Gamma World: Reflections

The long running Gamma World campaign has come to a successful conclusion.  I am pleased with the result of the campaign and that we enjoyed playing it.  However, I like to learn something from everything I try to do, so:

The issues that arose particularly from this game revolved mainly about the structure of the game rather than the story.  Firstly, the Red Box Hack method of generating the world set up a somewhat strange world and established a more ridiculous than frightening post apocalyptic feel and any chance of the horror of this type of scenario was put to bed by the character generation system and the mechanics of the game.  So embracing the ridiculousness of some of the players suggestions (with the key being you can't do them all!) and the random mechanics, the game moved on.  Unlike the 4e game, the sheer randomness of the powers and omega tech meant that designing scenarios became a guessing match - any attempts at balancing encounters went out the window.  This total randomness in players' powers was acceptable for the length of campaign time (1 level gained per session) but I don't think it would have been playable much longer.

The pluses from this was that I got to run Gamma World, I used all the material I bought for the game, I got to use my favourite monsters from the setting and most importantly I pulled off, thus could add, another enjoyable and successful campaign to my GM credentials!  The last few sessions I tried to plan less and get more player input, particularly with the skill challenges and this seemed to work well.  One of my issues with GM story telling as apposed to GM led games is that I am often not quick in thinking up 'cool stuff'.  I usually have to think through things such as conflict resolution or outcomes of encounters and this takes time, with my mind going blank when put under pressure.  However, realising that there are other people who have cool ideas around the table that you can run with and not be too caught up in your own story was the big take home idea of these last sessions.  It makes me think I could pull off a game of Spirit of the Century, Dead of Night, etc as I have shown that I can think of the larger story yet be flexible enough to incorporate the ideas put forward by the players.

I won't be running Gamma World again (except perhaps as a Furnace game but that's a different post) as the sheer silliness and randomness was fun but not a repeatable game idea.