My wife Mary and I started a sandbox-style campaign for Resolute. I'll be posting our campaign journals here. We plan on playing on Saturday nights, but we'll see how well life allows us to do that. FYI, this is probably going to be more in line with 'traditional' actual play threads than the other thread I'm posting; I'm not posting any particular dice results (unless I actually write them down), but will instead give an overview of the experience of playing the game.

Session One

    We started with character creation. I made a forge gnome disciple named Mimsby (before we started playing), but I had Mary use a draft of a life path character generator. I'd been toying with this for some time, but recent thread discussions about using a dialogue to establish your character got me thinking that combining this into a generator would be a good idea; by answering a half-dozen questions about your character's 'first day', you end up scripting a short narrative while also allocating your starting points. At the end of 15 minutes of doing this, Mary had a character and had a good sense of who this character was and what she was about. She said that this was the easiest and most fun way she's ever made a character, and she liked how it could easily be randomized (although she thought that it might produce some very funky results- I agree that it might). Her character was done, and she had a purpose; she was a moon elf sent by the Seelie Court to search for a lost temple from before the Great Reckoning.

    I think that in general, each hero would start with 1 rumor to get the ball rolling, but since there were only two of us, I had each of us start with two rumors. Between us, we knew:
    - A boat had gone missing on the southern shore of the keep.
    - Two days from now games would be taking place, and the prizes were expected to be pretty good.
    - A local hunter has been coming into the marketplace selling unusual items such as pixie wings.
    - The western woods have seen an increase in the number and aggressiveness of wolves.

    Lily (Mary's character) decided to first investigate the local hunter. Since pixie wings were an unusual find in a mundane forest, odds were good that this had something to do with the Seelie Court. She and Mimsby headed out, getting attacked by a pair of wild jackals. They quickly dispatched the Jackals (Lily noticed them with intuition, and her stealth allowed her to pick them off quickly with a little help from Mimsby).

    They treaded carefully up to the hunter's cabin. They used intuition and trial and error to discern that constrictor vines inhabited the path near his abode, and Lily used a good intuition roll and a resolve point to find a hidden path that the hunter used to bypass this lane and get to and from his cabin. At the cabin, they befriended his pet wild boar with a helping of the jackals they had killed, and they befriended the hunter with an offering of wine and pheasant. Over dinner, he told them about the ravine behind his cabin leading to an enchanted and shaded tree, and Lily suspected this had some connection to the temple.

    However, rather than following that now, she decided to go back to the Keep to participate in the Midsummer games, and see if she or Mimsby could win a prize. They struggled through the first two rounds of the games, both placing moderately well in the race and javelin throws; Lily did well in the first, while Mimsby did well in the second, but they were in 2nd and 3rd place respectively at that point. After the archery competition, Lily moved into a solid second place, with Mim in 3rd still, although they had gained ground on the leader, an NPC named Geoff. However, during the swordplay competition, Mim drew Geoff and Lily drew a weaker opponent. Lily easily dispatched her adversary, while Mim used several strong rolls (and his two resolve points) to defeat Geoff, who was actually the stronger swordsman and slightly more powerful; however, Mimsby had luck and resolve on his side and made it to the finals vs. Lily.

    In the finals, Mim started off strong against Lily, nearly defeating her in one shot, but then he threw the fight and let her win, taking 0s on all of his defensive rolls and letting her take him out in two hits. She narrowly edged Geoff for first place (75 total points vs. his 70), while Mim took 3rd place overall (at 64 points). Lily earned 25 gold and bracers of precision, making her an even more imposing archer, while Mimsby earned 10 gold and got a potion of might. Both earned sufficient XP to increase an ability; Lily upped her Resolve while Mim banked his point for later.

    All around, this was a fun and eventful session.

Analysis:

    - I like sandbox play so far. Mary seems to like the more free-form approach, and that she gets to decide which leads to follow up and which to ignore- or when. The fact that she got to pick an overall objective for her hero during creation helped a lot too- from the outset, she has control over the general path her hero is going on. It helped that I have a lot of background material already in place. She could have taken a more thief-based or assassin-based approach (with fundamental missions scripted either way) or the Seelie Court mission she selected. This choice would have driven the game in very different directions; I could see having more players could really mess this up, since you could end up with heroes having vastly different goals (so much so that they'd have little incentive to stick together).

    - Mary felt that this version of Resolute is (far and away) the strongest game I've written. Combat runs very smoothly, and we were able to get through a lot of gaming in two hours of play. She seemed to particularly like how resolve works to give you modest bonuses in a pinch, and she also liked how the margin of success on an attack directly carries over the damage.

Quote from: mtdesing;454909I made a forge gnome disciple

Pundit's going to love this game.

Sounds like a fun little session.  The quick and dirty life path questionnaire sounds like a cool idea to flesh out.