What kind of games have you run with this RPG? What were the adventures like?

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- Edit. Nevermind. The RPG in question doesn't use the Gumshoe subsystem.---

I've used the system but not the setting (well not recently)

Regards,
David R

Only ever played the CCG.  Which was excellent I might adds, as far as CCGs go.  It made me want to read the setting it was based on, which is not something most CCGs do.

I've used the system for post-apocalypse steampunk (I was a player that time), for modern day conspiracy weirdness and for hard sf colonial marines style action.

The setting I have no great love for and haven't used, it's deeply American which would be fine if the game were set in the US, but it's not and as such I just find it jarring.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with stuff being American, as I write this my Amazon orders of three different US novelists and a half dozen US movies sit on my desk, but it's a really ignorant depiction of abroad that turns overseas into America with an accent and I just find that a bit painful.

Quote from: Balbinus;342829but it's a really ignorant depiction of abroad that turns overseas into America with an accent and I just find that a bit painful.

While I'm not denying you have a point, to be fair the island & dictatorial ruler is said to be trying to model the island heavily on the US.

I love the game and setting - I ran a 4-5 year campaign for my wife in the setting. Although I ended up heavily changing the background simply because I read the book at the start of the campaign, then introduced new things based on half-remembered ideas from my initial read-through - when I re-read the book several years later I realised I had changed a lot of things, and was running the setting a lot less dark than it was originally written.

Quote from: Balbinus;342829The setting I have no great love for and haven't used, it's deeply American which would be fine if the game were set in the US, but it's not and as such I just find it jarring.

There is a reason why the French translation of Over The Edge moved Al Amarja to the Bermuda Triangle...


I never used OTE as written. But a friend of mine played a fantasy version of it, and he sent me detailed actual play reports because he placed his campaign in a setting of my design. The adventures seemed D&D-ish to me, but also showed a minor quibble: the combat system is too harsh for a truly adventurous game with lots of fights.

Because of this, when I went to try OTE for a fantasy one-shot I changed the die roll. A trait value still told you how many dice to roll, but only the 2 highest results were added - ever. That leveled the field a bit.
Everything else I adapted from the Thundarr OTE hack Under the Broken Moon and the Star Wars hack Over the Empire.

I also GM-ed another game that was heavily inspired by OTE, the free system Inter Alia (later renamed Thema) which was basically OTE (three traits as character-defining features) combined with the d6-d6 die roll from Feng Shui. (Sadly, this game is not available any more on the net.)

Both games worked well but showed the typical problems of trait-based systems - they work best with settings that use archetypal situations and characters (personally, I'd be absolutely helpless coming up with a character in the everything-goes-setting of Al Amarja), and I don't think the players would have wanted to use either system for long term play.

Jasonga, did you experience any problems in your year-long campaign?

I ran a campaign of OTE for about a year. It ended up transitioning to a more or less d'Aubainne University-based game, as two characters were engineers/scientists, and one other was in his more genius moments (he tended to vary between understanding unknown aspects of quantum physics and being unable to operate a telephone).

I've mulled over using the system for something Heroes-like, though.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;342920Jasonga, did you experience any problems in your year-long campaign?

Not really. The system is so loose that you could almost call it free-form (which was fine for us, since we don't really care about the system). Combat could be quick, but it was difficult to actually die (a good thing with only one player ). The setting is crazy, but it's a good crazy that you can pick what you want from it, and ignore the rest.

As I mentioned, I managed to misremember a lot of the setting over the length of the campaign anyway, so by the end of the game it was only nominally the same setting (and it definitely wasn't the same at the end of the campaign - my wife managed to overthrow Monique and Constance, and get herself elected as the new president of the island )

Quote from: Balbinus;342829I've used the system for post-apocalypse steampunk (I was a player that time), for modern day conspiracy weirdness and for hard sf colonial marines style action.

The setting I have no great love for and haven't used, it's deeply American which would be fine if the game were set in the US, but it's not and as such I just find it jarring.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with stuff being American, as I write this my Amazon orders of three different US novelists and a half dozen US movies sit on my desk, but it's a really ignorant depiction of abroad that turns overseas into America with an accent and I just find that a bit painful.

I hope you realize that the Americanisms in the setting were intentional and did not spring out of ignorance. The Island is the way it is because of an concerted effort to turn it into a twisted vision of the US. Alamarja = All American.

It is jarring. That's the point.

Yes, even so, I agree, and in my OtE campaigns I set the island in the Caribbean. The Mediterranean just seemed too far out of place.
Whereas, the idea of a US-themed dictatorship in Central America seems pretty plausible.

RPGPundit

I agree that "somewhere in Central to South America" would have been much better.

Quote from: Machinegun Blue;343040I hope you realize that the Americanisms in the setting were intentional and did not spring out of ignorance. The Island is the way it is because of an concerted effort to turn it into a twisted vision of the US. Alamarja = All American.

It is jarring. That's the point.

I didn't, in fact it's the first time I've heard that but fair enough.

Doesn't help for me I'm afraid.  I'm not American, I just couldn't relate to it.  I had to google what the hell Greeks were, I mean I'd heard of them and I knew Americans had something called Fraternity Houses but I didn't really know what they were.

And that's just one example.

I'm not saying it's shit, it doesn't surprise me at all that Jasonga got great results from it, but for me it was too culturally American to really be accessible.

UA has slightly the same issue actually.

UA always seemed more American to me; to the point that OtE wasn't very foreign to me as a Canadian, but UA did seem foreign, even coming from that relatively very similar culture.

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