+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

I ran my first game of Monster of the Week last night, which went pretty much how I expected - in that, nothing went how I expected.

One of the core ideas in MotW is that the GM (or "Keeper") comes up with the monsters, people and places that the players interact with, but you don't do any planning for how events are going to unfold. As a result, there's no point where the players suddenly go off the map and you have to scramble to invent stuff to fill it; there was never a map to begin with.

But even knowing that, it took me a few scenes to get into the right mindset of improvising everything. In hindsight I should have foreseen some of what the players did, but it's hard not to sketch out potential scenes when you're figuring out bystanders and locations - and my idea of the game we were playing was undoubtedly more serious than the players'. Which is fine! That illusion came crashing down as soon as we started going through character creation anyway.

We made it about ⅔ of the way through the mystery, they've figured out a bunch of stuff about what's going on and the party is split up (a thing that MotW encourages), with two of them are facing down the monster while the other interviews a potential suspect.

Everybody seemed to have fun, most of the feedback was positive and we should be looking at an exciting finale when we regroup.

Awesome, well done. I always find investigation scenarios to be the hardest to run, sound like you got it right though.

In my game on Monday my players decided to visit a town they had previously said they were going to avoid. I had to dig back through to half-started notes I wrote about this place three months ago and then flesh it out with random tables in the setting book I am using. It was all going well enough and then the random encounters provided me with a beggar exorcist who loves opium, the players decided that an exorcism could be just what their half-dead mentor needed so they did a deal with her, one thing lead to another and we ended up with an hour of running around all the opium dens and tea houses in the town in a drug and magical tea fuelled haze.

tldr: I love GMing games where I have no clue what's going to happen next.

Having a game set in the "real" world, in modern times, probably limits the number of opium-fuelled exorcisms I'll have to preside over, but at the same time I wouldn't put it past these idiots.

Can I talk about Megagames in here?

I'm also running Scion 2E for some folks online. It's easier than finding a group locally because of the stranglehold of the dungeons and the dragons. Scion's pretty rad!

Always happy to hear about your Megagames! Talk in here or start a new thread. hell, go and talk about them in the Xbone Pirate thing Screenshots thread if you like, it's not like we ever minded off topic tangents before.

I fear that Xbox Pirate Thread might not be a great place for it.

Last weekend we ran a game called Exterminator War which was a bit of an odd duck. EW is the creation of Jim Wallman who's one of the originators of the Megagame concept and it's based on a pen and paper roleplaying game campaign he's been running since the 70s. Think The Expanse but with the Borg arriving on your doorstep to start wrecking things.

We had about 45 players in total which was pretty good! I was Main Map Control and Exterminator Control. I was tasked with landing in a corner of the galaxy and was told to 'raise as much hell as you can.' It turns out that if I follow the rules as written I can raise a pretty significant amount of hell. By turn 6 (of 14) I was generating two ships that were stronger than the combined fleets of the human colonies a turn.

They're always a fascinating learning experience for the players and for the designers. I don't think that the game's going to be run again, especially in Dundee, because it's perhaps a little more diplomatic/wargame focused than a lot of the other games.

There's a non-zero chance that I'll be running on in Edinburgh or Dundee before the end of the year based on the classic Watch the Skies, but with a slight twist because that's how I roll.

If you're running megagames in Dundee, let me know - even if I can't make it, I know a few other people who'd be interested.

Sure! There's a facebook group for people that are still doing the facebook thing. I'll see if I can link it…

If you sleep for eight hours, your god decides that you should be able to use your god powers again.

Potion of long rest should be a thing.

Megagames Dundee facebook group.

I'm currently reading Masks. It's a great PBTA game about Teenaged Supers. It's got some really, really cool stuff in it. Again, as with all PBTA games, it's all about the conversation but this seems to have been created to allow people with entirely different approaches to conversations to thrive. It's channeling everything from 80s Teen Titans to '10s Young Avengers and I couldn't be happier. I'd really, really like to try running a synthwave fuelled game set in quasi-Miami in the 80s. I think that might be kinda neat.

aniki ran Monster of the Week for me and Sarah when we were back in Norn Iron this week - it was fun! We, too, probably took a less serious approach than he might have wanted (I, a werebear, was probably the more "reasonable" of the two; Sarah's bereaved, poetry-writing, vampire-hunting emo teenager was fantastic, though), but we also apparently took a very different (and much longer) path through the mystery.

We'd never played Apocalypse stuff before, but I liked it as a system. Character creation, in particular, is really easy and quite fun - I don't know if it's a standard to the Apocalypse World stuff, but it's good, quick, and doesn't overwhelm with numbers and jargon (for the most part).

The latest Bundle of Holding offer is worth a look, it features the corebook and a bunch of supplements for the Mindjammer RPG for about £20. If you don't know it Mindjammer is a Sf RPG set in a transhuman post-scarcity future. It's well-realised, logical, and not miserable.

Basically it's the closest thing to a Culture RPG.

It uses Fate which may or may not be an issue for you but there is still an awful lot of content here even if you ignore the system stuff.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Mindjammer

If you want a free taster there is a pretty good PDF quickstart available: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180186/Mindjammer–Dominion–FREE-QUICKSTART

It had been sitting on my Amazon wishlist for a few months – prompted, I'm fairly certain, by Luscan's enthusiastic recommendation on The Old Place – and on Friday I finally got around to buying the 13th Age rulebook (as anyone who follows me on Twitter will already be aware).

The issue I'm having isn't with the mechanics – although there is a lot to learn in that regard, and I'm still unsure if our group will be willing to swap back to a crunchier system after Monster of the Week, but that's a problem for another day.

I just can't seem to click with the setting.

This is a problem I've had with other books in the past, and it might be what's made MotW so easy for me to gel with: its setting is just our world, so there's no catching up to do with politics or geography. The obvious solution is to just take what I like and change the rest as required, but I've also got a pseudo-steampunk pirate setting I wrote a bunch of stuff for in 2013 that I'm thinking about adapting.

I guess the question is how have other DMs in our membership adapted existing settings that they didn't click with? And how much should I try to prepare for the setting, given that it's only going to be seen by at most a half-dozen people? (I've adapted almost a page of stuff about religions and have bullet pointed out some other socio-political stuff from my 2013 document.)

Or should I lean more into the collaborative aspect and just have a first session of worldbuilding and character creation with the players? That seems like a big ask from players for a game that might not last so long.

I didn't quite get the Dragon Empire either until recently. I had an idea for a campaign using my own stuff for the Adventurer Tier, the Stone Thief book for the Champion Tier and whatever the players wanted for the Epic tier finale. I was asking the 13th Age G+ community if it would work in the Dragon Empire because it would need an old points-of-light setting in the middle of an apocalypse. The unanimous response was that the Dragon Empire is totally vague enough to be that if that's what I wanted, and I realised that it isn't that I was missing something about the setting, it's just been intentionally left vague so that each group can do whatever they want with it.

For your game, I would recommend that you leave it vague until you need to define it. For your first session your players only need to know what their current job is, you can fill in some details about the world to accommodate the back stories your players want and fill in and then fill in the gaps later if the campaign is turning into a long one.

I don't think I've ever run a game of anything in the published setting; I homebrew the lot. At least that way, if someone asks something I don't have an answer for, I can just invent canon on the spot.

Or should I lean more into the collaborative aspect and just have a first session of worldbuilding and character creation with the players? That seems like a big ask from players for a game that might not last so long.

Collaborate, but don't be afraid to come at them with some weird stuff. When you get 13th Age and you start reading it and it's got a lot of that stuff front loaded, you'd be surprised how much of it you can just oust. A lot of DnD pre-supposes that you have your adventures in Faerun, but I don't think I've ever actually played a game that used the stock DnD setting.

In other news: Scion continues to be fucking rad. It's like American Gods but all twisted up.

The importance of the Icons was a big stumbling block for me with 13th Age, when I first read the book - having spent a couple days thinking about it, I don't think it's as big a deal to adapt as I initially thought. Trying to come up with enough varied and interesting alternatives, though…

Of course, there's no rush. It'll be months before we wrap up Monster of the Week.

Yeah, Icons are just the figureheads of the various factions. The elves, the dwarves, the human empire, the Wizard school, the thieves, the good dragons, the bad dragons… If you are building your own world just give all the factions a similar figurehead that your players can have allegiance to or history with.

I'll be honest though, I've dropped icon rolls from my game. I've got enough stuff going on each session without having to shoehorn in a icon relationship every thirty minutes.

Monday night was our last regular Whitehack game before or summer break. It was also the second session within the dungeon of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure The God That Crawls.

I had expected the god of the title, an ever-hungry mass of slime and the only real threat present, to give the players some trouble. I guessed that they would spend a fair bit of time running away and then figure out how to manipulate it so that they could escape or achieve their goal (finding the item in room 2:10). I figured that there was only a small chance of them killing it since they didn't have any way to harm it other than a stand-up fight, and it had more Hit points than them.

In the first session in the dungeon, session 15 of the campaign, the PCs arrived already tired and slightly wounded, so of course, the god ambushed them straight away. They ran into the tunnels and pretty much the first place they found was the mirror ceiling trap in room 2:09. It was obviously a trap, so of course one of the players leap for it and ended up trapped within the mirror, which then shattered. When I have all six players present, one of them will always trigger the traps.

This trap from last session though, ended up defining much of Monday's game.

The players took the shards of glass (I rolled a d100 and told them there were 54 of them big enough to use) and set them up to be a corridor of death for any persuing massive slime monsters. The PCs by chance walked straight to the god, turned and legged it back to their corridor. The god followed.

I gave the god a save to stop halfway when it realised what was happening. It failed. I gave the god a save for half damage. It failed. So then, past half health already, three of the PCs fought back the god and ultimately killed it as it retreated.

I was impressed, I hadn't expected that at all.

By the end of the session though, the PCs were completely lost in the labyrinth and had run out of water.

D&D rocks. I can't believe I have to wait six weeks to continue the game.

3:16 Carnage Among the Stars is ten years old today, to celebrate its designer has reduced it to $3.16 over on Drivethru. If you don't already own it, go treat yourself. It's basically a light story game about space marines.

Best Friends and Remember Tomorrow are both great and on sale too!

https://twitter.com/gregorhutton/status/1018269515199733767?s=19

Already put this on Twitter and Facebook, but for those of you who aren't active/don't have me on there: I'm taking part in a 12-hour charity D&D game on August 4th in support of Cancer Research UK. Any support or assistance you might be able to lend would be greatly appreciated!

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/12hrdnd

If anyone is interested in watching the D&D stream, it goes live at 10am Saturday:

I've mentioned on Facebook and maybe Twitter, but just for posterity: the 12-hour game was amazing, loads of fun, and borderline traumatic. Peak D&D, basically.

I - Gargle, kobold drunken master monk - spent most of the first two hours polymorphed into a horse for losing a carnival game; after that, we had our fortunes read (most ominously) and discovered that the carnies were all undead, and the ringmaster some kind of extraplanar monstrosity; then the cleric and I watched in horror as our adventuring colleagues systematically executed everyone in the freak show tent. We returned that night, and murdered our way into the sealed-off haunted house, and worked through a series of puzzles - our reward was getting sucked into the fucking upside down, where we were stalked by soul-sucking shadow beasts and had to demean ourselves for a watching audience of grim, black-garbed jesters (aka the Twitch audience, narf).

By the time we escaped and killed the ringleader, freeing the village from the clutches of the evil carnival, I think we'd all been through something of a wringer, and I'm pretty sure I was ready to swear off ever doing anything like that again; now, a mere 5 days later, I'd sign up in a goddamn heartbeat.

I’m halfway through running a great 7th Sea session with five of my gaming friends, three of which are new to RPGs. It’s been great fun, run on Saturdays at my house over the summer, we’ve been sat outside in the sun, rolling dice and drinking. All been good fun so far, leading up to next months finale!

My 7th Sea story so far.

A group of soldiers, sailors, priests and scholars all in the employ of The Vaticine church, have been tasked with escorting Sister Ursula Of The Inquisition back to Castile. Within moments of revealing she is in possession of an ancient Syrneth artifact, The Heart Of Quinametazin an ancient stone giant, their boat is attacked and wrecked on a nearby island.

Working their way inland to escape the attack of a young Kraken, they are escorted by a young shaman, White Flower, who falls for the elderly scholar and teaches him to reach inside and awaken his own links to magic.

Calderon, the Inquisitions agent in the new world seems to have kidnapped Sr Ursula and taken her to an ancient pyramid, our heroes battle their way to the top against stone beasts that come to life and fling themselves into a small chamber at the top of the pyramid.

The newly awakened scholar/ shaman, enters into his first animal trance and maps out the pyramid finding a shortcut to the ancient Syrneth complex below, the heroes jump down a stone slide chased by skeleton pirates, and land in the middle of half of Calderon’s troops.

As the local shaman summon terrible creatures, alchemists pelt our heroes with potions, acids and fire. Taking damage, the heroes finally beat their way through these mobs and find their way into the ancient temple below.

Dwarfed by the scale of the place, our heroes find themselves on a stone bridge, spanning a magma filled chamber, disappearing into the dark centre of the island and what must be the inactive volcano that could be seen from the beach.

The bridge’s traps are cunning and deadly, but scaled to prevent giants - massive blades the size of ships sails swing across the bridge overlapping the length of the bridge. Giant hammers smash parts of the bridge, the thousands of years of action causing parts of this causeway to have collapsed into the magma. Arrows the size of tree trunks fly across the space when triggers are stepped on.

The heroes wind their way through these only to be faced by the second half of Calderon’s troops, dispatched in even quicker time, but their progress is stopped by one of Calderon’s partners jumping out of the shadows.

John Pierre Ballon - the secretive leader of the new Montaigne revolutionary forces introduces himself, reveals that Sr Ursula is a Montaigne princess and that she holds the final key for Calderon to awaken Quinametazin.

At the mention that Ursula is Montaigne royalty, something in the newly awakened shaman stirs, and a further magical force of Porte is shown to him, revealing that this orphan boy may be Montaigne royalty himself.

Tiberon the naval officer with piratical urges, lunges at John Pierre, slips through his guard as he is boasting about his revolution, releasing he may not have been as prepared as he could have been John Pierre slips away under the cover of his troops.

Our heroes make short work of the remaining brutes and reach the end of the bridge, as it opens into an even larger chamber, the furthest parts clouded in sulphuric clouds, bridges spanning from all quarters into the centre of the chamber, far below, the magma like a trapped subterranean ocean.

The centre of the cavern holds an ornate altar, circular discs of stone make up a platform with control panels that are made of sheets of diamond and buttons made of more gold than either of the heroes has ever seen in one place.

Atop the altar is Calderon, JP and Ursula.

I've been working on a 13th Age setting and campaign for the last month or so, getting quite excited about the idea of running something new - to the point that it was distracting me from the Monster of the Week campaign that I'm still in the middle of running.

But then tonight after we finished our MotW session I sat down to write the first new mystery I've had to for about three months. The pace we're going at, I've had enough stuff written to cover us until now; tonight was the first session of the last thing I'd previously prepared.

In the space of about ten minutes I'd figured out the countdown for the mystery, the monster that's behind it, and sketched over a dozen bystanders I'd need to populate it. This msytery has immediately replaced the idea I'd originally had for our mid-season finale, and I'm desperate to get through the one we just started so I can drop this on the hunters.

I think I might just have been excited about writing something new, rather than 13th Age specifically. It's good to feel this invested in MotW again.

Sounds good. There's nothing better than having a game you are excited to run. I'd love to see what prep for MotW looks like. It certainly sounds intriguing.

I'll be running a 5e one-shot on Monday. Both the players have decided they want to play Half-orc Bards, so it should be interesting.

I'd love to see what prep for MotW looks like. It certainly sounds intriguing.

For me, it looks like a Trello board.

The steps to create a mystery are very basic (the book encourages a lack of preparation, to a degree) and don't have to come on this order, but this is usually how I do it.

1. Come up with the mystery concept or monster. For the Trello board linked above, the concept was "Hot Fuzz but werewolves", which gave a pretty good direction for most of the rest of it.
2. Plan out the countdown, a six-point breakdown of what would happen if the players never got involved - basically the bad guy's plan. It means you have an idea of what to do if the players are dragging their feet or looking in the wrong places - drop another body, have someone disappear, get the monster to jump out, or generally just advance the story and raise the stakes.
3. Write up the monster, give it attacks, special Moves and weaknesses as relevant. (This is usually where I decide if it's going to need minions, too.)
4. Write up a list of bystanders and locations, give them each a name, a motivation (and special Moves, if required), and a brief description. I also like to give my bystanders a couple of facts that they know about the situation, so that the Hunters can figure out what the person's relationship to events is. Sometimes I've got cards for dead characters - victims the players aren't going to speak directly to - just to track how they fit into the story.

If your game is taking place in the same town/area every time, you might have recurring locations and characters to include, but mine is influenced more by The X-Files, Fringe and Warehouse 13 than the likes of Buffy, so I basically have to start from scratch every time.

But that's basically it - the countdown is as close to a prepared story as you get. For this mystery, I had to invent a half dozen characters on the spot and ad-lib their stories, though that got me a great recurring line that really spooked the players every time someone said it (and everyone said it); on the other side there were four or five characters and a whole subplot that the players never got near.

I was initially worried that having so little to go on would make it harder to fill a session with stuff, but in fact having less prepared meant I never had that moment of oh God they're going off the story panic because the entire assumption going in was that I'd be reacting to their shenanigans.

Cool. Surprisingly close to how I prepare for my OSR games.

I'll have a thing happening, I'll bullet point what will happen if the players don't get involved and I'll list a few NPCs the players might interact with who are affected by these events. I'll include a couple potential hooks that might draw the characters in. Finally I roll up a few random events to mix in as cover and to try and make the world feel more alive.

My issue when running anything has always been over-prep; but I have at least learned to write my version, and then also the version where the PCs just kill everyone.

So, in Dundee there's a group that meets on a weekly basis to play 5E. It's a big group, though, like some 20-ish people that you can drop in and drop out of and every adventure is a one-shot. If you want to play 5E and just kind of- do stuff then it's a pretty good scene.

The problem for me with that is that I dislike 5E.

So, over the course of the summer break, while all the students are away and we have a smaller group, we stop our metaplot of the 5e campaign and usually take a break. Every year, previously, the idea of 'what if we ran something else over the summer?' has been floated but it doesn't seem like anyone ever put too much effort into it. I asked what'd happened in previous summers and was told 'Oh, no one wanted to play. We offered to run Dark Heresy, Only War, and 3.5 and no one wanted to play those-'

But what if instead of replacing 5e with more DnD and games that are aggressively opposed to player empowerment, we tried to replace them with games that were more enjoyable for one shot or short-term styled games?

In the first week, I ran Paranoia. We had a full house for it.

In the second week, I ran Scion 2E (which is real good). That looks like it might be turning into a full blown campaign at the request of some of the players.

In the third week, I got to play a thing! That thing was Numenera and fucksake, Monte, you clown.

Last week I missed it because stuff happened.

This week I will probably be running Masks! A PBTA superhero game.

So far, there hasn't been a game that's not run because people weren't interested. I have been pushing real hard for systems people haven't done before, games people want to try, and games they won't get anywhere else. It has gone real well.

Some takeaways on this:

• Paranoia takes more preptime than I remember it taking.
• Players that have only ever done DnD need a bit of cajoling to go for what's most fun rather than what gives advantage on your next saving throw.
• People are willing to go to pretty extraordinary lengths if there's a chance their character might get turned into a monkey.
• Scion 2E is real good and more people should play it.

Good effort!

Which version of Paranoia? I've only got the new edition which I found to be quite unwieldy and not all that fun to run (and I'm not sure the players got much out of it either). It's just a load of stuff to keep track of all the time, the combat mechanics are kind of clunky (the way initiative is handled is particularly difficult to explain, to the point that we just didn't use it).

Plus the rules just aren't all that clear about quite a lot of fundamental stuff (like NPC stats, for instance).

But I was a Kickstarter backer so I've got shitloads of books and expansions that I've got zero interest in using.

He was running Paranoia XP I believe, which does sound like the best option of all the editions. If you don't want to see your Kickstarter spoils go to waste though, Paranoia will run fine with just about any system you do like, provided it's possible to suddenly and unexpectedly kill your PCs. I've considered running the setting with OneDice, White Star, All Flesh Must Be Eaten… Anything with skills and laser pistols will do.

Paranoia XP.

The most important thing to understand about Paranoia is that it's the GM that knows the rules, not the players. Questioning the GM is treason. Ask players what skill they think is most appropriate, get them to roll on it. Degrees of success and failure are a thing. When you get into a fight, I found just going around the table clockwise was good because, for the most part, the party was so split up doing their own things I could get away with that.

Plus, if a character ever does something you don't know how to roll, just have it blow up and kill them.

I now have a 100% success rate with running D&D 5e.

I ran Orcs in Tarodan's Tomb which is a small dungeon adventure with only eight locations, yet it manages to fit in an extremely diverse bunch of orcs, with a boss orc, and an even worse boss fight and a traitorous ally. I was impressed. I was also impressed that 5e managed the game no problem despite the fact that both the PCs were half-orc Bards.

How flexible is D&D? I've never played, just wondering.

Like, if I wanted to go completely off story, is that catered for? Or does the DM have to nudge people in the right direction?

I've watched a couple of episodes of HarmonQuest, anyone else seen that? It's pretty funny so far. There's something endlessly amusing about low-key, real-world banter being animated in a fantasy world.

Like, if I wanted to go completely off story, is that catered for? Or does the DM have to nudge people in the right direction?

Short version, depends on the DM. There's usually a semi-obvious way that they want the story to go, but an experienced DM will be able to cope with some variation in priorities from the party. If one or more players deliberately want to fuck with the plan, killing questgiver NPCs or whatever, that's harder to deal with.

D&D is as flexible and fudgey as you want it to be. The DM Guide kind of encourages you to let players attempt whatever they like; if there's a chance of failure, set a difficulty target and get them to roll for it. But that's kind of TTRPGs as a whole, I guess?

Some DMs/groups like to run dungeon crawls (which are, by nature, somewhat linear), some like a sandbox where the players drive almost everything that happens; I think a mix of both works best. Come up with a few major characters/factions with things they want, a couple of starting quests, and see what direction the players want to go.

Again, that's maybe just TTRPGs.

I've only ever really run my own stuff, though, so I don't know how much material there is in the published stuff for dealing with unexpected outcomes.

I've mostly just run Monster of the Week, an Apocalypse Engine game themed after TV like The X-Files, Fringe or Buffy, which is much lighter on rules than most d20 games, but the thing I've found is that it's surprisingly easy to get players back on track when they go off on a tangent (so long as they're not chaotic stupid). Moving NPCs and information around so that it definitely gets found, interrupting scenes with characters blustering in, or just having the monster drop in and fuck shit up.

I've done stuff that I'm convinced is really transparent, obvious interference - particularly with NPCs giving out information too freely - and the players not only haven't commented on it, in a couple of instances they thought they were really clever for getting details out of a witness.

That said, the nature of MotW is that your Hunters are focused on one thing at a time rather than playing in a proper sandbox - the players have a lot of leeway in how they deal with the Monster, but they're going to be dealing with it.

I am trying to bring the lessons I've learned from MotW into the other game I'm prepping for, though - blocking out locations and characters but leaving out the narrative connective tissue for improvising on the night.

Moving NPCs and information around so that it definitely gets found, interrupting scenes with characters blustering in, or just having the monster drop in and fuck shit up.

This is my standard DM approach in any system. If you don't find something essential, it'll find you.

I tend not to have a plan for where my players will go. I set a few leads or encounters which will suggest things the players can do or investigate or steal or fight or whatever, they will choose one or two and the game will go that way. Occasionally they ignore all my hooks but usually they have a good reason and I can build some entertainment around that. Honestly, one of the things I love best about these games is when my players come up with stuff I could never have thought of and leave me wondering what the fuck is going to happen next.

For a less generic example:

I last night's game the players were exploring the tomb of an elven king looking for treasure, unfortunately there was already a dozen orcs in there doing the same thing. To further complicate matters there was also a half-elf thief who was happy to ally with them after they saved her from the orcs but she was planning to try and steal the treasure for herself at the end. Also the elven king is actually a lich and this dungeon is both his tomb and his prison.

I wanted the players to work through the orcs, then get into a big fight with Grogma, the leader of the orcs, and then have some sort of surprise finale with the half-elf backstabbing them or with the lich waking up. This is where things went sideways.

I did not expect the two half-orc Bard PCs to tell Grogma that they needed her to join their band as the lead singer and then back it up with a natural 20 roll on Persuasion. The game was supposed to be about testing out 5e so I didn't want to pretty much wrap up the threats there so I looked at my options and realised that this would be the perfect time to have the Half-elf stab Grogma in the back for massive Rogue damage, this was pretty much the plan that the players had agreed with her after all. Grogma then grabbed the half-elf (she had a dumb name which I can't remember) and threw her into a wall dropping her to 0 HP.

She had managed to take away half of Grogma's health though so it wasn't all bad and the players could then knock her out with a sleep spell. They were left with the choice of killing grogma and healing the half-elf, or leaving the half-elf to die and trying to get Grogma back on their side. It was a fun situation to reach and certainly not the way I had planned it.

Something important to remember about Persuasion; it's not a 'stop a fight just by pointing at a person and saying no hit them instead' skill.

The most persuasion can do in a fight with someone that wants to kill you and your friends is make them want to kill you last.

I dunno; depends on phrasing. "Hey, this is all a misunderstanding! Let's talk instead" can work, depending on the target.

It was a natural 20 and the player made a really good case for her turning and joining their troupe. She was the last orc left too, so it wasn't like she would have to start fighting her friends. If I'd had her smile and say, "I like you, I'll kill you last," I think they might have been a bit disappointed.

I just found this in my feed: https://plus.google.com/111159161165406537226/posts/Ckq7gvRQX8v

It's the super-minimal D&D variant Into The Odd adapted for running Paranoia. I think it would work really well. Basically all the system gives you is saves to avoid danger and damage rolls for combat (it doesn't even have to-hit rolls - in combat, everyone gets hurt). It's a lot of fun and it's very fast, and I think pretty perfect for Paranoia.

dungeons and dragons was a mistake.

morty i did it i turned myself into a grognard morty
im grognard rick

Is this basically just that kinda-bad Futurama movie but with Rick and Morty, and a comic?

I'd say that it's good to get people into the hobby, but what little I know of R&M fandom doesn't make me think we want those people in the hobby (and most of them are probably in the hobby already anyway). This isn't the first of Harmon's properties to roll into D&D, though - there was a pretty great Community episode (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, in season 2) about a D&D game.

(There was another one in a later season but it wasn't as good.)

I haven't read it all the way through. I got a few pages in and quit out. It's just chock full of REFERENCES but not even in a funny way. Just- 'hey, remember this?' or 'hey guys! In jokes!'

"I'd let Travis, Griffin or Justin explore my adventure zone, if you know what I mean" stuff. That's not me being hyperbolic, that's a direct quote from the comic. Harmon has a pretty neat love of RPGs - that episode of Community was neat! Harmon Quest is funny even if it has basically nothing to do with DnD beyond using the cultural cache of it to hook in Actual Play nerds.

I know, I know, that sounds real snobbish (it kind of is?) but at the same time they have characters doing shit those characters shouldn't be able to do if you use the rules, they're not paying attention to the majority of the books and the players aren't rolling their own dice. It doesn't really feel like DnD in any meaningful context, and it feels more like make-believe with dice rolling in it occasionally to see if you get to make believe harder than the other guy.