Playing Munchausen with students, gay zombie horror

Stories about games that you run and/or have played in.

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OgreBattle
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Playing Munchausen with students, gay zombie horror

Post by OgreBattle »

They're all video game design students who are mainly familiar with RPG's via MMO's, online competitive games, and some single player RPG's so i figured Munchausen would be a good start.

First game, I told them "you're adventurers meeting up to tell stories".

First guy's prompt was "tell me about how you survived the invasion of the fish aliens". So we went for a scifi setting. The guy told a story that kinda sounded like Phantom menace involving laser swords and underwater big fish fighting. Somebody used a token to add in "tell me about the legendary dog headed hero" and so dog people were added to the setting.

The next prompt was "tell me about the muscle man cat head warrior", this was tied into the "animal person scifi"s etting with a war between the space cat people and dog people. They fought over a resource rich pet food jungle planet.

The next prompt added in vampire space hippos and took a darker tone on how he needed to sacrifice his own friends to survive. The hippos are blood crazed and can be distracted by freshly killed people.

The next guy got sucked into the jumanji board game where his girlfriend was killed by Jason, then the Rock came out and got shot, and then he escaped Jumanji because you need two people to die for a 3rd to escape.


The 2nd game was "escape a haunted city". They went for a zombie apocalypse scenario and one guy figured out he can amass a lot of tokens by interjecting "and you were there with your boyfriend" to the other hetero dudes who then spend a token in return to go "no actually it was my girlfriend".

The story ended up with all the male students in a gay love trapezoid fighting on the boat they used to escape the zombie apocalypse.

They had a good time, this was their first time playing this sort of free form RPG. The next class will be a more structured game with character sheets and phases of play like Shinobigami/Hunter's Moon/Tenra Bansho Zero. Will use basic D20 mechanics.
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Post by Grek »

I can't believe someone figured out how to powergame in freaking Munchausen.
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JonSetanta
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Post by JonSetanta »

I'd love to play this game.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

Teaching this class again.

1st class had two groups do Munchausen.
Group A- Story is about combining humans with frogs with weed to make a mutant army to reform society

Group B- Story is about making a weed dragon to reform society and do card duels.


2nd class

Had students do a free form RPG and told 'em to add in rules when they felt they were needed. I gave the premise "fantasy adventure where you get treasure from a dungeon"
The goal of this session is to get them thinking "when are rules needed?"


- They chose to have 1 Game master
- Conflict settled with Rock Paper Scissors
- Every character has "3 items and 1 weapon", such as a net or a poison kit or a sword


Characters were...

"Warrior from the North"- Uses a sword and intercepts foes
"Gunslinger"- Has a gun for ranged attacks, can fire items from gun
"Martial Arts Master"- can leap and physically powerful
"Broke Pharmacist"- Has a cauldron, mixes bombs
"Unemployed assassin"- Smoke bombs, poison kit, darts
"Seer"- Can see the future (GM tells them stuff)
"Card Master"- Draws cards for magic, which is resolved by Rock paper scissors, if GM wins GM says what the magic card was. Pretty open ended

3 students came in later due to some thing to attend, I told them to assist the GM so they wound up as an enemy encounter. The GM had decided to place a bear in the dungeon.

"3 headed bear with shark heads"- One head can't smell (stuffy), one is blind, one is deaf. Instead of fighting they agreed to work together.

I thought their spread of characters was interesting, there are obvious imbalances between character concepts (cards can potentially do anything) but it worked out as this is a one shot and nobody had a desire to one-up the other.

So rules were needed to...
-resolve conflicts, combat and decision making. They used rock paper scissors
-give everyone a somewhat even amount of things to do (their '3 items 1 weapon' rule)

2 hours were spent in character writups, then wandering around, interacting with what may or may not be a magic mirror. There was a fight with two gargoyles that had the gunslinger riding on the 3 headed shark bear 'fire a net from her gun' and the 3-shark-heads-bear say 'I throw the gunslinger'. The bear was struck by the gargoyles and a 'berserk counter-attack' ability was made on the fly to kill the gargoyle.

There was a puzzle room with 4 monstrous flowers that the party had to split up to water to open the final door. So encounters with plant monsters... though the martial artist just had a flower that was charmed by him rather than the flower charming him.

The final boss of the dungeon was a masked swordsman, the assassin tried to blind him with a smoke bomb but one sweep of his sword sent it billowing away. The reasoning from the GM was "this is a powerful swordsman so a simple smoke bomb won't stop him".


They didn't figure out an action economy or turn order, so some players took up more table time by talking more, but that was part of the lesson to go "well that's why you need to figure out turns, actions, it's bad when people have nothing to do and go play on their phone"

They had also split the party (seer wandered off), so that was an exercise in "why you shouldn't split the party during 'active time'"

This teaching format of 'see where their creativity goes, but also see what common pitfalls occur' is going well.


Next class is using the Fate Core system to do a similar premise, but see how it turns out with more structured rules.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Thu Aug 22, 2019 11:27 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Dogbert »

I'll patiently wait for the next installment of this epopee...
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