Tonight we got together to continue the story of bareknuckle boxing in 'Gold Rush'-era San Francisco.  I was pretty excited as I had played more recently in a 17th Century duellists version (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=22285.0) with just two players which was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately we tried to add a fourth player tonight which didn't go so well.  The new player wasn't into the game concept, he wasn't bought into the background (since he didn't help create it) and he didn't like the card mechanics (he kept comparing them unfavorable to PTA).  So from my perspective it ended up being a wasted evening, which was more his fault than the game's.

We had a few cool early scenes, but the new player kept trying to game the system and gloss over the roleplaying, but then he would complain later that there wasn't enough roleplaying in the game.  I see his point that the game doesn't drive conflicts as much as he would like, but still...

Overall I would say that the roleplaying aspects of Contenders do hang by a thread to a certain extent.  So it seems important to keep pushing them as much as possible to make sure that the mechanics don't start taking over.  Even without the difficult player, I think it would have been helpful to have kept better notes about the last session so we didn't need to rely on our memories from 3-4 weeks ago.  Notes about favorite boxing venues and names of NPCs like the promoter) and others we had created for scenes would have helped the continuity, along with taking 2-3 minutes at the start of the session to recap what had happened the last session.  But with a GM-less game there is no one who is "responsible" for keeping these notes and it's easy for everyone to be the "lazy player".  This is the first time I've had a second session of a GM-less game so it was interesting to see that dynamic pop up.

This is ending up to be a bit of a rant, but I think it's useful because every session can't be awesome and we can learn things from a session other than just how the game rules were working.

Chris B.