The Catch-Uppening #RPGaDay2017

5. Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

Ken Hite's Day After Ragnarok nails it for me.

6. You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do.

We have actually been talking about doing a gaming retreat lately, so this isn't too far off what we were thinking about -- although we would probably be doing a retreat over a weekend, rather than a whole week.

I think you've kind of got two ways to go. Either you use the time to play a single, long-arc adventure in a condensed period of time (say, something like the seminal MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP) or you play a number of one-shots over that time to try a bunch of new games (or revisit old favourites). My tastes often skew toward novelty, so I'd probably lean in that direction.

So my "new games" lineup would probably include: SPIRIT OF '77, TREMULUS, THE VEIL, ECLIPSE PHASE, and Dan Bayn's great noir game SECRETS AND LIES.

7. What was your most impactful RPG session?

This is a tough question, because we've had a lot of strong sessions over the last few years. Maybe, for me personally, the session of APOCALYPSE WORLD a couple of years ago when everything really fell apart for my character Fox, leaving him with nothing except his love for the unreliable Driver Gremlin. I've played a lot of games that were a "downward spiral" before, but never one where I struggled so hard and failed so utterly, costing so much. By the end of that game, we were truly desperate and alone.

8. What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2 hours or less?

I think you can probably have a decent game of FIASCO in 2 hours, if things are going smoothly and everyone knows the game.

Lately, though, we've been playing my haunted house game NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE, which has been a three-player game (not including me as GM) of intense drama. Those sessions skew toward the shorter side, and it's a good thing, because with only three players there are often 2/3 characters "on screen" at any one time. So that doesn't give anyone a lot of time to sit out and catch their breath. It's good, because we get a lot of stuff done in two hours, but also demanding. Last session we decompressed for about half an hour afterwards, chatting, and I think we all needed that.

So my real answer to this question is: if you're playing a drama-intensive game, 2 hours is a good time length.