangouts called DiceStream, made for the Marvel rpg.  It made the game easy to play online, so if you are considering an online game, go get this extension.  Google Hangouts is a real game changer for online roleplaying by the way… I need to get a post going about that. I’m running a SW EotE game using it and I love it…

So here’s the video.  I’m the bearded dude with a confused look on his face.  Many thanks to Mark for running the game, and go check out his websites.  :)

For the past few weeks I’ve been a little busy working on both a new adventure for rpgKids called “The Red Dragon of the Whispering Mountains”, and a dice and card game I’m tentatively calling “Ode to the Gem Hunters”.  For more on the rpgKids adventure, you can go check out the Facebook page for rpgKids.  While I’m still playing the FFG SW with my home group, I haven’t really had anything to blog about lately with it, and I’m no fan of those “sorry for not blogging” posts.

But now I wanted to blog a little about the game I have been working on, for a few reasons, mostly to get some feedback on the idea of it, and see if I can get some suggestions.

So like I said, the game is called “Ode to the Gem Hunters” and it is played with a stack of Dungeon cards, a stack of Magical Item cards, special symbol dice, gem tokens and treasure tokens. The game’s goal is to make your way through a dungeon and collect a certain number of gems before your opponent.  I created a homebrew prototype from bits and pieces  I got at Michael’s.

My homemade cards and dice.

I designed the game for two players, although I playtested it with three and there’s no reason why it can’t be played with 3 or perhaps even 4 players.  On your turn you draw a dungeon card and have to resolve the card’s challenge before moving on to other areas of the dungeon (drawing another card).

Example of a card

The way you resolve the card’s challenge is to build a dice pool using the symbols on the card, and add attack dice (the dice with the swords).  The mechanic calls for symbol cancellation in order to  succeed and collect your loot.  if you don’t succeed at defeating the challenge, you are stuck on this card until all the dice have been cancelled out, keeping you busy while the other players are collecting gems.  There aer magic items that can affect the dice in the dice pool, grant you extra turns, etc…

A Magical Item example

So I have this little game, and I’m not sure what to do with it. I could pdf it and put it up on the blog and have people take a crack at playtesting it, although printing out and cutting 60 cards and several dice symbols may get old quickly.   I could try to see if I score a chance for a small publisher to at least take a look at it, although that’s pretty unlikely at this point. I’m not an established game designer after all.  Or, I could put it away and be satisfied with having finished a game. I don’t know. Crossroads, I am in you.

So yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to.

If you have any thoughts, or are interested in seeing the game, let me know.

PS. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the game icons on the dice come from the fantastic Game Icons website, where I got the dice symbols from. Check them out!