RPG A Day, 2017

August Ninth (On time as I start writing)

Prompt: What is a good RPG to play for about ten sessions?

Hmm. To some extent, the answer is “any”, in that the session length isn’t specified and you can do a lot in a 10 session campaign. Narrowing it down, I’d say “One that is not driven by the ‘zero to hero’ paradigm common to a lot of games, so you can experience a lot of the potential of the game in a single long adventure.”

If I have to pick one good example, it would be Call of Cthulhu. While you can hypothetically play a series of adventures, and characters certainly can improve in skills as they go slowly insane, it doesn’t rely on the dangling carrot of gaining more/better k3wl p0w3rz as you progress. (Lest anyone think I’m only discussing D&D-inspired class/level games, let me gesture melodramatically to a huge stack of White Wolf products, where one of the first things you notice is that the core books are full of awesome 5-dot abilities and you’re usually lucky to have a single two-dot power when you start out.)