Who Has Played Gamma World?

[The Bear Hawk]

Who has played Gamma World? I would like to learn more about how you run the game and how it is played. You know the stuff that is not in the rule book.

[captaincrumbcake]

I haven't. Not in all the decades since its release. Never bought the box set; or book(s). I know nothing about it. But, from what I've heard, I've always been fascinated to try playing it.

[simrion]

I've attempted to run it numerous times but my players have never been that dedicated to play a campaign. Die hard D & D ers

[robkuntz]

Played it a long time ago. Just another RPG, really. What isn't in the book is at the table while playing or later when cogitating upon it as a DM. Like swimming in order to learn it you have to dive in the water.

[mormonyoyoman]

Neither have I run nor ruined it. MA was fun enough and apocalyptic rpg didn't fit me, until Morrow Project added the theme of rebuilding. That premise, more than a ruleset (Nasty things, rules. Makes one late for mid-game dinners!) got my attention.

[finarvyn]

We played a few sessions of 1E and 4E (the one with AD&D-like rules). Both were okay, I guess, but for scifi gaming I tended to drift back to METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA instead. GW was a decent enough system and felt a lot like OD&D but with mutations. I think it was pretty decent in its presentation (at least with the two editions mentioned above) but I always felt like they were trying to push gonzo slapstick and I like my RPGs to be more serious. Humor should come from player actions, not from the rules.

[FaerieGodfather]

I've played 2nd and 4th. 7th (the one based on 4e) looked interesting, but I didn't like the trading cards.

[Admin Pete]

Aug 14, 2017 22:00:55 GMT -5 finarvyn said:

We played a few sessions of 1E and 4E (the one with AD&D-like rules). Both were okay, I guess, but for scifi gaming I tended to drift back to METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA instead. GW was a decent enough system and felt a lot like OD&D but with mutations. I think it was pretty decent in its presentation (at least with the two editions mentioned above) but I always felt like they were trying to push gonzo slapstick and I like my RPGs to be more serious. Humor should come from player actions, not from the rules.

IMO true and house rules are a fix for that, plus if the players have read some of the most relevant classic fiction (such as the Per Hiero Desteen/Sterling E. Lanier books) and and are on the same page then it can be run serious. Gamma World IMO has a lot of untapped potential if you were able the play weekly and have a committed core group of players.

[scottanderson]

withdrawn

[Admin Pete]

Aug 20, 2017 2:13:24 GMT -5 scottanderson said:

withdrawn

What?

[scottanderson]

It was late and I was tired - I wrote a long response that didn't make a lot of sense once I read it back

[robkuntz]

Aug 20, 2017 8:46:37 GMT -5 scottanderson said:

It was late and I was tired - I wrote a long response that didn't make a lot of sense once I read it back

Much better idea to not make sense with one word rather than many!  

[simrion]

Aug 14, 2017 22:00:55 GMT -5 finarvyn said:

We played a few sessions of 1E and 4E (the one with AD&D-like rules). Both were okay, I guess, but for scifi gaming I tended to drift back to METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA instead. GW was a decent enough system and felt a lot like OD&D but with mutations. I think it was pretty decent in its presentation (at least with the two editions mentioned above) but I always felt like they were trying to push gonzo slapstick and I like my RPGs to be more serious. Humor should come from player actions, not from the rules.

Fin you raise some good points. I discovered the game around the time "Road Warrior" came out in the states and it always influenced my campaign style. Some of the setting stories in the 1E GW rules seemed to foster this feel as well. I think the gonzo readily expressed itself as my players randomly generated their mutant animal characters and things would go off the rails from there. I think, inadvertently, the rules began to change/influence the setting more towards the gonzo and less towards the gritty. Not a bad thing, just not what I wanted. And the venerable Aftermath was just far too rules crunchy to my teenage mind though it would have scratched my "post apocalyptic" itch had it been more accessible.

[Admin Pete]

Aug 27, 2017 7:19:03 GMT -5 simrion said:

Aug 14, 2017 22:00:55 GMT -5 finarvyn said:

We played a few sessions of 1E and 4E (the one with AD&D-like rules). Both were okay, I guess, but for scifi gaming I tended to drift back to METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA instead. GW was a decent enough system and felt a lot like OD&D but with mutations. I think it was pretty decent in its presentation (at least with the two editions mentioned above) but I always felt like they were trying to push gonzo slapstick and I like my RPGs to be more serious. Humor should come from player actions, not from the rules.

Fin you raise some good points. I discovered the game around the time "Road Warrior" came out in the states and it always influenced my campaign style. Some of the setting stories in the 1E GW rules seemed to foster this feel as well. I think the gonzo readily expressed itself as my players randomly generated their mutant animal characters and things would go off the rails from there. I think, inadvertently, the rules began to change/influence the setting more towards the gonzo and less towards the gritty. Not a bad thing, just not what I wanted. And the venerable Aftermath was just far too rules crunchy to my teenage mind though it would have scratched my "post apocalyptic" itch had it been more accessible.

I have always envisioned the game as dark and grim, with the gonzo being required to inject needed humor into the game.

[LouGoncey]

So long ago -- 1981?. Played some GW. Jungle adventures. Everything was lethal. We killed all the males in a village, took the children and women slaves. Didn't last long though. The children killed us in our sleep.

Seemed like a twisted variation of our D&D sessions, so we returned...

[The Semi-Retired Gamer]

My old group played several sessions of the first edition. We missed second edition and we tried to play third. It was quite a departure on the previous rules and the errata was ridiculous. We always went with the grim and dark tone instead of all out gonzo. GW never got as much play as I would've like but we played a ton of RIFTS years later.

[limeodyssey]

I ran 1e gamma world for years, as did my one of my close friends. He continued his campaign for over eight years and used all published material for 1e as well as the articles in the zines on eg the Moon.

His major focus became Gamma Venus, where terraforming had long before turned it habitable and then of course the Gamma World apocalypse cut it off from Earth. Thus Earth is the mutated baroque magnificent setting and in his game Gamma Venus was high tech, more like Judge Dredd and other 2000AD settings which were quite an influence on him.

Both he and I, separately with little overlap, hugely expanded the lists of technology. He delineated literally hundreds of weapons and vehicles whereas my focus was on umpteen different drugs, security cards, robots and more outre technology such as what would now be called nanotechnology.

Decades before Futurama, we had biots (organic flesh robots) and werevehicles - of two types - first type what would now be called transformers and second type which I focused more on were technology infected with a cybernetic form of lycanthropy making them appear to be one sort of item but at certain times or under certain triggers the technology would warp and change form.

His campaign only ended when people graduated and moved away and even then it persists from time to time to this day.

Mine petered out per se but it was part of a multiversal campaign so it would be more accurate to say that the focus of a 32 year campaign shifted from Gamma World to something else within the endless universes.

I think the key to good Gamma World is to decide, irrevocably, on what kind of fallen technological world it is. Is it ever going to be able to rise again? Or is the golden age gone forever?

I took the gone-forever approach - end of the original Planet of the Apes, fall of man, it will never be known exactly what happened, or why.

My friend took a very hard sci fi approach based on Strontium Dog, Judge Dredd (which is a post apocalypse world) and so on, meaning that the fall of man and his god level technological civilization is, ultimately on a long enough timeline, one of many Falls, after each of which an unimaginably long interregnum and dark age has to be fought through before everything returns to the high tech world of long ago.

That kind of "optimism" (or fatalism?) never appealed to me. I figured, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. It can't simply be a case of going on enough quests and you'll get all the pieces you need and the power will come back on. The power is never coming back on, not for all practicable purposes. There is the faintest echo of this in Dark Knights, the current OSR campaign book I am completing.

[robkuntz]

I played in Eric Shook's short lived GW wherein I played a cloned R. Buckminster Fuller with additions governing his genius qualities. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

[dragondaddy]

Gamma World is one of my favorite games. Also like to run Morrow Project and Metamorphosis Alpha as well.

[Deleted]

I played the original BitD and the newest version of NTRPG Con last year. I enjoyed both games very much.

[Hexenritter Verlag]

I never did, though I owned a copy of 3e version of GW. I'd play in a 1e/2e version of the game but I'd never run it. I ran Cyberspace as my primary game as a teen & when I came back to to RPGs it was a player initially; the closest I got to Post-Apocalyptic gaming was two brief RIFTS games. I'd love to eventually run a OD&D or B/X based Post-Apocalyptic campaign.

[Mighty Darci]

I seem to have missed most of this thread. Those of you that have played, please post more about it.