Tabletop RPG

It's actually not anything in the game design, really - I know that for story or system things that are bugging me, I can always take those to Matt to discuss. It's the actual in-game events that do it - I feel my character's stress, is the best way I can think to explain it. Naoko has to battle her way out of X, while Kogel has to not fall victim to Y, and Kalil has to accomplish X, Y, and Z all at once while standing on his head. I actually start to feel the stress of having that much to keep track of.

So... still just me. :)

The GM should still be exiled to the couch just to make sure.

Ugh, I had a friend who decided to take a hand at being a DM, he had this really nasty habit of only allowing for his solution to a problem or outcome. Anything unique or novel that he didn't think of would fail in some way. We pretty much played his one short campaign, and then swapped back to our regular DM quite happily.

Damn shortsighted of him. I always enjoyed when the GM comes up with 3 or 4 solutions that would work, and then allows for creative plans outside of his ideas if they could conceivably work and you get good rolls.

My GMing style would be to come up with no solutions to a problem or mystery, then see what my players tried or theorised, and then have that work (or turn out to be the case). I was a very lazy GM!

I'm going to move a tabletop campaign onto the Web, probably using Roll20. I know little of webcams or mics --- is a cam with a built-in mic enough, or do I need a headset? It seems like my speakers would feed back into the mic; does that not happen?

This is something that Speak With Bread has more experience with than I do, since she's played in such a campaign.

A friend of mine was in a Pathfinder group for awhile, and occasionally I'd join her in the group as a guest star type of appearance. The DM was...not very good, in exactly that way. One of the first sessions the party spent most of the session in the equivalent of dead air, because it was sealed into the catacombs. Searches for secret doors out of the place were fruitless. What the DM was pitbulled onto was that the party had to search for a magic door, which while secret, was not the same thing as a secret door.

I should have declined to attend any more sessions after that one. It never got quite that bad again, but that sort of thing was a recurring problem. (Ultimately, she stopped going due to a combination of logistics and the group's dynamic getting unpleasant to be around for other reasons.)

Depending on your speakers, you'll either be just fine or get hella feedback; the latter is especially a problem if you have more than one person on roll20 in the same room. A cheapo headset definitely wouldn't hurt.

Thanks!

The Fate Core kickstarter is about 9 hours away from ending.

Even if you do not play Fate, or even know what Fate is, you are insane if you read this thread and you do not get in on this for as cheap as it is.

Something to keep in mind is that once the Kickstarter is over the Fate Core PDF will be offered on a pay-what-you-want basis (including free). So if you don't know what it is and don't want to spend money on it you can still check it out.

On the other hand, Fate is awesome, and the $10 level is an insane value for all the other expansions you get. I pledged $30 because I like the system (and the team behind it) and want a printed copy.

I'm really looking forward to tryout out the Fate version of The Day After Ragnarok. And Shadow Of The Century + Strange Tales Of The Century look like they'll be amazing.

So glad this thing succeeded beyond their wildest dreams...

Tabletop Forge, one of my earliest Kickstarted projects, has thrown in the towel and gone "Welp, RollD20 does everything we were trying to do, only better. I'm joining them - here, have a premium RD20 account".

I've been using RollD20 for the Only War campaign and it's good but not great. Last week we had to deal with D100s rolling the same value multiple times, and some really bad slowdown with high-res background images. Hopefully this merger will improve things rather than just remove the possibility of a better alternative.

Also, that's my first "failed to deliver" KS! Do I get a prize?

Here, have a premium RD20 account.

(sorry, couldn't resist).

I have Only War. Love it so much.

Awesome. I am playing it on Roll20 right now!

I have missed every single shot except one I rerolled using Fate. I am awful.

I am jealous. I dont expect to play it, sadly, but I've had the Imperial Infantrymans Uplifting Primer on my shelf for over a decade. Only War is something I'm happy to have just for the fact of having it. Even if the art they commissioned for the book (that they didn't re-use from other 40k works) is not really up to standard most of the time.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Some of the art in the Horus Heresy art book is the same style and it just doesn't really fit.

I continued to miss every shot - even with two Fate rerolls, I hit once in 3-4 hours. Fuck it, I have a flamer for a reason, time to use it.

So my Greyhawk campaign is populated with heroes that are alternatively Crazy Awesome and Complete Idiot.

The halfling thief manages to scout ahead on his own and get ambushed by an Umber Hulk. Umber Hulks have a nasty ability that they attack twice per round and if both attacks hit the same PC, that PC is grabbed. Thief gets grabbed, taking a buttload of damage in the process, but escapes and bails to warn everyone else. Umber Hulks also have this ability to say FUCK YOU WALLS and just tunnel through - which it does to follow this bite-sized little meal. Everyone wants to save their little buddy, so they rush in while the halfling gets his distance.

The Umber Hulk uses Confusing Gaze. IT WAS SUPER EFFECTIVE! The warlord, bladesinger, and fighter all get dazed and wander about aimlessly - while the halfling gets confused and walks right towards the Umber Hulk.

Which proceeds to do the claw-claw-grab thing again, and then spends its one Action Point to use an additional ability. REND. If it has a creature grabbed, it can just deal INSANE automatic damage to it.

This took the halfling in one turn from "ow, I'm hurt" to "Well, negative 36 hit points." "Dead?" "SO DEAD."

Bisected like Bishop at the end of Aliens, and this hit everyone like a 2x4 to the face. In five years of gaming with this group, there had only been THREE character deaths, and each time there was a cleric with the Raise Dead ritual. There is no cleric in this party.

The survivors slew the umber hulk, got out of the dungeon, made their way back to town (with the two parts of their friend in a Bag of Holding) and called in every favor they'd accrued in the past twenty sessions to get transport to a city where they could purchase a Raise Dead ritual, selling off nearly all their loot for the ritual and the material components. Eight hours later, their halfling friend is back in the land of the living.

So they want to go BACK into the caverns. Fair enough, it's personal now. It's been about ten days of in-game time, so they get back to the umber hulk's mostly-decomposed corpse. The next room has a behir - big 40' long lightning-spewing six-legged wingless dragon. And they try to negotiate with it. "Well, I don't want to help you, look at what you did to the Umber Hulk." "We could do the same to you." "No we can't!"

They get the behir to agree to take them to the witch what lurks in the caverns - actually, they get it to SAY it'll take them, nobody succeeded on their Insight check versus the behir's Bluff check. So it opens its mouth wide, offering to transport them inside its gullet.

Four out of the five players: "We'll climb in."
Player of the common-sense fighter: "No, it looks crowded, just come back for me."
Behir: *uses Devour ability*

Yay, combat starts with 80% of the party in the belly of the monster. So they're taking constant physical and lightning damage. The elven hunter, however, has an item to help them out. Goggles of Charming. "Will they work from inside the behir?"

...it doesn't say that it requires eye contact...

"I'll allow it."

First turn, they dominate the behir from the inside. First command: "VOMIT!"

Out they go, on a wave of lightning. A couple portable walls and suddenly it's turned into a mosh pit with five angry PCs and one constantly-dazed behir playing the role of the cow in Piranha Creek.

It took them THIRTY ROUNDS of combat to finally stab, shoot, and Blunt-Force-Trauma it to death. But they managed to have the elf continually shooting it in the head to keep it dizzy, so it couldn't use its nasty multiple-attacks feature. The one time it did --- everything missed.

So yeah, this was the session where the thief died, got brought back, then everyone walked into the monster's mouth, mind-controlled it FROM THE INSIDE, then locked themselves into a 25x25 room with it and went all Royal Rumble.

I love Gygaxian adventures.

NPC love triangles are the GREATEST. Why do I enjoy my character's torment so much?

I thought this was great.

I am just sitting down to run an American-horror themed game of Hunter: The Vigil. My players have no idea what is in store for them.

There is no better feeling than this.

So my Greyhawk campaign has finally hit 11th level and entered Paragon Tier as of today's session. The heroes had to travel north to the Sea of Black Ice, where they were tasked to recover at least a 100lb chunk of the eponymous black ice, a substance that not only refused to melt at any temperature, but was necessary to repair the obelisk sealing Kyuss (god of undead) away from the world.

The session had only one combat encounter (a chance meeting with an orcish raiding party) but involved a lot of survival checks and skill challenges. The closer they got to their destination - the Wall of Black Ice deep in the frozen sea - the more strange things began narratively happening. They would sleep without dreams, feeling like they awoke immediately after closing their eyes. The sun never dipped below the horizon, and objects ceased to cast shadows. As they entered an abandoned city of frozen black ice, the color seemed to leach out of the world until everything was completely monochrome (note: the rogue had scouted ahead at night with a pair of darkvision goggles. Darkvision is, by definition, monochrome. He had no idea this effect was happening.)

They get to the wall and everything starts going bizarre. A sort of anti-echo cuts off speech almost before it's spoken, and actions seem to almost have a miniscule but notable lag between thought and deed.

Two of the party, one of whom had earlier received a prophetic dream of the wall, decide they're going to try to climb it. While the other three work on the ritual to retrieve the ice, the fighter and the rogue begin to ascend the ice wall. Within minutes, the fighter has lost all his healing surges to frostbite, while the rogue (the party's prophetic seer) is unscathed. With one of them near death, they reach the top of the wall - and see an entirely different world they cannot comprehend. They watch a city built before them in rapid time-lapse images, buildings rising higher and higher, and eventually the sun stopping in the sky and everything going monochrome and freezing to black ice before crumbling into nothingness.

At this point they are confronted by an entity that the party had encountered twice before - a one-eyed, one-handed gray humanoid calling itself the Herald of Vecna, god of secrets. Earlier, he had told the party that they would be tested, and all would be revealed if they were ever ready. Now, he says, they are ready for a great secret. The wall before them is not simply a wall of ice - it is the literal end of the world. The world they know is merely a bubble floating in a great cosmic sea, one of countless millions, and they stand at the very edge of it. What they witnessed has happened to other worlds and will eventually happen to all of them.

In an eyeblink, the two of them find themselves at the bottom of the Wall, with their comrades saying they were only gone for moments.

Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. Yeah.

So they have a new overarching quest for their paragon tier plot - find the Spine of Vecna and somehow discover what is going wrong with time.

Now, what they don't know. They're assuming that the Spine is a physical artifact, a relic of Vecna's mortal form like the Hand and the Eye. Oh no. No no no, not at all. You see, Vecna is the god of secrets, and the best secrets are those hidden in plain sight through riddle and metaphor.

As they will discover, the myriad worlds are not so much like bubbles in a sea, but like pages in a book. You can stab through from one to the other, turn them, flip through, jump around. Tear one out, crumple it, fold it, burn it. Each page has its own words but they all tell one great story. And where do all the pages of a book meet?

At the spine.

They have to find the place where all planes meet - the interdimensional city of Sigil, the hub of the Cosmic Wheel, the City of Doors. The one place in the universe where the gods can't go.

I cannot wait to see how they handle this.

I'm jealous of both your players and your campaign mastery.

I could just see a player coming across what they deem to be the spine of Vecna, and then trying to rip out their own spine to replace it with Vecnas.

Through the Wormhole with DM Nute.

We're starting up a campaign tonight that has been on hiatus since October, and while I'm excited to play again.. Nute's campaign sounds awesome and I'm totally jealous.

Whereas I have to wait until next Friday to play again. It's killing me. The current plot is a series of solo sessions (just one player and the GM), and since there's three players, it means we're all going once every two weeks instead of once a week so the GM doesn't burn himself out. That, and he likes keeping us in suspense.

Galen Argos, my 13th level fighter, met his demise at the bottom of the ocean.... Grappling and successfully drowning the main villain of the campaign. Out of the four games I've been in, this has been the first campaign that has reached completion and it's my first character death that wasn't GM/OOC bullshit. We're starting a new campaign soon and I'm bursting with ideas already.

Half Price Books has a 40% off coupon today, so I wandered into the RPG section to see what I could see. Someone dumped a mint copy of Serenity, but it cost $50, and I knew I'd never get to play it, and I have the PDF, so I passed. Then I found an old copy of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide in excellent shape and picked it up for $12. I never got one of these--2nd Edition was out when my friends and me started playing--and it's just a gold mine of imaginative ideas. I found a scanned PDF a few years ago, but flipping through the real deal is so much better.

You read the Artifacts section, right? Machine of <someone special> the Mad?

Villains & Vigilantes back in Dee and Herman's hands.

Anyone here going to Pax East? I'd love to play some RPGs with you guys... as long as I don't have to GM!

... said everyone.

One of my favorite RPGs. It was ridiculously imbalanced, but in a way that was true to comic books. I hated Champions because the points system made every superhero and villain essentially the same power level.

The champions system is quite easy to abuse, and they even give you examples of what to look out for in the rules. As the GM it's pretty straight forward to loosen the guidelines for key villains -- "Woa, he has a 20d6 energy blast, I thought you could only have 12d6?!", "Why yes it is!". Similarly there are powers you straight up can't take as a PC, but villains can have them.

As a childhood math/stats nerd, Champions was one of the first RPGs I ever owned. And I learned all about min/maxing and abusing the system. If your GM gave you enough points, the combination of an Area Effect Drain (Presence) and buying additional Presence with the limitations of Charges and Only Usable For Attacks basically could shut down any combat before it started. We called that the "Sit the Fuck Down and Shut the Fuck Up" maneuver.

The original rules for Multipowers and Elemental Control frameworks were also rife for abuses. It was awesome.

Yeah, the GM pretty much needs to be on the min/max ball with cutting such shenanagins short, as Champions is (potentially) more unbalanced and ripe for abuse than any other system I've seen. I'd likely have straight up disallowed using such limitations on Presence (since neither is really limiting), and only allowed a modest Presence Drain; certainly the combination would have been right out.

Exalted is pretty gloriously broken as well, in all of the best ways.

A guy advertised that he was looking for players at the local game club I play boardgames at so I thought I'd try my hand at RPG-ing again. Only he advertised Warhammer Fantasy but right before we met up for the first time he had fallen in love with some Japanese game called Tenra Bansho Zero. My first impression: a mashup of every violent anime trope, ever. Who thinks anime is stupid? This guy. But I don't hate it enough to let it stand in the way of fun, or atleast the potential of fun, and as described these Tenra Bansho games don't last very long so maybe we'll get through a few sessions and then do Warhammer. Or maybe we'll have fun in fantasy-feudal japan with the superpowered samurai and the worm-symbiote medicine men. Stranger things have happened

Either way I figure that as long as I'm not gonna GM I can't really complain that much about the game. But I really would have liked to play Warhammer.