Tabletop Gaming on a Budget

Happy New Year! I wish you good health, success and fun in 2018. Let’s start off with RPG Blog Carnival for January 2018 which is presented by Renaissance Gamer and the subject is Tabletop Gaming on a Budget.

Tabletop gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies that I know of. You get hours of entertainment from a small monetary investment. Still, there are times when your budget is tight and you wish to game. I shall explore some of the cheaper options that I know.

First, if you don’t have a game to play and no budget to acquire one, you can still play. There are lots of wonderful free tabletop games out there like Lady Blackbird by John Harper, Lasers & Feelings by John Harper, Love & Justice by Senda Linaugh, Fudge rpg by Steffan O’ Sullivan, and many others. You can also get some good games for Pay What You Want through Evil Hat Productions like Fate Core by Leonard Balsera, Brian Engard, Jeremy Keller, Ryan Macklin & Mike Olson, or Fate Accelerated by Clark Valentine, Leonard Balsera, Fred Hicks, Mike Olson & Amanda Valentine. You can also find a variety of other products in the Pay What You Want section on DriveThruRPG. If you wish to venture into the more experimental realm, you can download some draft games from Game Chef and try them out. You can still play a wide variety of games with little to no expense.

So,you’ve found a game and now you wish to expand upon it.. Usually, games should be playable with just the core rules, but maybe you’ve  played it extensively and are looking for more options. Look around online for the game’s community. If it’s your favourite game, there are bound to be many other fans who play this game as well, and they may have created their own shared material which you can bring into your own games. If you wish to do something which the core rules doesn’t easily allow, talk to the community and see if you can figure out a way to make it work. Tabletop gaming is a creative endeavor.

Now, if you still need that extra product for your game, talk with your group about it. See if you can pool your money to purchase it since it will help improve the group’s overall experience. If it’s a physical product then you would have to determine where the product will be kept. I would recommend that whoever needs it at the time gets to keep it and read it. If it’s a digital product then it’s easily shared  amongst your closed group. It’s also a great idea to keep an eye out for deals. DriveThruRPG holds frequent sales of their products, and Bundle of Holding is an excellent website with great deals on rpgs.

Conventions can be another place to purchase games for low prices. Most conventions have a second hand store where folks try to sell their old used games. However, most conventions have an entrance fee which you should take into account before shopping. CanGames, the gaming convention which I help organize, only charges if you wish to sit down and play a game. You can come visit the convention, look around, and even purchase items at the various vendors at no charge. CanGames also has a booth which sells used games that the attendees brought to sell.

Another resource part of a budget that few consider is time. We live busy lives and if your money is tight, there is a chance that you may work several jobs so your time is limited.. So, while you’ve found and enjoy gaming, you don’t have the time to dedicate several hours in a night to play. One option then are play by posts. These games go at a slower pace than live play since the sessions are stretched out over a much longer period of time and players participate at their own rate. In this case, you can just spend a few minutes typing your character’s actions when you have the time, as opposed to playing for several hours straight.

There you have it, a few ideas on places to acquire and ways to play tabletop rpgs for cheap. Where do you acquire your tabletop games for low prices? How do you get the most bang for your buck?

RPGaDay: Favourite free game

On August 7th, the topic is my favourite free game. I find it hard to pick favourites. There are so many great free games out there. Some of my favourites include Fudge by Steffan O’Sullivan and Lady Blackbird by John Harper.

I fell in love with Fudge when I first found it online in its little corner of usenet in the early 1990s. It came out in 1992 and I found it a few years after its release. I enjoy it as it provides me with a system using descriptors rather than just numbers. The game showed many options as it was meant as a universal system. Additional, I enjoy the stress system of health where only the worst injury counts and you don’t get worse unless you suffer a worse wound or enough small wounds accumulate. It provide a good mix of potential one hit knock-out and drawn out death by many blows. Fudge also provides basic tools to create your own game. Since then, there are many other games which Fudge spawned including a small game known as Fate.

Fudge released some various settings which I enjoyed. My favourite is Terra Incognita which I describe as National Geographic Society as a secret agency. You discreetly explore the world, use cool gadgets and have tea at four. A fun setting which focuses on exploration and dealing with problems in a non-violent manner.

I played Lady Blackbird at GenCon 2014 for the first time. The setting is a space steam punk scenario. You see some influence from Star Wars and Firefly in it. There are characters provided with some rules to create your own but you are highly encouraged to use the provided ones. Three characters are the crew of the Owl, a smuggler ship and the two other characters are her passengers, Lady Blackbird and her bodyguard . Lady Blackbird ran away from an arranged married and hired the Owl to be reunited with her secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint. Unfortunately, the ship gets caught in Imperial entanglements.

The dice mechanic is simple as it is a pool of d6 where a success is any result of 4 or above. If you roll enough successes then you succeed. Where the game shines, it is the keys attached to each character. They are goal in the adventure which the player can follow or ignore. If they follow, they get rewarded with experience which they can spend to change the character or buy extra dice in their general pool. Alternatively, you can do the complete opposite and buy off the key and replace it with a different one.

I found Lady Blackbird a very character forward game. There is no set path. You have a map of the galaxy, you have an initial set-up and folks have goals. How the group goes about it is left to the group. When I played at GenCon, Lady Blackbird revealed she had the jewel of the storm to give as her dowry to Flint. This led to dealing with the Underworld as my character tried to replace it with a fake to sell the original in the market. My character had the key of greed and key to accomplish their mission of delivering Lady Blackbird to Flint. He figured the jewel of the storm wasn’t part of the agreement. He failed hilariously. The jewel of the storm is purely a creation of the Lady Blackbird’s player.