Campaigns I Won't Run This Summer

The rest of my group and I have different tastes. At some points, they overlap, and those are the games that we play. This leaves me with a number of games that I'd like to play, but have to put off until I find the right group; I assume it leaves them in a similiar situation occasionally. (Though it's possible that I take these things a tad more seriously than the rest of them, seeing as I'm the only one of us who blogs about games.) That's the case this summer.

Promethean: the Created. This one, I crossed of my "possibles" list almost immediately. I had a number of reasons for that, but first and foremost was that I didn't think the group would take it "seriously." When I showed a couple of them the book, their immediate response was to sit down and start designing character builds -- which is normally a tendency I like, or at least don't mind, but in this case I feel like that's missing the point. There are other games that encourage that style of play, no need to go grafting it on to a game with a different intent. Add in that my serious "character drama" players don't seem particularly enthused about the specific themes that Promethean handles, and you've got a game for another day. (And a game I'd rather play than run, anyway. But only with a perfect GM.)

Encounter Critical. I threw this one out as a possible game, but they all seem to hate it. Apparently it's too silly for a "real campaign." Even though we've had a lot of fun with our goofy-ass one-shots, they want (or claim to want) something more serious for an on-going game. Ah, well. I have high hopes for my college group, some of whom have shown signs of understanding that stupid and awesome go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Feng Shui. This is one that my group would like to play again, but that I have no interest in GMing. I'm the de-facto GM this summer, for various reasons, so it's off the list. We've had fun with it in the past, but once my initial excitement wore off I realized that I really dislike the shots sytem, and a couple of the other more fiddly elements it contains. There's another guy who does still like it but who's out of town this summer, so I'll leave it up to him to run when it's his turn.

There are a couple of games that are still on the "possibles" list, but just barely. Superheroes and Megadungeon in particular both face heavy resistance from a couple of the other people playing this summer. I suspect that resistance is based on prejudice more than experience, and that I could convince the objectors to at least give it a try, but I've got other games in the line-up that wouldn't require such efforts.