Historical Gaming

Yesterday, +Evil Hat Productions asked G+ folks to say who they'd like to play a game of Fate with, if they could travel anywhere throughout time for the game. My first thought - still my preference - would be to play with folks from my current group - as well as my friends Boris, Amon, and Mark. Play maybe 10, 15, 20, or 30+ years ago.

We have quite an age spread in our group - from late 20s through 50s - and some of us started gaming in the mid-'70s. So it would be kind of fun to game with our current group when we were all around 14 or 15, maybe in the mid-70s with EPT, D&D White Box, or Black Box Traveller. This would of course require a certain amount of shuttling of people between different locations in spacetime.

If I couldn't run that game, - well, then, maybe a gaming group made up of different members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.  A few of the key players and their styles with Fate:

• Lenin needs to be there for sure.  He has a keen eye for opportunities and openings. He'd be the most consistent user of the Create an Advantage action. Some of the Aspects he came up with were really funny and creative, like this one: "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country."
• Alexandra Kollontai for sure. Not just because she's the only woman available, I mean just read her bio. Left her husband and child to study Marxism. A Leader of the Left Opposition. That's two big Aspects right there. 
• Trotsky. Incredible revolutionary orator and supreme military tactician of the Red Army, he always leads with the Attack action using his Flashy Approach. He's a power gamer but even worse, he's a rules lawyer and always picking fights with the GM and other players. Even when they know he's right a lot of the other players won't help him because they think he's a contentious asshole. 
• Bukharin. A conservative player, Bukharin always thinks he's playing the long game. Truth to tell, he probably does have an extra Stress Box and one additional Moderate Consequence. A cautious player, he rarely takes advantage of any Aspects on the table. A philosopher, he does some of his most intriguing work once he's been Taken Out.
• Stalin. Of course, everybody knows he's Trouble with a capital "T" don't they? He's another power gamer, but unlike Trotsky who likes modern art and jazz, Stalin is conservative about everything. Stalin is the OSR dude at the table: for him, everything's about rulings, not rules. Nobody takes him too seriously at first. Lenin has to do a rewrite on Stalin's paper on the National Question, the first draft is so crude and stupid. But Stalin has a way of winning in the end. His M.O. is the social Attack using his Sneaky Approach. Most of the time when he Takes Out someone, it's an NPC doing it for him. A lot of his victims just think Stalin doesn't know, or that It's some kind of mistake. More players exit the game because of his play behavior than because of anything else.