Messages

31

RPGs / Re: Your Favorite Die

« on: June 02, 2009, 10:09:25 PM »

When it comes down to it, I like no die more than a d20. Probably because I've played so many games that use a d20. My favorite d20 is, ironically, the one I use the least. It's the one I got free when I went to the D&D4e launch Game Day. It's smaller than my other d20s and it's plain black numbers on a white die. But it's my favorite because it totally changed my gamer luck. For about...4+ years prior to getting that dice, I had the most horrible horrible luck finding a local tabletop game. I was only in 1 game during that time frame and it was with a group of pretentious arrogant asshats playing GURPS (and I don't like GURPS). When I went to that Game Day and got that dice, my luck changed. We turned the Game Day group into a regular D&D group for a few months before it died, but not long after I got invited to a Star Wars group that I'm still currently engaged in (I like the group, even if I don't want to play Star Wars anymore) and from that group got invited to a Shadowrun game and even before that I found my way into a Dark Heresy game. So even if I almost never actually roll that dice, it's still got fond memories.

32

RPGs / Re: Trail of Cthulhu

« on: May 30, 2009, 06:10:23 PM »

THey think it's more complicated than it is, or they just don't want to do basic math~~But if they don't wanna play I can't run it.

If you had any interest in running a ToC game via pbp, I would be first to sign-up.

I'd fight you to be first to sign up. Games like CoC and ToC are much better suited to pbp than more action oriented ones. And I've been seriously craving some Mythos goodness.

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RPGs / Re: Trail of Cthulhu

« on: May 30, 2009, 04:22:43 PM »

I personally play Trail of Cthulhu. If I understand right, CoC works on a percentile system, and my group is really iffy on that.

that's a weird thing to get hung up on.

Yeah. I may not leap for joy with percentile systems, but at least they have the advantage of being straightforward and easy to understand.

34

RPGs / Re: Rehabilitating the Bad GM (and why I now hate KOTOR)

« on: May 29, 2009, 11:46:03 PM »

Heh, my Star Wars game is currently making me hate everything Star Wars because of my own GM. I can't watch the movies, play the video games, read the books/comics, or whatever because I immediately feel the connection to the frustrating tabletop sessions and get ticked off. I'm a huge huge Star Wars fan and just can't stand it right now.

Hell, half of my Shadowrun game sessions (which is made up of players, but not the GM, of the Star Wars game) the last couple of weeks have turned into bitch sessions about the Star Wars game. The game has gotten just that bad. I hope you can get everything worked out with your game. Or at least put it down like Ol' Yeller and move on to something else.

35

RPGs / Trail of Cthulhu

« on: May 29, 2009, 11:40:14 PM »

So I've been looking at Trail of Cthulhu the last few days and I'm really digging it. I like the rules and the art is really awesome. I know there are a lot of CoC people here, so I kind of wondered how people thought it stacked up or if it's apples and oranges with CoC.

36

RPGs / Re: What does you have at the table?

« on: May 29, 2009, 11:37:05 PM »

At games I'm playing, I personally have:

Any and all rulebooks for the game that I own.
A large notebook for notes/HP tracking (also holds my character sheets, printed reference sheets, etc)
My character sheet(s) and background/history sheets
My dice and plenty of them
A pencil
A set of wet erase markers
A calculator
My drink and/or food
Whatever item I'm using to represent my character on a battlemat (usually my 40K artillery dice)

If I'm playing D&D4e, I also have my power cards and other 3.5" cards that I store information on.

If I'm GMing, there's bunches more stuff. There's at the very least:

My GM screen
My large battlemat
Figures for enemies (either miniatures, pennies with numbers/letters on them, glass beads, or paper markers)
My stick for beating players (sadly, only kidding)
Any props that I may need/want.
Audio CDs or USB drives with music for the game mood

37

RPGs / Re: 4E secondary skills

« on: May 25, 2009, 06:00:27 PM »

Eh, one of the things I like about 4e is that it got rid of all the stuff like that.

38

RPGs / Re: Dealing with Absent Players

« on: May 22, 2009, 10:34:48 PM »

In my games, we tend to put absent players in the background. They're doing this or that and are out of focus, so to speak. Half the time, the player in question or the other players tend to do the heavy lifting in explaining why that character is MIA. We haven't kicked out anybody because they've been forced to be absent, but we have had people leave because they couldn't commit to being at the game very often.

As for handing out XP (or similar stuff), in my current games it varies depending on the game and the people and the circumstances:

In our Shadowrun game, if you're not there, you get nothing. No karma, no money. It's just that kind of game for us. Progression tends to be pretty slow in Shadowrun anyway, so missing a session or two doesn't hurt anybody all that much.

In our Star Wars game, absent players get a % of the XP that the present players get. We play 8-10 hour sessions each week, so we get a lot of experience. Without the percentage awarded, the power gap grows far far too quickly and the punishment for player death is even worse. In our game, a new character begins play at a level equal to the lowest level character and without the partial experience we've ended up at times with characters as low as level 4 together with characters at level 9. Even with the partial reward we've currently hit the point where the highest level character is very nearly level 13 and the lowest is only 8. Then again, this Star Wars game is about to blow up, so it may be a moot point.

In my Dark Heresy game, the GM hands out experience based on how we move the plot along and as long as we're there for at least part of what happened, everybody gets the same experience. Unfortunately, it's a ~very~ small game, so if we're missing more than 1 person we can't even really have a game session. So even though it's very fair as to the rewards, the game gets outright canceled a lot.

39

RPGs / Re: Monster Manual 2

« on: May 22, 2009, 10:13:42 PM »

I'm planning on DMing for tomorrow. Don't think I'm getting MM2 yet because my plans to run D&D4 may have been nuked. I won't know for sure until after tomorrow night.

40

RPGs / Re: Red Flags of Gaming

« on: May 18, 2009, 11:57:27 AM »

When the GM doesn't even try to pretend that the NPCs he makes for the game are characters that he wishes he was playing.

When players are blatantly working on backup or alternate characters for the game at the table.

When players are working on characters for another game entirely.

When players start making Tomb of Horrors references and they're not joking around with them.

41

RPGs / Re: The worst and most hilarious thing I've ever done to a fellow PC...

« on: May 08, 2009, 03:05:00 AM »

Hey Ross, if you're short on anecdotes for the next episode, can you use that one? It'd be awesome. I don't think I've submitted any anecdotes to RPPR yet.

My personal recipe for Craft: Dead Hobo was going to involve casting Powerbolt. Either way, we've had this amusingly antagonistic relationship between all the PCs thus far. Our dear out of town player (PCname, Revan) once extorted another player (PC name: Chip) in a combat situation. Revan basically got paid 50,000 to fire a flash-bang grenade to distract a spirit so Chip could survive. There was an attempted kidnap of yet a third player by the Revan, which lead to a funny car chase where Revan tried to catch Chip, who was rescuing this third player while I made side bets with the hacker about who was going to win. So this guy has totally had it coming. Next week, we get to see if our Con checks are good enough to fool him into thinking we didn't do it.

42

RPGs / The worst and most hilarious thing I've ever done to a fellow PC...

« on: May 08, 2009, 01:45:10 AM »

...was tonight in my Shadowrun game. It is a tale that must be told. Then you too can share tales of fantastic things done by players to players.

One of our players is out of town, gone to Vegas with a girl he knows. But before I get to this week, I must discuss last week. Last week, our dear sweet out of town player was a bit of an idiot.. He basically posted his mug shot/wanted poster to Shadowland and bragged about it. He took video of him burning down a club and everybody inside it and sold it as a snuff film. Unfortunately, he also got me and another player kind of in the video too, though not much. Then he kind of bailed on me in a firefight where I almost died. So this week, we hear that the Yakuza was interested in talking to us. And by talking to us, I mean killing us slowly. In part, they found us because of this certain player. So we went to get revenge.

Not kill him or trash his stuff. Oh no. That's too simple. We were going to vandalize the fuck out of his giant gold pimped out Hummer.

We got about 3 pounds of shrimp and dumped them in the car. Including in the air vents. Also inside his secret compartment that he hides his super boomie gun.  We put vaseline on the door handles. We spread cocktail sauce all over to go with the shrimp. I cast a fashion spell to do such things as make his steering wheel powder blue with a smiley cloud in the center, a camo seat cover with colors of pink, green, blue, and flourescent yellow, and another seat cover in rainbows and pink hearts. We turned on all his lights and switches. We messed with his speakers so the only one that works is the one in the far back left and we put on the worst music we know.  And we spray painted "Flamer" on his gold hummer in brown paint.  We paid for another magician to cast a Stench spell in the car and ~make it permanent~. He'll have a hard time even getting in the car, let alone driving it. Oh and part of the reason he's going to have a hard time driving it anyway? We found a dead hobo and put it in the drivers seat.

The dead hobo conversation was amusing anyway. "What do I roll to find a dead hobo? Do we find one? Do I need to make one?"

43

General Chaos / Re: Top Ten Podcast

« on: May 06, 2009, 08:15:34 PM »

I don't listen to many podcasts, I have to say. I've sampled a lot of them, but rarely come back to them. Here are the ones I do listen to fairly often.

1.) RPPR
2.) Return to Northmoor
3.) D&D Podcast (mostly the PvP/PA ones)

And that's about it. I occasionally listen to Order 66, but the guys there kind of tick me off and whenever they do, I stop listening for a long while. I keep wanting to listen to more of teh Penny Arcade ones, but I'm not on ITunes (I refuse to install Apple software) and can't find regular links off their sites.

44

RPGs / Re: Games you would run if you didn't have the players that you do

« on: May 04, 2009, 08:28:55 PM »

Heh, welcome to a small world Klaatu. Another Albuquerque person right here.

45

RPGs / Re: Games you would run if you didn't have the players that you do

« on: May 04, 2009, 10:34:50 AM »

I'll trade. My character has to proofread and correct a 1500 page government document in 3 days.