Tabletop RPG

The main thing I like about AW is that without it we would not have Dungeon World. AW was something where I was very fond of the system but cold on the setting.

Now, using Eclipse for a setting coupled with the AW system? That would be awesome.

I don't really know anything about EP.. it's a Transhumanism-Space thing right?

Would the AW hacks for Traveler or Battlestar Galactica be 'close enough' to play it with some tweeks?

Yep, the core of EP is transhumanism, where you backup your consciousness and can load it into a variety of genetically-modified hosts. They've also created a setting around it that is ready-made for coming up with your own adventures, making it perfect for AW.

I'm guessing you could play pretty much any setting using AW as a system, and established ones like BSG are perfect since everyone already knows how the universe works. I might try it with Star Wars instead of using Edge of the Empire or one of the older systems.

Well, there's also a Star Wars AW hack... Actually, there's a lot of AW hacks..

Oh my glob.

Found on tumblr:




I think I may totally gank some version of this as an NPC race...

So my D&D campaign is now in a classic spot where they've become the lords of a small peasant province. In order to make improvements, I've adapted a sort of Civilization/Settlers of Catan setup wherein each of their fiefdoms produces a resource in proportion to their population, which they need to keep maintained through production of Food and Peat. Meanwhile, though, they're going out and adventuring to a series of caves rumored to house an ancient witch that creates monsters. Slay the witch, and the people will probably be a lot happier with their newly-installed foreign overlords.

When I'd asked my players: "On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being World of Warcraft and 10 being Tomb of Horrors, how Gygaxian do you want this campaign to be?" the average answer was an 8.

Therefore, I am running them through the classic The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. They've finally gotten over the habit of "A hole? Stick your head in it!" exploring and have now learned to respect the fact that in any given room in a Gygax dungeon, there is a significant non-zero chance that the floor might attack you.

They have, however, managed to diplomatically negotiate their way past a group of stone giants (by the halfling who speaks Giant introducing himself as a Pebble Giant, a distant cousin, and bluffing them into believing that he's family) and a blue dragon (they clear out the Lost Caverns for his new lair, he lets them through his territory and doesn't eat their citizens) and all that was before even getting to the Caverns. Once in, they gave away their entire cache of gems (worth a hefty five figures in gold) to deal with a tribe of pesh (mining goblins) to go to their province and take over the abandoned mine.

Some gaming parties want to establish power bases and arsenals of weaponry and immense magical power. I got the only ones who want to establish a stable worker-run economy with distributed means of production. And a wizard's keep.

That is great. It's the kind of thing that attracted me to Rogue Trader, where you can set up your own empire.

D&D is a gateway drug for socialism.

Well, we have the wizard wanting to start up a mage academy. So I ran with that - once built, the Mage Academy can take one volunteer each turn (one province must reduce population by 1) and there's a 1-in-3 chance they can become a Wizard Apprentice, who can be placed in a province to add to its production without counting against its requirements for Food/Peat. Of course, there's a 2-in-3 chance they become a gibbering wreck from arcane secrets that their mind was not meant to know.

Welcome to the Skit'Trask Mage Academy For Kids Who Can't Cast Magic Missile Good And Want To Learn To Cast Magic Missile More Good.

The warlord wants to ensure that the citizenry is drilled on basic military techniques to defend themselves against likely bandit raids now that they're going to have an organized system of production. To this end, the first thing the party is building is a Castle (improves the chance of the population resisting bandit raids in the party's absence).

The halfling (who controls the fiefdom responsible for producing Peat) and the fighter (in whose fiefdom the wheat fields for Food are) have decided to go in halfsies on a Brewery. Because they figure Wheat + Peat = Scotch. Works for me!

Great stuff, Nute. Pebble Giant is brilliant.

Have you ever looked at Birthright? It's been a while, but it has some domain administration and play rules that might be useful to you, especially if different players have different small fiefdoms to manage. I'm just thinking that since it's built on D&D, albeit 2E, a lot of stuff might be easily convertible. Ah, here's some 3.5 stuff for it. Ruling a domain.

Clearly, they need to be oppressed and shown the violence inherent in the system.

Oh, I adore Birthright. But I always found the system a bit clunky.

I roped a few people into trying out Dungeon World tomorrow night, and roped myself into being DM. Any tips from those who have played the system for some noobs?

Nute - How did Nixon the half-elf tax collector, his dog Checkers, Goodwife Punzie the human cook and Bolo the human guard end up faring in your campaign?

Smashingly! Effected the rescue of the party, then everyone got jumped and shunted off to Ravenloft where the NPCs were imprisoned in various traps designed to test the party's humanity. Bolo, for example, was imprisoned in a cage across a room filled with thin glass wires stretched between ceiling and floor. In order to get to him, someone would have to walk across the floor and be basically cut to ribbons - "he bled to save you, will you bleed to save him?" type of stuff. Of course, the party chose to smash through the wires with brute force, which triggered a spell animating the resulting cloud of glass shards into a mobile threat.

Currently the NPCs from the refugee train have all settled in the party's new domain. Bolo is assigned to start up a town militia, while most of the other named NPCs are acclimating themselves to the new lifestyle.

The Regiment: Colonial Marines is out:


Fuck yes.

For anyone here on BF who acts as a GM/DM in their games, do you use music at all? Generic, theme/mood?

I've been considering running a game (ran one in Baltimore for a half-dozen or so sessions and it went pretty okay) of some sort or another, and I'm looking to plumb the depths of your experience!

<smiley face>

I like to use music when I can find the time to find something fitting, mostly it's a matter of listening to potential music during the week and marking pieces that I want to use.

I use a combination of specific pieces for effect at key points, and then filler mood/theme music most of the time as it's too difficult to constantly time everything to the music, not to mention that for a typical ~4 hour gaming session you'd have to queue up a bazillion different pieces.

I run sessions of Call of Cthulhu a few times each year and generally like to have some atmospheric music (at least for sections of the story). Aphex Twin has some "Ambient Works" compilations that have some very appropriate atmospheric music for a creepy game like CoC.

Pelgrane Press has instrumental music for Call of Cthulhu (sample). Ken Hite and Robin Laws use it to great effect on their excellent Ken And Robin Talk About Stuff podcast.

It looks like lots of people have put together CoC playlists at YouTube. Like this one. I'm guessing there are fantasy ones as well, but any that deviate from the Conan: The Barbarian soundtrack are automatically not worth your consideration.

Matt Bowyer is INSANE about music. Every character, NPC, place, etc. has a theme song. He's even done a little music editing.

Edit: Whenever we hear the theme song of the ultimate villain, we wail and gnash our teeth.

This is all completely true. Sessions are scored like movies, and there's always a relevant track playing in the background. If there's no music playing, it's because he's going with full silence for effect.

Nate Maybe you wail and gnash your teeth - I jump out of my damn chair. Every. Time.

I've tried music, but none of the places we play at have a good enough sound system to make it work - it just sounds tinny and awful. Doesn't help that we don't really all share the same taste in music, either - although experience with other GMs who use music has taught me that movie soundtracks are universal.

It's a shame, too; the current villain is patterned off of Golbez (or possibly Exdeath) and it'd be nice to pop in Golbez' theme at least once when he shows up.

Movie soundtracks, game soundtracks, classical music, and for the right setting jazz are definitely the easiest to use. Trying to work in rock and roll or most modern music is difficult, at least for me. The good stuff is just too attention grabbing, and typically there's singing where you can understand the words which is a huge distraction. Electronica can work for the right setting though, but sadly I play such genres rarely anymore.

Matt uses Overclocked remixes of game soundtracks a lot.

I pull a lot from game soundtracks, and then Overclocked mixes of gaming tracks. If I remember when I'm home tonight, I'll dig up some links to themes that I use for main characters and places.

New music I have added to the game in the current arc comes from Okamiden, Final Fantasy VIII (Overclocked remix), Medieval 2: Total War, Guild Wars 2, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, NieR, Darksiders 2, XCOM, and Persona 4.

Much of it follows a theme. Rapunzel's character has the most Japanese-esque stuff in her background, so music for her family, her abilities, and Aeons that are very close to her pull from Rei Kondoh's work in Okami, Okamiden, and Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes. Nate's character is slowly shifting from Rob Dougan's music to more stuff by Jesper Kyd (Darksiders 2, Assassin's Creed, Hitman, Borderlands). I have an entire arc that is built solely around music from NieR, and every time I use a piece from NieR it's referencing a particular thing.

Mostly I use music that *I* am going to like, and screw the rest of you guys. (unless it's for your character, and in that case I get your input, or I just ask you what kind of thing you've been listening to and then sneak in references to it three months later because I am always taking notes)

Music with words in it is only used for very special occasions, and only if the words fit what I'm doing. "Watershed" by Vienna Teng is one such piece. (NieR has vocals, but it's all in a made-up language, so it doesn't matter.)

That Dungeon World session I mentioned upthread was canceled, but we got to play tonight. There were only two PCs (a fighter and a cleric) and I was DM. I improvised everything for this first session (you're supposed to build the world together, so I didn't want to do a ton of prep before we started) and it was fun as hell, but not a very interesting adventure by any measure. I'm hoping now that the initial work is done and we have some of the world built and some hooks set that I'll be able to prepare much better for next time. Winging it constantly gets old fast, especially when you're completely at the mercy of where the characters decide to go and what the dice gods have in store for them.

On the other hand, the dice gods saved my bacon several times tonight. The beginning of the story was getting a little stale as they investigated an empty house, but then one of them was checking out a trapped box and missed his Defy Danger roll so badly he got poisoned. I decided the poison was a hallucinogen, and when his fellow adventurer entered the room he was mistaken for a bugbear and attacked. Their rolls after that went so badly for both of them that I thought they were going to kill themselves by tripping over things and hitting their heads repeatedly.

I need to do a lot of work for the next session, but so far this gets a thumbs up. It was nice to be able to dive in and play without dealing with the heaps of material something like Pathfinder foists on you, and the whole thing was narrative-driven to the point where it reminded me more of Fiasco than of any RPG I've ever played.

After collecting RPG books for several years, I've finally dipped my toe into actually playing one of them. A friend invited me in to play FFG's 40k Imperial Guardsmen RPG - Only War - with his regular D&D group. Last night was our first session, featuring regiment & character creation, a quick guide to using Roll20.net, then getting into the initial stages of our campaign. Although I've never been involved in an RPG before, I do have a lot of 40k background knowledge and have read most of FFG's 40k books as well - the DM and I are the only ones with that kind of background, so they're leading me a little on the RPG side while I'm able to help with both rules and background. Seems like a good mix.

Character creation was confusing as hell at times, but we enjoyed the regiment creation - it's a nice addition to the series and really helps giving RPG newbies like me a headstart in adding some character background.

Neat, I hadn't been keeping up with the 40k RPG supplements, that sounds like a pretty good one thematically. IG are drawn from a vast pool of people, even mutants, so you get a pretty easy reason as to why and how the group game together, without all forcing them to be too homogeneous. I think I recall a Deathwatch version, but that still forces everyone to be a Space Marine, which is a bit more constricting.

They're not actually supplements - they're rulesets in their entire right. Yes, they share a *lot*, but each one is really an evolution of the previous one.

Deathwatch was our alternative but it's so straight down the line that I wasn't all that excited by it. It's pretty much what you think it is - a collection of superhumans destroying ever increasing threats to ridiculous levels. Only War rivals Rogue Trader for the genuine flexibility of the setting, and it has pretty much the right power level for our group as far as I can tell. I can't see Rogue Trader working too well with too many 40k newbies, but your average Trooper only knows what the Creed and his Uplifting Primer tells him about the wider galaxy.

I have no idea how it compares to other RPG rulesets in reality; it's all well and good owning a bunch but never having played them means I only really grasp the fundamentals of the background and some basic ideas of the mechanics. My copies of Serenity, Eclipse Phase, Diaspora are unlikely to ever be used sadly!

Yeah, you are most definitely not alone in the category of 'people who buy RPGs but don't get to play them'. I don't have that great of a grasp of the ruleset, I think we didn't get beyond a single session and some basic experiments of 1v1s before our group fell out of habit. I'm sure that Deathwatch would appeal to some of that group, we had some die hard space marine lovers. I think we had Inquisitor, but I didn't really like the setup on that one. The system seemed mostly okay, it was hard to tell which flaws we saw were us misunderstanding rules or just being so early in character development.

I think the DM was a little disappointed that I wasn't all Captain Rulebook beyond looking shit up. I think I held us up twice - even at the end of chargen we had complete newbies going "OK, I'm settled on a Stormtrooper with carapace armour, this sweet hotshot lasgun, and xyz traits" and I'm all "Wait hold up explain what the fuck about characteristic aptitudes?!"

I can see this being a gateway to going *back* to Rogue Trader if they get the 40k itch but want a grander scope. Either way, I hope it continues. I met all of them at the DM's birthday party and got on really well with them, so I can imagine this'll be a lot of fun once we get into it properly.

Not sure if this is the right thread for this or not... Chaosium announced today that Lynn Willis, designer of the Call of Cthulhu RPG and many many other works, has passed away. It's hard to overstate how important Willis was to Chaosium, CoC and RPGs in general -- Kenneth Hite has a decent summary.

The same two players as last week subjected themselves to my off-the-cuff DM antics again tonight as we picked up our Dungeon World session where it left off. I had planned to do a lot of prep today but that was before today exploded in my face, so I only had time to look up some monsters and transfer all the info we'd generated last session to some categorized cards for easier reference.

We only got to play for two hours, and while it seemed we played a lot longer than that because there is zero downtime, looking back on it we really didn't get very far. Regardless, the narrative flowed much better tonight, and I was awed by the amount of serendipity fueling the story. I was finding monsters that fit in with the environment and plot just in time to spring them on the players, and they were coming up with awesome ideas left and right that propelled the narrative in the general direction I had hoped it would go without me having to railroad them. They're on the cusp of solving what is shaping up to be an excellent mystery, made all the more excellent by the fact that it was pulled out of our collective rectums.

One of the neat things about the system is that you always gain experience when you fail, but rarely do when you succeed. So we have a hapless, hopeless cleric who apparently worships the God of Snake Eyes getting constantly pushed to the brink of death and racking up XP, while our fighter who can't seem to roll anything other than boxcars smites stuff endlessly but has little XP to show for it. Not that the fighter needs to level up, because no matter what I throw at him he just points to center field and clobbers the bejesus out of it. Tonight I had a 40-foot worm that could swallow him whole attack, thinking it would get him to run away, but he charged straight at it, dodged at the last second, and sliced off half its HP in a single blow. When it dove into the dirt to get away he jumped on its ass and rode it 80 feet down into a series of tunnels that were used to set up the next stage of the story. It was beautiful.

I have a ton of work to do, and really need to work on my descriptions, but I'm really loving this system. We've found a few holes (chases, for example) but they're always pretty easy to cover by modifying an existing rule or making something logical up on the fly.

Next week I'm going to see if I can get more people together to try the new Star Wars game. We shall see...

Came across Zak Sabbath's blog (D&D With Pornstars) again last night, and I thought I'd point one post out to the active D/GMs here (*cough* Nute *cough*): Dueling Campaigns.

He has a face-to-face party and an online party in the same campaign and one is hunting the other! This is the kind of game I've been wanting to be involved with.

Zak's girlfriend is role-playing the War Witch, who is the major antagonist of the face-to-face party (I think) and has hired or has some other connection to the online hunter party.

Question for the players around here (including my fellow players, Nute and Nate ): does gaming ever stress you out? As in, do the things your character needs to accomplish, (be it in this individual battle happening right now or in an overarching arc with lots of fires to put out) strain you beyond the usual mental excitement one would expect? If so, how do you handle it?

In my case, I know it's born out of a lack or loss of control over a situation - I'm susceptible to this no matter what, but I don't like when it happens in something I'm ostensibly doing for fun.

The stresses exacerbated by gaming, for me, usually don't involve in-character things so much. Often it's "Am I not getting the point here? Is there something I'm missing?" - for me, this leads to frustration and what I refer to as "find-the-pixel" moments where if it were an adventure game you'd be clicking at random all over the screen in hopes that you find the right pixel. (I don't care if it's been 20+ years, fuck you, Myst!).

What can be stressful in situations like you describe is the feeling of loss of agency. Part of the fun of roleplaying is character agency, that your actions decide the course of future events, be it the next round in combat or long-term consequences down the line. As a solution, when I'm feeling that way, I talk to the GM and try and come to an amenable solution. Often it's "Okay, I get what you're saying - be patient, it'll all work itself out soon" and sometimes it's "All right, I didn't realize I was building a bit of a railroad, let me fix it."

Or we can just poke Nate with sticks until Kalil pulls his friends out of the goddamn Lifestream and stops faffing about with terror missions.

I'm leaving you for last.

As far as stress in a game, I've felt a bit disappointed or frustrated at times for the reasons Nute provided above. I've never felt something I'd call stress. For me that's becoming snappy, waspish, and irritable, usually due to workload issues. I've never felt during gaming the way I do when I'm writing a paper the morning before it's due because I've procrastinated to the last second.

It's like a movie. I love movies. I get emotionally involved, yell at the characters when they're not doing what I want them to do, cry during the sad moments, identify with characters that are kinda like me...but when the movie is done, it's over, and I become disconnected as easily as I became invested. Same with gaming. Emotional involvement, but not stress.

So, just me, then. :)

These feelings can be remedied by withholding food from the GM and making him sleep on the couch.