Topics

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General Chaos / Cheating on RPPR with other Actual Plays: Critical Role

« on: October 19, 2015, 03:02:20 AM »

So one of the guys in my weekly game says to me, "do you watch Critical Role?"  And then I did.  And it was pretty fucken boss.

It's this 5E D&D actual-play series, with a bunch of professional voice actors.  What really makes it good, though, is that this isn't an "internet celebrities awkwardly play D&D together" sort of thing.  These guys had already been playing together for a long time, and then the Geek & Sundry people suggested making a show out of it.  So they have this really great group dynamic--playing naturally off of each other, genuinely having a good time playing the game.

The only negative I'd say about the show is that, given it's a D&D game, you tend to get these 45-minute long combat sequences that can really drag.  Not really a fault of the players--there's only so much you can do to make dice-rolling and hit points interesting for a third-party viewer.  Everything else is gold, though.

(I did a quick search beforehand and "critical role" didn't come up with any hits on the forum, so I'm hoping there aren't like three different discussions already in progress that I missed...)

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RPGs / Call of Cthulhu (BRP) tweaks and houserules?

« on: December 04, 2013, 10:03:55 PM »

I'm gearing up to run another Call of Cthulhu campaign, and I'm interested in any preferred houserules or clarifications people have adopted. 

I've been tempted to houserule full-auto fire to be a bit less overpowering; perhaps make it so that auto fire can give you a bonus to hit or damage, but not both.  It does seem a bit silly for a full-auto tommygun to be the ideal sharpshooter's weapon.  And most of the Mythos creatures that don't have explicit damage reduction from firearms tend to get shredded with a single burst from an automatic rifle. 

On the other hand, I suppose in the long run it still doesn't make the PCs much safer, so leaving it in isn't necessarily going to derail the game.  And the incredible illegality of such weapons could also be said to "balance" their combat effectiveness.

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General Chaos / Recommend me some good horror books

« on: September 21, 2012, 08:42:40 PM »

Aside from a whole lot of Stephen King, I haven't read much horror in my life.  A year or so ago I got around to reading some Lovecraft, which is a really mixed bag--a lot of his story construction tends to irritate me.

So I'd like to hear some examples of what you guys consider to be really good horror novels/collections.  "Lovecraftian" horror would be cool, but I'm casting a wide net here.

I'm also rather interested in the Dreamlands/Hastur mythos stuff for gaming purposes, so works with an interesting take on that would be appreciated.

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RPGs / Fleshing out my 1960s Delta Green plot

« on: April 13, 2012, 11:00:07 PM »

I've been running a Delta Green game set in the early 1960s.  So DG is still technically legal; they're just so secret and undercover that they don't have "call in an airstrike" resources.  I have the general premise, but my biggest problem is that I haven't figured out what the Big Secret Plan at the end is.

Essentially, I've got two mythos factions that the players should get caught between.  The Anasazi are barely-refluffed Serpent People:  an ancient race of sorcerer-priests who ruled some of the pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, and since then have been infiltrating government and industry.  They're evil cultists--blood magic, all that jazz--but they generally prefer the status quo, ruling the humans behind the scenes.

On the other side are the Mi-Go and MJ-12, with the full force of the Cold War arms race behind them.  My idea is that the Mi-Go are developing some kind of Big Bad Apocalyptic Event using all the industrial resources at their disposal.  The Anasazi want to stop this, but their methods involve all kinds of morally-reprehensible sorcery.  So the investigators may have to walk a tightrope between helping evil cultists, and fighting evil aliens. 

My biggest problem at the moment is that I haven't thought of what form the Big Bad Apocalyptic Event should be.  I suppose I could just rip off Divine Fire and make it a not-a-nuclear-reactor that summons Elder Gods.  But I keep thinking there should be more to it than that.  Something more complicated than "this is the machine that causes the End Times.  Blow up this machine."

On a different note, I have one PC who was crippled in the first couple sessions; I'm planning on giving him a "how would you like to walk again" deal with some sort of Bad Thing.  Not really sure what sort of consequences I'm going to throw at him if he accepts, though.

So anyway, any sort of wild-ass theories or general spitballing would be helpful.