There’s this game, you may have heard of it? It’s called Gamma World and everyone seems to be talking about it and/or playing it. Yours truly got fascinated with Gamma World long ago, after hearing about it at PAX East. The hooks sunk even deeper when I spoke to Dave over at Critical Hits about the playtest.
What’s so special about Gamma World? First, it’s 4th edition D&D ruleset on massive, mind-bending amounts of peyote; the ruleset is vastly tweaked, made wilder and faster and more agressive by several degrees. Second, it’s a really great return to something that there is a distinct lack of — the gonzo rpg. It seems that every game that you come across these days is you and your friends versus a world-spanning threat. There aren’t a lot of games in the mainstream –certainnly nothing else in WotC’s stable — that explicitly says “Relax, have fun. Laugh and be zany.” I appreciate that Gamma World holds the banner for the gonzo, following in the great tradition of Paranoia (which in my opinion is the classic gonzo game).
If there’s a chink in the armor, it’s that whlie we can make characters tremendously fast (10 minutes to start, around 5 once you’ve made a few), there are currently no official ways to make an adventure quickly. All the ease of play has been passed to the players, while the DM gets the standard encounter building tools that you use for 4e. 4e makes building encounters easier for sure, but for a game like Gamma World the tools need to enable a GM to get the basics to run a game right when they want to play. One can always improv a game (I did so, though with the help of some tools I built), but Gamma World should provide those tools explicitly. Experienced GMs will probably do what I’ve been doing automatically, but lesser GMs might be at a loss, especially as there is not much other help for building an encounter.
(did I mention that I have a set of tools I made up to do just that? I’ll be releasing it soon on the site. It’s called Automatic Adventures and I think it’s pretty damn cool. Patience grasshoppers!)
So that’s my basic thoughts on the game. The very next day after I picked it up, I had to play. I actually got a couple of sessions that weekend. I’ll talk about the first here.
My first victim was my buddy Dave over at Guilt Free Games. He rolled up a Seismic Gravity Controller. I wasn’t really jazzed up by the adventures or encounters in the book, so time for Automatic Adventures. I had done, no prep other than build the first draft of AA, but using it we established that his character Thurgood was a street tough, looking to knock out whoever got in his way.
Around the area known as the Devil’s Bend, a cult of genetically engineered humans known as the Cult of In Vitro had been causing problems to the other denizens of the area. Thurgood had come into a town (can’t find my notes we wrote unfortunately), right as there was a toxic spill! Irradiated vegetation came to life in the form of reptiles, and Thurgood fought the lizard vines off bravely. There wasn’t much time to celebrate though, as even more lizard vines arose from the sludge, attacking the survivors in the town.
Fortunately for Thurgood there was an empty car nearby. He hotwired it with a quick mechanics roll and started to flee the chaos of the town. Unfortunately for him, the agents who caused this spill were members of the cult of In Vitro were under strict orders not to let anyone leave alive.
So here we tinkered around with some makeshift vehicle rules (so I like to tinker! sue me), which resulted ultimately in Thurgood shaking off his pursuers and making his way to further adventures…
It was great and fast fun.
Next up is Cockroach empaths and cockroach drones piloting humans.
Also, what do you want to see on At-Will concerning Gamma World? Gamma World is not going to ever be our main emphasis, but if it’s 4e I like to cover it.
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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Cockroach drones piloting humans? Sounds like The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. Man, that’d be a fun kind of themed Easter egg for a series of Gamma World adventures: implicit references to lots of completely different kind of games.
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the Automatic Adventures thing, and other GW stuff, but right now I gotta go to work.
Sounds great, and I can’t wait for something like AA. I just got GW last night for our group and they wanted to play right away, but I waas in the same boat. DM with no preplanned excitement and not to pumped about the ‘adventure’ in the book. Something like AA would be perfect given all the creative zaniness inherent in the rulebook, I would have expected something with random rolling tables for adventure-crafting. It would have fit the other random tables to roll on for Ancient junk, whole characters, why not factions and plot points? Please make AA a resource with fully randomized plots with rolling tables. That’d be great.
So far, I’m already touting AA as a tool my players could use for an easy time trying out DMing, (so I can finally be a player, and maybe get to play that hawkoid sniper.)
I’m looking forward to GW being a diversion from our main epic 4e game, incorporating new players with the simplified rules without demanding much committment.
I’m certainly eager to see this. I’ve been curious about the game, but the notion of even an abbreviated form of 4E encounter-building is disquieting for something supposedly so “pick up and play”-oriented.
Hey, Quinn, just noticed: You’re missing an “m” from “Gamma Terra” in the title.
Also, I was wondering what you thought about using D&D monsters with Gamma World. Obviously, the basic mechanics are essentially compatible, but have you got any balance concerns? I know damage output tends to be a lot higher in GW, while in-combat healing is nearly non-existant, so it seems like that would have some impact on balance.
Speaking of monsters, I’m surprised GW doesn’t have any random encounter tables. That seems very much in keeping with the spirit of the game. Maybe a bunch of pre-built, pre-balanced monster-and-hazard mixes, grouped by level and terrain (or theme?) in random tables would be a useful thing. I’d totally steal monsters from D&D to fill out the lists, too.
Man, I really do not need to be thinking about this, now.
I agree, I think that the DM support could have been a little sharper. I was able to improv a session in a couple minutes, and the zaniness allowed it to work out well, but I could see a newer DM, or someone less sure of their improv skills having difficulty. Due to some interesting die rolling, half of my group was psychic plants. To create a quick setting, we did a few rounds of improv for the characters, and the location, and ended up fighting robot alligators with missiles in the depths of an abandoned shopping mall/ sewers. The monsters being the same as 4e monsters helped significantly for game balance.
@ Matt Sheridan: I think one of the main things about “balance” in Gamma World is that it takes 10 minutes to create a character, and only 500 XP to get to 2nd level. The books basically say “yeah, you’re probably going to die”. Which honestly, was fantastic. The lack of healing, or of a dedicated defender role mean that encounters are not balanced, and the shifting alpha mutations make that even harder. I kind of like that they threw it out the window, using only rough guidelines for balance: the xp budget.