How we came to live in Cold City

I've managed to convince a number of my non-gamer friends to play RPGs with me. I want this to be a magnificent triumph, but they keep reminding me that they're already painfully nerdy and this isn't an accomplishment. I'm choosing to ignore them on that point.

Over a series of emails and forum posts, I tried to see what direction their interests pointed the group in. One member of the group is an actual gamer, and his preference is for 3.5, which just does nothing for me. Sorry, Cecil. I got a general feel from them what they wanted in broad genre terms, whether inter-party conflict should be a part of the game, and how much creative input they wanted. Once I had a general idea about the direction, I asked about specific games.

This is where I screwed up. I offered to run the three things that I'm most interested in at the moment: APOCALYPSE WORLD, SMALLVILLE and LEVERAGE. I know that a lot of the guys are history buffs and like spies as well, so I also threw COLD CITY in there. Including COLD CITY wasn't my mistake, my mistake was in describing (and actually naming) the other games.

I tried to stress that we wouldn't use SMALLVILLE to play Smallville, but without giving the group an idea of what the game really could/would be, they had no reason to vote for this one. It's also an example of how we're thinking of games differently. I'm thinking about taking the system and applying a totally different set of trappings to it. I'm not sure that makes any sense to someone who doesn't spend time thinking about system. Also, I should have called it Cortex Plus/Drama instead of Smallville, because once they read that word, they tuned out immediately, and I really don't blame them.

I think something similar happened with LEVERAGE. The group had already expressed to me that they didn't want to play in an established setting, so I probably should have called this Cortex Plus/Action instead.

With APOCALYPSE WORLD, I think I turned everyone off immediately by mentioning the sex moves. Ah well.

So ultimately, out of four games, we're playing the one I want to play least. But that's really really okay. I want to play COLD CITY, otherwise I wouldn't have suggested it. Out of the four, it's probably the least mechanically interesting. In fact I'm actively suspicious about the mechanics, but I'm willing to give it a shot. I'm honestly not sure how it's going to work, but I'm going to do my best to play it as written, instead of attempting to hack it right away. Hopefully, I can manage to do actual play reports as we er, actually play.