[RPG]: [Actual Play Week] Spirit of the Century, reviewed by Sangrolu (4/5)

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13704.phtml

Alan D. Kohler's Summary:

Spirit of the Century is a meat game of pulp action heroics that taps deeply into the well of player creativity.

Go to the full review for more information.

[iago]

Thanks a bunch, Alan! I definitely enjoyed the warts-and-all view of coming to terms with the game through running it. (And I'm glad the partial-pregen suggestion has legs for you. That's one of those things I wish I could take credit for, but it definitely came out of the community.)

[devlin1]

Partial or full pre-gen is the way to go when running SotC in a convention setting. At OrcCon, I did full pre-gens for Spirit of the 31st Century (without distinct phases -- everyone there was familiar enough with Futurama's cast that it a list of 10 Aspects worked just fine), while Shadow Rat did a mostly 3/5ths pre-gen for his SotC game. Actually, IIRC, he had Aspects for the fourth phase (which provided some good guidance and sped things up a bit), and nothing for the last (giving us total freedom to determine what happened). In fact, in one of the games he ran that weekend, they did nothing but fill out those last two phases, and everyone had a blast.

As has been said before, SotC may be a pick-up game, but it's a pick-up game that assumes significant time investment on the front end for character creation. Once the characters are made, then yes, it's easy to get a game going, but (aside from the on-the-fly character creation rules) it's not really a "Let's quickly whip up some characters!" game. IME, anyway.

And I'll second the reviewer's observation that the players in a SotC game can have a great time even when the GM isn't at his best. (I say that from the GM's perspective.)