+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

spends one forward to buy the GM a pizza

That'd be a Hold rather than a Forward.

I mean- that's a lot of money.

I mean- that's a lot of money.

It really is. I'm not surprised that a lot of people have signed on, but just now the average donation is about £1000.

It kind of supports my point that the media most RPGs are trying to emulate is Saturday morning cartoons.

just now the average donation is about £1000

That's thrown off a little by the one lunatic who's pledged $20,000.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exaltedfuneral/the-ultraviolet-grasslands?ref=user_menu

This is well worth throwing some money at if you like weird psychedelic fantasy adventures with gorgeous art. The author/artist is a friend of mine but I've signed up for $60 and I can't wait to get the full book.

If you want a sample there is a free into here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/241606/The-Ultraviolet-Grasslands–Free-Introduction

https://twitter.com/Hunters_Ent/status/1112127477483220992

There's an Eclipse Phase sourcebook Altered Carbon roleplaying game happening. I want to like cyberpunk games but too many of them are obsessed with the cyber and not enough with the punk aspect, or at least what passed for punk 30-40 years ago.

Yeah, I've never found one which held my interest. I haven't read or watched Altered Carbon so I don't know if this is likely to change things for me.

Have you read Ex Machina by Guardians of Order? The rules aren't anything special but the four cyberpunk settings are pretty awesome. I had a lot of fun running the Daedalus setting, although since it was written ten years ago and it was all about big data and mass surveillance , it's probably horrendously out of date now.

I haven't read those!

Please tell me there is no 'if you get cyberware you become less of a person' things? That is usually my first stopping point with cyberpunk games.

Lol, no. You can have a prosthetic hand and not ich with the desire to go on a shooting spree.

It doesn't look like there's any legit way to buy it any more.

(https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/rpg.rem.uz/_Collections/Cartoon%20Games/BESM%20Tristat%20%26%20D20%20Systems/BESM%20Ex%20Machina.pdf)

The first 150 pages are the rules which are fine but nothing revolutionary. It's the Big Eyes, Small Mouth system so it's a bit like GURPS.

The remaining 200 pages are the four settings. Daedalus is near future surveillance horror. The others are Matrix but with less separation between the matrix and the real world, an orbital elevator and a collapse of society Mad Max sort of thing.

'if you get cyberware you become less of a person' … is usually my first stopping point with cyberpunk games.

Isn't that kind of a major theme in cyberpunk, though? There's definitely a distaste for humanity mentioned in Neuromancer:

[T]he elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat.

Though I guess there's a spectrum between that and developing sociopathy because you've got some fancy new eyes.

'if you get cyberware you become less of a person' … is usually my first stopping point with cyberpunk games.

Isn't that kind of a major theme in cyberpunk, though? There's definitely a distaste for humanity mentioned in Neuromancer:

[T]he elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat.

Though I guess there's a spectrum between that and developing sociopathy because you've got some fancy new eyes.

It could be a definition thing but, here goes.

Cyberpunk games like CP2020 and Shadowrun both have systems where you lose aspects of what your resonance or humanity whenever you get cyberware, so much so that people eventually lose all of themselves to this and become cyber-zombies. On the one hand, I get that it's a game balance thing, but on the other hand, be better at designing games.

Your soul, your humanity, your essence becomes corrupted by implanting cyberware. Is it knives in your forearms so you can slice and dice a Shiwase executive on the way to an op? Is it a CASIE mod to let you manipulate people in conversations? Is it a emotional regulator to help you manage your PTSD? Who gives a shit, you're now less human than you were before you did this. The problem of cybertech lowering a persons humanity or whatever butts up against the reality of sitting at an RPG table with someone with an artificial leg and you go 'so your character has artificial legs which means they're less human in a spiritual way.'

I get that it's a trope but it's pretty shitty.

Sure, Neuromancer is a foundational text in Cyberpunk but- The Call of Cthulhu is a foundational text of the Cosmic Horror genre. It doesn't mean there's not shit in both of those things that could use readdressing in a more up-to-date cultural context.

The punk aspect should be, in this humble chummer's opinion, more about class. When the rich end up with cyberware, aside from its functionality it's either A. Beautiful or B. Indistinguishable from their normal body. When the poor get cyberware it looks like they replaced their limb with the remains of a broken RC car; your body becomes an indicator of your function - you have these big fuckin' cyberarms, you're a cargo hauler and marked as such for life. I have these dainty cyberarms, I'm a concert pianist that can hit combinations of notes that no one else can even consider.

There's also the problem for me that cyberpunk has lost a lot of its speculative fiction aspect for me. Time makes fools of us all.

I mean- Okay.

I mean- Okay.

That attitude is less enthusiastic than Friend Computer deserves – are you some kind of communist? Or Mutant? Your behaviour is deeply suspicious; I shall have to report this incident.

(Although you've got a point. What kind of game even is it? It kinda looks like a management game, but that removed perspective feels like it would completely miss the point of Paranoia.)

No no, I'm down with it. I'm happy that more pen and paper games are getting RPGs other than DnD. We've had a call of cthulu game and we're getting a Vampire and a Paranoia game. It's neat that the kids that grew up playing this shit are now in management positions.

Yep, no idea what's going on but it certainly looks like Paranoia.

Lads, lads, lads… I've had an idea about Paranoia.

What if it was a trap based battle royale…

Another kickstarter for your consideration:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trilemma/trilemma-adventures-compendium?ref=thanks-tweet

50ish two-page adventures for whichever game you like. Ancient ruins, cursed towers, at least one politically charged city of baffling complexity and hilarious danger. I really can't recommend this enough.

The adventures are mostly available free over on http://www.trilemma.com/ if you are curious.

I hit one of my players with a level drain attack today. He lost two levels, or about 30 sessions of XP. I felt pretty bad but he took it well.

I hit one of my players with a level drain attack today. He lost two levels, or about 30 sessions of XP. I felt pretty bad but he took it well.

Was it save or die?

Is it the bad OSR rules iconic pairing.

No save. He got hit, lost 2 levels. He could have been more cautious and avoided the combat.

The cleric tried to fix it after the fight and I gave the player a save then, but he failed.

Last night, our paladin kept loudly threatening to righteously smite what was clearly an immensely powerful fiend; the rest of us were keen to just get the heck out of there, and the fiend was inclined to let us leave.

But the paladin just wouldn't shut up, even when we restrained him and dragged him away, so she put a geas on him and now he can't speak for 30 days under pain of 5d10 psychic damage.

I take it 5d10 is a significant amount for your paladin friend?

Is it the bad OSR rules iconic pairing.

I feel I should add, I don't think either 'save or die' or 'level drain' are bad rules, provided the players are given sufficient opportunity to avoid them.

I'm happy to have PCs die in my games, it seems weird to not also be content to remove part of a character. It's not even all that bad thanks to the exponential costs of levelling up; in the time it takes the rest of the group to gain another level Finch should recover her two lost levels. Before long the 7000 XP she lost will be pretty insignificant.

As for save or die, I use it when the players have clearly messed up, I don't spring it on them.

I take it 5d10 is a significant amount for your paladin friend?

We're only level 4, I think he's got 36 max hp. So it's not likely to kill him outright, but it's pretty funny.

Last night, my 13th Age players found themselves barricaded into a schoolhouse with the inhabitants of a village seeking refuge from an undead-ish siege; I'd put an obviously-shady NPC in the room, with the intent that they would be revealed later as working for the group behind the situation.

The bard walks right up to him, asks "Hey, want to tag along while we figure this out?". Which of course he did, taking the opportunity to dispose of evidence and taunt the party, before being asploded by the Cleric's holy magics (or maybe teleporting away at the last second, I haven't decided - there was no body left, so my options are open).

I feel I should add, I don't think either 'save or die' or 'level drain' are bad rules, provided the players are given sufficient opportunity to avoid them.

I'm happy to have PCs die in my games, it seems weird to not also be content to remove part of a character. It's not even all that bad thanks to the exponential costs of levelling up; in the time it takes the rest of the group to gain another level Finch should recover her two lost levels. Before long the 7000 XP she lost will be pretty insignificant.

As for save or die, I use it when the players have clearly messed up, I don't spring it on them.

I think we might just have fundamentally different approaches to dungeon based roleplaying games.

My opinion time, I guess: Level drain that you can't save against or SoD stuff is actively wretched and 99% of the time feels like someone is being arbitrarily punished for adventuring.

'In the traditions of the old school renaissance, players are empowered in their decision making such that they may avoid dangerous situations!' is one of the big reasons that the closest to getting into the OSR I ever got was looking at Godbound and going 'hey, that's a really well formatted PDF.'

seriously the godbound pdf is real good

Not that players should always get their way or anything, but de-leveling a PC is too literal a method of player disempowerment for my liking.

I want my players to feel good about their decisions at the end of the session. Second-guessing bad ones, but never outright regretting them; never feeling like they've wasted their time, and certainly not to the extent of multiple levels of progress.

De-leveling feels adversarial, which isn't the atmosphere I want at my table. I want to trick and surprise the party, but would never put them in a no-win situation.

But then I'm also more in the camp of milestone leveling than XP, so there are a few old-school conventions that I'm happy to leave by the wayside.

Yeah, the campaign I'm playing at the moment is doing XP tracking, and it's the one thing I wish we could jettison; it seems like the DM is trying to jig the encounters so we level up at certain points, anyway, so I don't know why he doesn't just keep to milestones for his own sake.

Well the follow up to the great level drain session was last night. The level drained PC managed to earn XP that she's back up to level 3 already.

It wasn't all good news though, Dengar the Brave Ninja got killed after a worm attacked, wrapped itself around him and sucked out eight of his nine HPs. He did manage to extricate himself from the worm's grasp and continued fighting for I think three rounds with that 1HP, but eventually his luck, and special abilities ran out.

Shit, 9 health? I think my WoW character had about 900,000. (Although working out the maths on a 900,000 roll might give you a headache…)

Does 9 health give you enough scope to differentiate between a rat biting you, and a dragon? I'm no expert in dragon bites but I assume they're more than 8 worse.

I've just noticed Aniki and Luscan's replies on the 8th.

Level Drain isn't a permanent impairment, if you survive it, you will recover, just like HP. If it was a little easier on the bookkeeping it would be a reasonable way to track lingering wounds. The problem is that it feels like a permanent overly harsh loss because XP is treated like an ongoing, ever-increasing score for playing. I've never felt the need for constant progress in my characters while playing and one of the most common problems I have had while GMing is PCs levelling up to the point where the game is no challenge any more, or worse the PCs are so powerful that the game world doesn't make sense any more.

I don't see why XP has to be an untouchable reward when nothing else the players achieve is guaranteed to remain. NPC allies can die. Magic items can be lost, stolen or broken. The PC's stronghold can be burnt down. I find that if players know these things can be taken away they value them more. If they know their character can die in any encounter the encounter becomes more meaningful.

In more practical terms, I'm using level drain and character death in this campaign to keep the group at a sensible power level for the scenarios I am running. All the scenarios are scattered around the map and I only had a vague idea of which order they might do them in. They are mostly pitched at levels 2-4 so I needed to keep them roughly in that range. Any new characters replacing dead ones start at level 2.

As always it depends on what you and your players want out of the game. We had a big discussion about it at the start of the campaign and everyone was happy to give it a go.

My next campaign will absolutely not function this way because it is very much going to be all about the ever increasing power or adventurers.

Shit, 9 health? I think my WoW character had about 900,000. (Although working out the maths on a 900,000 roll might give you a headache…)

Does 9 health give you enough scope to differentiate between a rat biting you, and a dragon? I'm no expert in dragon bites but I assume they're more than 8 worse.

For one thing, he had already taken some damage, I think his HPs are in the 15-20 range at full health.

A small Red Dragon can do two claw attacks and one bite attack. The claws are d8 damage, the bite is 4d8. It also has fire breath and trample options. It would almost certainly kill them all.

That being said, in my previous D&D game, four level 5 PCs (so just a little bit tougher) took on and killed a 250HP giant who could literally pick up and chew on them.

I had a fighter with 20HP take on and kill a 100HP Stone Golem in one-to-one combat. So it's certainly not all about the HPs.

In my experience, D&D player characters have lower health than monsters but do more damage per hit, while monsters have more HP (to soak up combat rounds) but don't hurt the players as much (assuming levels are the same). It balances out okay until someone decides to PvP someone over an alignment mismatch, because player health isn't design to take player damage.

(Disclaimer: I've only really played 4e D&D and a little bit of 5e; most of my running experience is with 13th Age which uses much more closely-aligned player and monster stats.)

Are there any iPad games that do a half-decent job of simulating D&D? I don't have the time to track down a local group and commit to playing, but it's always intrigued me.

I guess Baldur's Gate would be your best option on iPad.

Oooh I forgot that had an iPad port. Thanks!

Dunno what crossover there's going to be here, but Stephen Colbert is going to play D&D with Matt Mercer for charity on the 23rd of May as part of Critical Role's Red Nose Day efforts. They're running polls to decided what, exactly, the adventure will be - based on current donations, he's going to be a bard, accompanied by his NPC mother, seeking to liberate a magical, sentient sword that acts as a hype man from a lich obsessed with inappropriate "bone" puns.

It's finally happened. My DM career is at the stage I never thought it would reach: I'm about to have a session where I turn two of my players into agents of opposing teams, with no-one else at the table aware.

In a previous session, the Bard was (surprisingly easily) manipulated into reporting the party's actions back to one of the (eventual) main villains; I should get to the point tomorrow night where the Cleric is fully on-board with the "good" guys.

I often find these things are more fun when everyone is aware of what's going on. It can be very easy to have all of this drama going on with players working at cross purposes, bit only the GM knows about it and when there final reveal comes the players don't remember (or never knew about) all the events which lead up to it well enough to get it.

"Black library stuff is stupid and-"

"starring Brian Blessed as Gotrek."
GW, you son of a bitch…

I was at UKGE this past weekend, and played a few RPG demos and one-shots – rolling as a player for the first time in what feels like years.

Alien RPG

This was great. We played a ~90 minute "cinematic" mission (a high-risk one-shot, basically) set on Hadley's Hope. Our four-man team of local part-time rent-a-cops had to reactivate an emergency beacon, on the other side of the colony.

Mechanically, this is based on a streamlined version of the same Year Zero rules as Tales from the Loop. Each of four Attributes has three skills; you get a pool of d6s to roll based on your combined Attribute and Skill scores, and anyone with a 1 or higher in that same skill can add one additional die to your pool.

Each 6 counts as a success, or you can push your luck: re-roll the entire pool, and take a black Stress die. Stress dice can give you additional successes, but if you roll a 1 on a Stress die, something bad is going to happen.

We each had a private goal to pursue; in a longer game following along with these would contribute to character progression, but for a one-shot it was a pretty good way to get us to RP a little bit. My priority was The Mission, and other survivors be damned; another character wanted to be the first ti get a confirmed xenomorph kill, while a scientist wanted to (predictably enough) secure a living sample for study.

My favourite touch was its approach to limited-use items like the motion tracker. It starts with a rating of 3 power – which means to use it, roll 3 dice. There are no Successes for the tracker – it always just works – but if you roll a 1, then its battery has been depleted and you lose one of the dice. It made using the tracker a slightly fraught decision – every ping risked the thing dying, leaving us blind.

Liberal use of seismic charges and an efficient firing-squad ambush saw off the only xenomorph that we actually go close enough to see; as of that afternoon I think we were the only team to have a 100% survival rate.

Fallout RPG

Not impressed with this one. While it was billed as a Fallout RPG, it's really just a campaign scaffolding for the existing tabletop miniatures wargame. The guy running the demo obviously hadn't done his prep for the non-wargame part, so we ended up just having a couple of combat encounters. Which were fine, but fiddlier than a TTRPG needs, and wouldn't work without the (very expensive and space-consuming) miniatures game components.

13th Age

I've been running a 13th Age game for a couple of months, and was glad to see a couple of free spaces left for one of the organised games, so I could experience the system from the other side of the screen.

We had to locate a crashed meteor (one of the setting's "Living Dungeons") and kill it, before the official monster hunters arrived. It was a fun dungeon delve, with some interesting concepts and one kinda-badly-thought-out puzzle.

I played a Sorcerer, which was a lot of fun – melting people with acid breath, firing off lasers and generally being a chaotic death-dealer. (We don't have any casters in my game.)

The DM (visibly nervous) had written the encounters for a six-player party, but two people never showed up and he didn't rebalance them on the fly, so we got pretty well pasted by an "optional" boss, but the rogue and ranger managed to almost completely bypass the final fight with a couple of well-timed powers.

I wasn't expecting any surprises from this one, and didn't get any, but it did make me realise how slow combat can feel when you're not running the entire board, and I'm going to make more of an effort to keep people engaged in fights in my own game.

Conan RPG 👌

This was… okay. A not-great scenario (prison break), a fight that felt a little bit too long, and a set of dice mechanics I wasn't familiar with (2d20) conspired to dull my excitement.

I'd be interested to see it in a setting that's not so beholden to an existing property that I've never engaged with; apparently Star Trek Adventures uses a similar dice mechanic, so it might be more up my street (especially since it's unlikely to be so combat-focused).

Yeah, STA looks like a lot of fun, though I've only read it - not really confident enough in the setting to attempt running a game.

Star Trek Adventures is indeed based on the mechanics used in Conan, which seems risks now I write it down. It has less combat options and more Fate style meta currencies and flexible character traits.

I'm glad the Alien RPG played well.

As for 13th Age, "No surprises" would be my two-word review of the system.

As for 13th Age, "No surprises" would be my two-word review of the system.

I can't tell if you're saying this as a positive or negative. (Personally, I really like 13A; its D&D-adjacent approach has helped get players into the right place, and the streamlining it does around monsters and encounter building makes prep very easy for me.)

It's a positive and a negative. Positive for all the reasons you mentioned, but I got a bit bored running it.

I might go back to it someday though, I'd like to run Eyes of the Stone Thief. If I do I'll pull out all the stops and throw every crazy creature I can find in there, I'll also run it as fast as I can, throwing story and levels at the players as fast as they'll let me.

Last night, I got to do the best goddamn RP I've ever done.

Insincere apologies for the incoming wall of text…

Chatter - kenku ranger. Me. As in most settings(?), kenku are generally seen as beggars and thieves; the highest opinion someone’s likely to have is that they’re merely untrustworthy.

Cassius - Lawful good half-elf paladin - emphasis currently heavily on the “Lawful” bit.

Clink - a kenku NPC, runs a shop.

Rukkar - a half-orc NPC who travelled with us as part of another adventuring group.

– Act One –

Clink’s shop was being regularly tossed by a racist human guy whose name we never learned; the first time it happened while we were there, Cassius hit the guy - just unarmed, but he threw a Divine Smite in behind it and damn near punched him through a wall. Probably should have mechanically killed him outright, but the DM let him heal the guy, who ran off.

Shortly after this, the party’s bard arranges to have Rukkar come work for Clink as security, to try and dissuade the racist asshole from bothering him.

A few days later, Cassius, Chatter, and the bard go to check in on Clink and Rukkar and see how they’re doing. As we walk in, Rukkar’s rolling something up in a bloodstained carpet. The bard fluffs her Insight roll, and believes Rukkar when he says they just spilled some wine. Cassius’ LAWFUL GOOD SENSE is tingling, though, and he challenges Rukkar, who tries to run for it. There’s a brief scuffle, the rug rolls open to reveal the racist, who’s been battered to death, and Clink uses Mimicry to replay the incident - the asshole was tossing the place again, then made an… unwise comment about Rukkar’s parentage when he tells him to get lost (Rukkar recently lost his dad, and it’s raw). So Rukkar got mad.

Cassius won’t let go of it; as far as he’s concerned, it’s murder, so he goes to drag Rukkar off to prison. Chatter tries to bait him into a similar angry response, calling him a “fucking half-breed”, but Cassius hasn’t been subject to a lot of racial bias, apparently, so just ignores it, and nothing else happens.

Chatter will remember this.

– Act Two –

Fast forward a few sessions to last night, when we’re in a new place - Hedron, the city of mages. We’re in a pet shop, of all things, when the cleric - a gleefully irritating one-armed kobold con artist by the name of Dai - tries to sell the shopkeep a “stick of Paladin Control” - which is just a regular stick, except Cassius is under a geas after threatening a very high-level tiefling warlock, and can’t speak. He does have a thing that lets him pause the effect, though, and he’s pissed off enough to burn it so he can call the kobold out on his bullshit. Dai doesn’t back down, and keeps trying to cast Deafness on him. Cassius is getting angrier, to the point that he takes a swing at Dai - with his sword and everything - for 11 points of damage.

Things immediately escalate; the cleric’s druid buddy immediately wild shapes into a giant spider and webs Cassius, and Dai’s winding up a level 2 Guiding Bolt until the shopkeep Counterspells it (thank all the gods for being in a city of wizards). We apologise, and drag everyone out.

Chatter’s kind of had enough of the paladin at this point now, too, so he confronts him with a list of questions I’ve been putting together basically since the Rukkar incident:

What is evil?
Is it evil to kill someone?
Is it evil to kill someone who hurts you?
Is it evil to kill someone who hurts others?
Was it evil for Rukkar to kill that man?
The law did nothing. Kenku don’t matter. Rukkar acted when the law did not. Was that evil?
You hit the man and healed him, so he could come back later and hurt kenku again. Was it evil to let him go to hurt again?
Is it evil to let bad people go free?
You hit Dai for insulting you. That's what Rukkar did. Was that evil?

At this point, Cassius manages to get a word in edgeways and claim that the attack was a warning shot, so Chatter pulls his bow to full draw in Cassius’ face and asks, warning shot?

Do it, Cassius says, almost daring me.

Chatter lowers the bow, turns his back on Cassius, and walks off.

Coward, Cassius says, and Chatter, furious, replies: you’re not worth the arrow. Then he leaves, looking for the closest bar.

At this point, I realise the rest of the table haven't spoken for about five minutes. I get Inspiration from the DM, and a fistbump from the guy playing Cassius.

I love D&D.

+1

I ran a six hour session of Vampire 20th Anniversary edition last night.

I have been asked to run again on Saturday. I feel that there may be ramification for their actions on Wednesday.

So, another 5 hour session of Vampire last night. I have a question for people - what do you do after a game to unwind if it's tense and stressful? Like, the only natural conclusion point that I could get to in last night's game was at the five-ish hour mark; we killed a player character, a major NPC, one of the other characters got cursed and the whole thing at the end of it was a bit of a rollercoaster. There was a lot of 'that was really great' and all that but I was just wiped out.

What do people do after a game to climb down out of their trees?

We normally chat for a bit after the game, 20 or 30 minutes. I find that's the best way to gauge what really worked in the session and what I should focus on in the next session.

By that point it's usually 23:30 and I'm knackered but if I've still got my GMing buzz going I'll either start writing my notes for next week or I'll go online and tell whoever is listening about the game.