Joshua Randall
Legend
[Also posted on Circvs Maximvs, but posting here too because I'm vain.]
I went to Origins for the first time in 10 years. It was a fun, for the most part. Here's what I did.
D&D Living Forgotten Realms (LFR)
[sblock]They were premiering a lot of LFR adventures at Origins, so if I had wanted to, I could have played nothing but LFR. However, that is lame, so instead I played a few LFR games and a few other games.
ADCP 2-2
[sblock]This was an "Adventuring Company" adventure, meaning that ostensibly the PCs were members of adventuring companies competing against each other for the best result in a race. However, because there weren't enough people playing ADCP in any given slot, it just turned into a normal adventure.
The heroic tier version of this adventure involves a race across the Calim deserts. The paragon tier version (which I played) involves a race through the Elemental Chaos. That's pretty cool!
After picking a sponsor (one of four), we were teleported to the Elemental Chaos where we were immediately attacked. True to LFR form, the attack involved copious amounts of fun-destroying daze and immobilize. However, this being paragon tier, the PCs were able to mitigate most of the debuffs and bring some pain to the monsters. Apparently we weren't supposed to beat this encounter, but were instead supposed to flee or be captured.
Note to adventure writers: never, ever, ever write an encounter that is supposed to end in PC capture. Never. Ever. The players would rather see their PCs die than be captured, in most cases.
Anyway, our group was sufficiently resilient that after a bit of a slog, we pulled through. Thereafter we journeyed on to a mysterious hut floating in the Chaos (?!), where thanks to my PC's passive Insight of 32, we were not fooled by the sage inside into going to the wrong location to retrieve the wrong item for him. (I didn't cheese out my Insight on purpose, but as a side-effect of some feats and items and his Paragon Path, he ended up with a ridiculous bonus.) The right location involved fighting some frost giants et al... but thanks to the wizard's Mass Resist Energy we wiped the floor with them. Man, is that a good power!
One of the treasure bundles is a boon, Melora's something-or-another, that grants you a per-encounter fly power. Not bad.[/sblock]
EAST 2-2
[sblock]Bait and switch for the fail. The adventure description says that the dwarves of Earthheart have invited you there to take on a myconid threat. Now, I've always liked myconids as monsters, and my PC has a mushroom phobia (don't ask), so this sounded perfect. Instead, it turns out the myconid thing was just a bluff, and the dwarves really want to give you a priceless artifact of Moradin so you can go to the Elemental Chaos to arcanobabble the mana-capacitor, or something. It made zero sense.
Also, this adventure had FOUR combat encounters and TWO skill challenges. At paragon tier.
Your standard LFR adventure has 2 combats and 2 skill challenges, or 3 combats and 1 skill challenge. And you can usually get through that in 4 hours. There is no way to get through 4-and-2 in 4 hours without cutting something. This ended up running 45 minutes long.
One of the combats was particularly lame: it involved three "hazards" (read: traps that you can't disarm), one with a pull effect that immobilized you, one with a ranged attack that dealt radiant damage, and one with a different ranged attack that dealt lightning damage. According to the DM, per the adventure, the monsters were immune to all of these! (I believe him, too; many LFR adventures are written like that.)[/sblock]
DRAG 2-2
[sblock]A low-heroic (1st-4th level) adventure that supposedly involved figuring out why Dragon Coast ships were being destroyed. Instead, it was just one long "go here and talk to X, he sends you to Y, who sends you to Z". We did talk our way out of a combat against spriggans, which was cool. The final combat was against some random vigilante group that seemed to have nothing to do with the rest of the adventure, which involved pirates. And then it turned out the pirate captain we negotiated with didn't even know why the ships were being sunk! Terrible.[/sblock]
So overall, LFR gets maybe a 'C' grade: about what I expected, warts and all. ADCP 2-2 was pretty enjoyable, EAST 2-2 was annoyingly long, and DRAG 2-2 was disappointing.[/sblock]
You're One in a Minion
[sblock]Speaking of bait and switch... this was advertised as a 4e game in which you play as minions, defending your village from an orc horde. That sounded... intriguing to me and my friends, so we signed up.
Instead, this was a demo of d20 Pro, which is like Map Tools etc. So we paid $8 to view a software demo. Ugh. I thought about leaving, but that would've left the other players in the lurch, so I stuck it out.
The software was pretty slick, but I have no use for it. Also, we weren't really playing minions, but scaled-down 1st level PCs. Whatever.
Grade: D. Only saved from being an F because the DM/demo-er was pretty good.[/sblock]
Dread: Passages
[sblock]Of course I had heard about Dread, but never played it. I really didn't know what to expect from this going in. Would the DM and other players be pretentious turtleneck-wearing, latte-sipping would-be thespians? Would they instead be overly irreverent jokers who diffused the dread until it lost all meaning? No way to tell in advance.
As it turned out, I needn't have worried: this was one of the best role-playing experiences I've ever had.
The other players were four college students from Baldwin Wallace (a college in Ohio), and a librarian from Avon (a suburb of Cleveland). The college students were obviously 20-something, and the other woman and I were in the 30-40 range. The DM was a professor at one of the SUNY schools.
The scenario was that we were all British children, ages 12-14, being evacuated to Canada during World War Two. We were aboard a merchant vessel repurposed into a passenger ship. There were essentially three pairs of characters: a set of brothers, a set of "best mates", and a brother-and-sister (me and the librarian lady). Everyone knew each other vaguely -- lived in the same town -- but the strong personal connections were in those diads.
My questionnaire ended up leading to two brilliant moments. The first came during character creation when I answered one of the early questions with "I don't like being evacuated but Mum said I had to." Then a later question asked
So all of a sudden my totally mundane answer became loaded with supernatural overtones!
There was another question about what my character was afraid of. As I had recently re-read Bellairs' Face in the Frost, I answered along those lines -- that my character was scared of "the old man's face in the frost on the windowpane, because he had only one eye and seemed to frown at me." (I added the one-eyed part just to be slightly different.) This led to possibly the greatest on-the-spot RP-ing I've ever come up with.
The situation was this -- after our ship was torpedoed, we escaped in a life boat. Everyone seemed to be ignoring us, in a supernatural way. (Like they couldn't see us.) And we were seeing strange visions, such as a Viking longship passing through the burned wreckage. Eventually we washed up on an island where it became clear that we were in some kind of fairytale realm. (Actually -- Fairy itself -- but this wasn't 100% clear yet.) Along the way, we ran into an old man -- and the GM described him as looking basically like Gandalf -- not using that name, but describing the staff, the floppy hat, bushy beard, etc.
"Oh, and he only has one eye," the GM added.
The other characters were totally weirded out by this one-eyed codger, especially when my PC started hiding behind them. "Who is that?!" they demanded of me.
"I think... I think it's Odin!" I replied.
Now, I don't know where that answer came from, but it was perfect. It fit in with the earlier Viking longship sighting, it fit with the one-eyed theme, and it even fit with this old man giving us prophetic advice. But I never intended for the one-eyed "face in the frost" to be Odin at the beginning, when filling out the questionnaire. It just... worked out. Awesome, awesome moment there.
In the end, everyone survived! We made out it of Fairy, rescued some other children, and didn't topple the Tower a single time. And this was despite me making a stupid pull about 1/3 of the way through the game that left the thing way more precarious than it could have been. (It was a stupid pull in the metagame sense of leaving the Jenga Tower too rickety -- within the RP part, pulling made sense at the time.)
Definitely a great game, and my hat is off to the other players. I would not have guessed the college kids had it in them to sustain the mood for 4 hours, but they did. And the GM was excellent.
Grade: A.
Aside from some dice, my only purchase was the Dread book. Yeah, yeah, you don't need it, but I like to support people who come up with good ideas. I fear that I will never run a game (it surely can't live up to my virgin experience), but that's no different than a bunch of other games and books I own.[/sblock]
Star Wars Saga Edition
[sblock]This was supposed to be some sort of adventure written specifically for Origins, but the GM admitted he wasn't finished and offered to either run it as-is, or substitute a different adventure. We opted for a sub, and I thought we were off to a bad start. But it turned out to be a lot of fun.
The adventure he actually ran was called Murder on the Executor, apparently a WotC adventure from before the loss of the SW license. The PCs were all Imperial non-comms investigating the death of a bridge officer on Darth Vader's flagship.
(Funny note: the GM had an unfortunate inability to pronounce "Executor" correctly. He kept saying 'ecks-cuh-too-tor', like some combination of "extra" (minus the TR, plus a C) and "tutor".)
The players agreed beforehand that being Imperials, a certain amount of PvP was to be expected in the end. However, during the course of the adventure, due to some horrible die-rolling, we turned into the Keystone Kops. So instead of being conniving officers trying to pin blame on each other, etc. we were just incompetent boobs blundering through the investigation.
What was particularly funny was that one of the characters was apparently a rebel sympathizer, and the player decided to have her (the PC) betray us at a key moment. That would've been fine, except that the key moment was NOT the final encounter even though the player thought it was. So the GM had to do some fancy footwork to make things work out, and he pulled it off.
In the end, the murderer was unmasked, the traitor PC was put down, and it was a not-so-glorious victory for the Empire. We all got commendations from Vader himself. (My character crapped himself at that point.)
Grade: B. A bit of a rocky opening, but the GM did a fine job pulling things together. He was also really into the Star Wars theme and flavor, and that led the players to be into it as well.[/sblock]
Dresden Files RPG
[sblock]So I guess this was recently released or something? And everyone was all excited to play. I didn't even know that when I signed up -- I just liked the books (well, the first 3-4 after which I stopped) and thought it sounded fun.
This was my first experience with the Fate system or whatever it's called. I'm not sure if Dresden used vanilla rules or some custom version, but they felt needlessly fiddly to me, especially the spellcasting. You'd think in a game about wizards that the spellcasting rules should be smooth as butter... but what do I know.
I think the GMs (there were two) had a decent idea for a scenario, but the execution was lacking. Also, their table management skills were pretty poor.
The scenario was that our PCs were all at the opening of a play, Shakespeare's The Tempest, in Cleveland. (Both GMs were from there.) It soon transpired that the "special troupe" of actors were obviously not human, and the "special effects" were obviously magic. (Well, obvious to our PCs, not to the muggles.)
The problem was that the PCs' various reasons for being there were too incompatible. My PC was a mob boss, and another PC was my henchman; we were there to meet a contact and buy a magic artifact. (I collected them.) Another PC was a "half-demon cop". Another PC was a "were-hawk reporter" and troublemaker. Another PC was an actress who had been displaced by the "special troupe", and the last PC was a local wizard.
So the actress and the reporter wanted to know what was up with the play itself, my PC and the henchman just wanted to meet our contact and make the buy, the wizard wanted to know how the "special effects" worked, and the cop... well the player was kind of obnoxious so I'm not really sure what he wanted.
For way, way too long the GMs paid attention to the four other PCs, who were investigating backstage, leaving my PC + the henchman PC with nothing to do. ("You spot your contact in the balcony from you private box, but he clearly wants you to wait for him there.") Twiddle thumbs....
It also should have been obvious to the GMs that the player of the actress PC was bored out of her mind. I'm not sure what they could've done to engage her (not knowing her PC's motivations), but there had to be something.
Eventually things turned into a big brawl -- "Prospero" was really an insane wizard who had enslaved "Caliban" (a troll), "Ariel" (a flying fey), and "Miranda" (a spellcasting fey) to help him complete a ritual that required The Tempest itself as a component. Prospero also had some hired muscle in the form of 3 ghouls (posing as actors). The combat was reasonably fun mechanically, but very unsatisfying flavor-wise.
See, my PC was supposed to be this debonair mob-boss who had acquired a magic holy sword and become an unwitting agent of God. That sounded cool, as I could see him ordering hits but only on really bad people. But the way the PC was built and the way the GMs wanted him run was as a fireball-tossing blaster using the holy sword to wreak havok. But not by swordfighting (he had no Weapon skill), but by casting spells. Through the sword. And sinking the mental stress into Heaven. Or something.
It just really jarred with my idea of a mob boss. But whatever -- I did get to cast a Fireball that totally incinerated Miranda. (I rolled 3 +'s, she rolled 3 -'s.)
The game was also frustrating to me because literally up until that fireball, I rolled no net-positive rolls the entire game. Seriously. Not exaggerating!
And, the GMs seemed very willing to reward obnoxious-demon-cop-guy for even the most ludicrous uses of his keywords (or whatever they are called -- Aspects or something), whereas they never rewarded me for trying to play up my keywords.
Finally, the game just didn't feel very strongly Dresden-like. It could've been any random "fantasy modern" game.
Grade: C. Would be a D but I bumped it up because I did (sort of) learn a new system, so I've got that going for me.[/sblock]
So there you have it -- what I did at Origins.
I went to Origins for the first time in 10 years. It was a fun, for the most part. Here's what I did.
D&D Living Forgotten Realms (LFR)
[sblock]They were premiering a lot of LFR adventures at Origins, so if I had wanted to, I could have played nothing but LFR. However, that is lame, so instead I played a few LFR games and a few other games.
ADCP 2-2
[sblock]This was an "Adventuring Company" adventure, meaning that ostensibly the PCs were members of adventuring companies competing against each other for the best result in a race. However, because there weren't enough people playing ADCP in any given slot, it just turned into a normal adventure.
The heroic tier version of this adventure involves a race across the Calim deserts. The paragon tier version (which I played) involves a race through the Elemental Chaos. That's pretty cool!
After picking a sponsor (one of four), we were teleported to the Elemental Chaos where we were immediately attacked. True to LFR form, the attack involved copious amounts of fun-destroying daze and immobilize. However, this being paragon tier, the PCs were able to mitigate most of the debuffs and bring some pain to the monsters. Apparently we weren't supposed to beat this encounter, but were instead supposed to flee or be captured.
Note to adventure writers: never, ever, ever write an encounter that is supposed to end in PC capture. Never. Ever. The players would rather see their PCs die than be captured, in most cases.
Anyway, our group was sufficiently resilient that after a bit of a slog, we pulled through. Thereafter we journeyed on to a mysterious hut floating in the Chaos (?!), where thanks to my PC's passive Insight of 32, we were not fooled by the sage inside into going to the wrong location to retrieve the wrong item for him. (I didn't cheese out my Insight on purpose, but as a side-effect of some feats and items and his Paragon Path, he ended up with a ridiculous bonus.) The right location involved fighting some frost giants et al... but thanks to the wizard's Mass Resist Energy we wiped the floor with them. Man, is that a good power!
One of the treasure bundles is a boon, Melora's something-or-another, that grants you a per-encounter fly power. Not bad.[/sblock]
EAST 2-2
[sblock]Bait and switch for the fail. The adventure description says that the dwarves of Earthheart have invited you there to take on a myconid threat. Now, I've always liked myconids as monsters, and my PC has a mushroom phobia (don't ask), so this sounded perfect. Instead, it turns out the myconid thing was just a bluff, and the dwarves really want to give you a priceless artifact of Moradin so you can go to the Elemental Chaos to arcanobabble the mana-capacitor, or something. It made zero sense.
Also, this adventure had FOUR combat encounters and TWO skill challenges. At paragon tier.
Your standard LFR adventure has 2 combats and 2 skill challenges, or 3 combats and 1 skill challenge. And you can usually get through that in 4 hours. There is no way to get through 4-and-2 in 4 hours without cutting something. This ended up running 45 minutes long.
One of the combats was particularly lame: it involved three "hazards" (read: traps that you can't disarm), one with a pull effect that immobilized you, one with a ranged attack that dealt radiant damage, and one with a different ranged attack that dealt lightning damage. According to the DM, per the adventure, the monsters were immune to all of these! (I believe him, too; many LFR adventures are written like that.)[/sblock]
DRAG 2-2
[sblock]A low-heroic (1st-4th level) adventure that supposedly involved figuring out why Dragon Coast ships were being destroyed. Instead, it was just one long "go here and talk to X, he sends you to Y, who sends you to Z". We did talk our way out of a combat against spriggans, which was cool. The final combat was against some random vigilante group that seemed to have nothing to do with the rest of the adventure, which involved pirates. And then it turned out the pirate captain we negotiated with didn't even know why the ships were being sunk! Terrible.[/sblock]
So overall, LFR gets maybe a 'C' grade: about what I expected, warts and all. ADCP 2-2 was pretty enjoyable, EAST 2-2 was annoyingly long, and DRAG 2-2 was disappointing.[/sblock]
You're One in a Minion
[sblock]Speaking of bait and switch... this was advertised as a 4e game in which you play as minions, defending your village from an orc horde. That sounded... intriguing to me and my friends, so we signed up.
Instead, this was a demo of d20 Pro, which is like Map Tools etc. So we paid $8 to view a software demo. Ugh. I thought about leaving, but that would've left the other players in the lurch, so I stuck it out.
The software was pretty slick, but I have no use for it. Also, we weren't really playing minions, but scaled-down 1st level PCs. Whatever.
Grade: D. Only saved from being an F because the DM/demo-er was pretty good.[/sblock]
Dread: Passages
[sblock]Of course I had heard about Dread, but never played it. I really didn't know what to expect from this going in. Would the DM and other players be pretentious turtleneck-wearing, latte-sipping would-be thespians? Would they instead be overly irreverent jokers who diffused the dread until it lost all meaning? No way to tell in advance.
As it turned out, I needn't have worried: this was one of the best role-playing experiences I've ever had.
The other players were four college students from Baldwin Wallace (a college in Ohio), and a librarian from Avon (a suburb of Cleveland). The college students were obviously 20-something, and the other woman and I were in the 30-40 range. The DM was a professor at one of the SUNY schools.
The scenario was that we were all British children, ages 12-14, being evacuated to Canada during World War Two. We were aboard a merchant vessel repurposed into a passenger ship. There were essentially three pairs of characters: a set of brothers, a set of "best mates", and a brother-and-sister (me and the librarian lady). Everyone knew each other vaguely -- lived in the same town -- but the strong personal connections were in those diads.
My questionnaire ended up leading to two brilliant moments. The first came during character creation when I answered one of the early questions with "I don't like being evacuated but Mum said I had to." Then a later question asked
How do you commemorate the anniversary of your mother's death five years ago?
There was another question about what my character was afraid of. As I had recently re-read Bellairs' Face in the Frost, I answered along those lines -- that my character was scared of "the old man's face in the frost on the windowpane, because he had only one eye and seemed to frown at me." (I added the one-eyed part just to be slightly different.) This led to possibly the greatest on-the-spot RP-ing I've ever come up with.
The situation was this -- after our ship was torpedoed, we escaped in a life boat. Everyone seemed to be ignoring us, in a supernatural way. (Like they couldn't see us.) And we were seeing strange visions, such as a Viking longship passing through the burned wreckage. Eventually we washed up on an island where it became clear that we were in some kind of fairytale realm. (Actually -- Fairy itself -- but this wasn't 100% clear yet.) Along the way, we ran into an old man -- and the GM described him as looking basically like Gandalf -- not using that name, but describing the staff, the floppy hat, bushy beard, etc.
"Oh, and he only has one eye," the GM added.
The other characters were totally weirded out by this one-eyed codger, especially when my PC started hiding behind them. "Who is that?!" they demanded of me.
"I think... I think it's Odin!" I replied.
Now, I don't know where that answer came from, but it was perfect. It fit in with the earlier Viking longship sighting, it fit with the one-eyed theme, and it even fit with this old man giving us prophetic advice. But I never intended for the one-eyed "face in the frost" to be Odin at the beginning, when filling out the questionnaire. It just... worked out. Awesome, awesome moment there.
In the end, everyone survived! We made out it of Fairy, rescued some other children, and didn't topple the Tower a single time. And this was despite me making a stupid pull about 1/3 of the way through the game that left the thing way more precarious than it could have been. (It was a stupid pull in the metagame sense of leaving the Jenga Tower too rickety -- within the RP part, pulling made sense at the time.)
Definitely a great game, and my hat is off to the other players. I would not have guessed the college kids had it in them to sustain the mood for 4 hours, but they did. And the GM was excellent.
Grade: A.
Aside from some dice, my only purchase was the Dread book. Yeah, yeah, you don't need it, but I like to support people who come up with good ideas. I fear that I will never run a game (it surely can't live up to my virgin experience), but that's no different than a bunch of other games and books I own.[/sblock]
Star Wars Saga Edition
[sblock]This was supposed to be some sort of adventure written specifically for Origins, but the GM admitted he wasn't finished and offered to either run it as-is, or substitute a different adventure. We opted for a sub, and I thought we were off to a bad start. But it turned out to be a lot of fun.
The adventure he actually ran was called Murder on the Executor, apparently a WotC adventure from before the loss of the SW license. The PCs were all Imperial non-comms investigating the death of a bridge officer on Darth Vader's flagship.
(Funny note: the GM had an unfortunate inability to pronounce "Executor" correctly. He kept saying 'ecks-cuh-too-tor', like some combination of "extra" (minus the TR, plus a C) and "tutor".)
The players agreed beforehand that being Imperials, a certain amount of PvP was to be expected in the end. However, during the course of the adventure, due to some horrible die-rolling, we turned into the Keystone Kops. So instead of being conniving officers trying to pin blame on each other, etc. we were just incompetent boobs blundering through the investigation.
What was particularly funny was that one of the characters was apparently a rebel sympathizer, and the player decided to have her (the PC) betray us at a key moment. That would've been fine, except that the key moment was NOT the final encounter even though the player thought it was. So the GM had to do some fancy footwork to make things work out, and he pulled it off.
In the end, the murderer was unmasked, the traitor PC was put down, and it was a not-so-glorious victory for the Empire. We all got commendations from Vader himself. (My character crapped himself at that point.)
Grade: B. A bit of a rocky opening, but the GM did a fine job pulling things together. He was also really into the Star Wars theme and flavor, and that led the players to be into it as well.[/sblock]
Dresden Files RPG
[sblock]So I guess this was recently released or something? And everyone was all excited to play. I didn't even know that when I signed up -- I just liked the books (well, the first 3-4 after which I stopped) and thought it sounded fun.
This was my first experience with the Fate system or whatever it's called. I'm not sure if Dresden used vanilla rules or some custom version, but they felt needlessly fiddly to me, especially the spellcasting. You'd think in a game about wizards that the spellcasting rules should be smooth as butter... but what do I know.
I think the GMs (there were two) had a decent idea for a scenario, but the execution was lacking. Also, their table management skills were pretty poor.
The scenario was that our PCs were all at the opening of a play, Shakespeare's The Tempest, in Cleveland. (Both GMs were from there.) It soon transpired that the "special troupe" of actors were obviously not human, and the "special effects" were obviously magic. (Well, obvious to our PCs, not to the muggles.)
The problem was that the PCs' various reasons for being there were too incompatible. My PC was a mob boss, and another PC was my henchman; we were there to meet a contact and buy a magic artifact. (I collected them.) Another PC was a "half-demon cop". Another PC was a "were-hawk reporter" and troublemaker. Another PC was an actress who had been displaced by the "special troupe", and the last PC was a local wizard.
So the actress and the reporter wanted to know what was up with the play itself, my PC and the henchman just wanted to meet our contact and make the buy, the wizard wanted to know how the "special effects" worked, and the cop... well the player was kind of obnoxious so I'm not really sure what he wanted.
For way, way too long the GMs paid attention to the four other PCs, who were investigating backstage, leaving my PC + the henchman PC with nothing to do. ("You spot your contact in the balcony from you private box, but he clearly wants you to wait for him there.") Twiddle thumbs....
It also should have been obvious to the GMs that the player of the actress PC was bored out of her mind. I'm not sure what they could've done to engage her (not knowing her PC's motivations), but there had to be something.
Eventually things turned into a big brawl -- "Prospero" was really an insane wizard who had enslaved "Caliban" (a troll), "Ariel" (a flying fey), and "Miranda" (a spellcasting fey) to help him complete a ritual that required The Tempest itself as a component. Prospero also had some hired muscle in the form of 3 ghouls (posing as actors). The combat was reasonably fun mechanically, but very unsatisfying flavor-wise.
See, my PC was supposed to be this debonair mob-boss who had acquired a magic holy sword and become an unwitting agent of God. That sounded cool, as I could see him ordering hits but only on really bad people. But the way the PC was built and the way the GMs wanted him run was as a fireball-tossing blaster using the holy sword to wreak havok. But not by swordfighting (he had no Weapon skill), but by casting spells. Through the sword. And sinking the mental stress into Heaven. Or something.
It just really jarred with my idea of a mob boss. But whatever -- I did get to cast a Fireball that totally incinerated Miranda. (I rolled 3 +'s, she rolled 3 -'s.)
The game was also frustrating to me because literally up until that fireball, I rolled no net-positive rolls the entire game. Seriously. Not exaggerating!
And, the GMs seemed very willing to reward obnoxious-demon-cop-guy for even the most ludicrous uses of his keywords (or whatever they are called -- Aspects or something), whereas they never rewarded me for trying to play up my keywords.
Finally, the game just didn't feel very strongly Dresden-like. It could've been any random "fantasy modern" game.
Grade: C. Would be a D but I bumped it up because I did (sort of) learn a new system, so I've got that going for me.[/sblock]
So there you have it -- what I did at Origins.
