Thoughts on 3:16

3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars

Well, we ended up not playing 3:16 last week, we had a lot of things popping up in those pesky adult lives of ours. Originally it was just going to be Andy, fresh from Historicon, missing the game, but he was supposed to be running it! I offered to do a dry run for everyone else, just to get used to the rules. The more I read up on the rules, the more I liked them though, and somehow I ended up cockblocking Andy's seat as GM. Sorry again Andy, ahem! It's just as well, 'cause I haven't pulled my GM weight in a long while.

So I'm running a 3:16 campaign now, woohoo! Of course we've yet to play, but I'm confident. In classic form I over-prepared off the bat, crunching through a whopping five pages of notes. I need to relax and just have fun with it. Having read the rulebook now a couple of times in detail however, a lot of realizations are coming to me about 3:16.

On the outside it seems like fun, campy, machismo alien-killing free form RPG. It's simple to run, and once everyone's on board, it's a blast...literally. But there's more to it, a lot more, and although it's cheesy to just say "play the game and it'll hit you", I can see where that's a spot-on way to describe it. It's subtle, almost too subtle at first.

The best way I can think to describe it is while the left hand has your attention, waving in the air, the right hand is about to punch you in the gut. This thing's got a lot more under the hood than the fad-of-the-week sci-fi RPG than you think of at first glance. It'll still be a blast, trust me, but in the long run I know it will yield more than just an M41a alien-blasting thrill ride that I was only giving it credit for initially.

And how's this for irony: this post is number 316...