OK. I have an announcement to make. Generating four characters in a single night is a very ambitious thing to do. We failed! I managed to get three of the systems done and it took us a four-hour session to do so! We started with Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC). Then we moved to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D) and finished with Cypher System. There are only two players that do not have an Earthdawn Character so I will catch up with them prior to Earthdawn night.
Count the number of players right!
The first issue I had was the fact that I thought I was dealing with four players when I actually had five. That means I was short in the number of character sheets that I had. Luckily one of my players was about to copy the sheets I was in shortage with so night saved. DCC was totally the easiest to create for. Each of the six (we had one extra for this system) players generated four 0 level characters in just over an hour. It was a fun time. But the alarm bells did not ring for me at that stage. Over an hour for the easiest system is an issue.
AD&D is more complicated than I thought
We moved on to AD&D because I thought this was going to be fairly simple to move on to. I was wrong. The six (the surprise player stayed for this system) players knew very little of this system. I had to explain all of the choices and so this system took us the better part of two hours to sort out. That was without equipment! I was under the pump at this point but was determined to knock over the cypher System though. With a little coercion, we moved on to that.
I enjoyed the builds for the Cypher System the most
During the DCC creation, we talked about our previous games. These discussions were filled with laughter and fond reminiscing. I thought at that point that we already knew where the decision was going. But then we moved into Cypher System. As some of the players worked on detail I covered rules and I think I piqued a lot of the players’ interest. Interesting characters were made and I was impressed with the process. So it all still hangs in the balance.
Earthdawn Players
Of the five players, three already have Earthdawn characters. When we had a night of Conan that was short on players we would play Earthdawn instead. That means that only two of the five need to catch up and I can do that in the next couple of weeks with them. The group seemed OK with that solution.
Mechanically speaking
So, for the night, I managed to get through only three of the systems. That was purely mechanical aspects too, though Cypher includes setting in the setup. We had fun. There was a lot of laughs and interest in the games that were presented. I am really looking forward to where this is heading. As yet I have no idea what the first game will be that we play, apart from the fact that it will not be Earthdawn! Wish me luck as I make that decision. I feel that it will be either DCC or Cypher but that is yet to be decided. Keep rolling!
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Impressive that you got through that much!