last year, just for fun during my summer break, I watched almost 30 Matthew McConaughey movies (even more of them than I initially planned). I never did post a full account of that whole journey and my resultant novice-movie-reviewer verdicts, but maybe I still will someday. for now I will say that the key results of that project were:
- I now have a pretty detailed range of opinions about most of Mr. McConaughey's movies and
- I can confidently spell the actor's surname.
I also read his recent-ish memoir, Greenlights, which was an interesting package of retrospective optimism. last summer was a very good summer.
and now summer break 2023 has barely even blinked itself into existence, and I have begun organizing a similarly arbitrary project:
it shall be a one-woman tournament of table-top roleplaying game systems. this was, in part, my dearest Jeremiah's idea, to creatively remix a thing he is very into and a thing I am very into. I latched onto it almost immediately and started listing out the role-playing books-- core rulebooks for unique game systems-- that we already owned, calculating how many more I'd need to add in for an even 16.
surprisingly, we had a whole 15 separate books already, not counting different editions or sequels or expansion books or any of that. 15!
for the sixteenth? by complete coincidence, a friend in our gaming group suggested a one-shot of Wrath & Glory practically the same time we were thinking up this tournament plan. so... even if Warhammer 40,000 may not be the genre or tone or universe that I would've picked all of my own accord to round out the existing 15... still, it was convenient timing. we played a short session last weekend.
here are the match-ups we've designed thus far, presented in a kinda-sorta rough chronological order of maybe how I'll proceed through my judgement process:
World of Darkness vs Wrath & Glory (yes, that's an edited-in jpg of the cover. all the others we own in physical form, but not that one).
Mage: the Awakening vs Pathfinder 2e.
Changeling: the Lost vs Star Wars: Force and Destiny.
The One Ring vs Scion: Hero.
Exalted vs. Vampire: the Masquerade 5e.
Cyberpunk RED vs. 7th Sea.
Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs. Werewolf: the Forsaken.
Shadowrun 5e vs A Song of Ice and Fire.
my approach to this series will mirror the wholehearted subjectivity of the annual Tournament of Books, with the main difference being I shall serve as the one and only judge.
most (10) of these are games I have played at least one session of at one point or another. the other 6, either barely or not at all. D&D and Vampire I've played the most, with Star Wars, 7th Sea, and Shadowrun taking up third, fourth, and fifth places. our current long-running campaign is set in the base World of Darkness system (with added zombies). Mage, Changeling, and Pathfinder have been small 1- or 2-session experiments.
so judging all of these against each other will be an interesting task. as set-up, I've fashioned a big fat spreadsheet of metadata and notes about each book. for some of them, I know a fair bit already, or at least have a wealth of relevant pop-cultural knowledge to apply.
my plan, at the moment, is to follow a roughly similar process for each book, take detailed notes all along the way, and then write up reviews for each match accordingly.
the process:
- read/skim each core book in full
- create at least 1 new character (to add up to at least 2 total characters created) using each system
- assess each game's mechanics, aesthetics, and general user-friendliness
- summarize my past gameplay experience or, for the 6 I haven't fully played yet, arrange at least one session of play
I'll go through this for all 8 pairs before choosing which 8 advance to the next round. then we'll match those 8 and start again, more or less.
who knows what will happen. it'll be fun and interesting in any case.
Looking forward to reading the reviews of the entire tournament sequence! Thank you for sharing (and for learning how to spell Mr. McConaughey's surname!.
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