+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

It takes a keratin type of person to enjoy them tbh

Tonight, in "Ninchilla risks TPKing his players":

They've made it to the goblins' base, Cragmaw Keep. Again, I have tweaked the monsters for thematic and not-ROFLstomp reasons (the book is tuned for 4 level 4s, and I have 5 level 5s), but while I made sure each encounter was a reasonable challenge, I forgot they could pull the entire dungeon - which they of course did, by A. setting off a collapsing ceiling trap, then B. casting thunderwave.

I've held some of the hobgoblins back to defend the boss in the back, but the sorcadin and bard were on the receiving end of a couple of nasty fireball rolls by a hobgoblin devastator, and they're both down, in a fog cloud, making death saves (1 success, one failure, respectively). The rogue, who has 8 hp left, tried to circle around behind the bad guys, and is currently losing a fistfight with a hobgoblin iron shadow. The druid and fighter/barbarian still have hp in the double digits, at least, but they're on opposite sides of the castle.

Should be fun!

Awesome. My group decided to attack that place simultaneously from three different directions, resulting in them triggering basically every enemy and having to fight them all while scattered all over. They all survived though.

They made it! The bard is still unconscious (but stable, after a successful medicine check; they didn't heal her because the player couldn't make the session, and it was an easy way to keep her written out). The session ended with the druid confronting the hobgoblin boss (I swapped out the bugbear) and the "drow", while the rogue, sorcadin and fighter/barb were trying to tame the captive owlbear.

Before he kicked in the door, the druid overheard an argument between the "drow" and hobgoblin about their relative ends of bargains not being upheld, so I think the "drow" is probably willing to sell out the Cragmaw - she just wants the location of the Forge, and is perfectly capable of following the PCs there once they have the map. In any case, the hob/goblins have clearly outlived their usefulness, given that most of them are dead or fled.

It'll be interesting when they get to the Lost Mine. I have made more changes…

Last night I finished running the Jewel of Yavin adventure for Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. Consider it highly recommended.

The players are tasked with stealing the Jewel from a museum and also stealing the money made from auctioning off the jewel. They are given three days in Cloud City to plan and prepare and to find ways to convince those in the auction to big really high. They also have to win a cloud car race.

It was a lot of fun and the players are free to approach it however they like. The book accommodates that simply by giving loads of relevent information.

My group managed to complete both heists, then loose both the money and the Jewel (the first to an ally, the second to a Jedi). With the Empire and the Rebellion and Lando Calrissian all on the hunt for them they cut their losses and stole a bounty hunter's ship, deciding to try and find some more sensible work at the other side of the galaxy.

http://theonyxpath.com/announcement-scion-tv/

Scion is a good game that I do not understand well enough to run. I wish I did because I really, really love the idea behind it.

just started a new online campaign, I couldn't face starting another Roll20 game so I thought I'd investigate alternatives.

Owlbear Rodeo is a minimal virtual tabletop Which gives a shared map, tokens, fog of war and a dice tray. That's really about it. It is SO good. Every bit of it just works. The pointer leaves a trail so you can circle things or draw paths. Snap to grid drawing is tidy. Aligning grids is as easy as knowing how many squares are on your map. Uploading maps and tokens is effortless.

The only downside is that it doesn't have character sheets, but that's easily fixed with shared Google Docs.

I was planning to try FoundryVTT but it's not cheap and while it sounds good, it also sounds like work. Anyway, I'm more of a scribbly light-touch GM, so Owlbear Rodeo is more my speed.

In D&D last night the group decided that the undead wizard on level 2 of the dungeon needed taken out. They discussed it and decided to take a long rest first.

They had met this guy already, knew he was creepy and evil and in charge of all the undead who maintain the traps in the dungeon. They also knew he had a scrying pool.

Jamie suggested that they take a short rest before the long rest in case they get attacked. Ben (Paladin, leader) said that they didn't have time for that.

The minor Lich pulls his forces together and attacks the party as soon as they settle down for the night. The PCs were tired, low on all resources, and surprised. It was Bad. We all thought it was over.

By the end of the fight Jamie's ranger (remember that Jamie wanted to take a short rest) was dead. The paladin had been polymorphed into an unconscious frog to give him 1HP so that he would stop failing Death Saves. The Barbarian was down and doing bad with his saves too.

The Wizard and the Warlock had to take on two Zombie dwarves and the Lich themselves. Which, finally, they managed to do.

Fun session.

That sounds… tense.

My group are about to head into the titular Lost Mine of Phandelver tonight. I've swapped out pretty much every creature in the dungeon to preserve the surprise for one player who's run it before, but because it's split into more discrete sections, I'm hoping that they'll avoid attracting everything all at once.

They immediately split up in three different directions. The rogue is being hunted by a mind flayer psion, hundreds of feet away north of the rest of the group, who just finished fighting a group of ghouls before running south to help the barbarian, who'd gotten himself surrounded by darkmantles.

They're all still doing rather well, in terms of health and resources, but I do wish they'd stick together…

Our Monday night Call of Cthulu "one-shot" has been extended to three sessions, so hopefully we'll make it to something of an ending next week.

We're a neighborhood watch group in 19th century London, on the trail of what seems, alternately, to be Batman, some kind of golem, or the Predator. We've all managed to keep a reasonable grip on our sanity so far - though in an effort to tempt the monster out of its hiding place, I attempted to start a fight with a random passer-by, who turned out to be packing a revolver. Thankfully he missed me, but the monster – which we've theorised acts to protect people in danger – dropped in behind the poor NPC and took his head off with one hit.

Another party member may have talked the golem into going back to a room the player character is renting at our common tavern hangout, so… that'll be fun..?

Our fortnightly game of Deadlands is trotting along nicely. Our GM had a puppet to hand to illustrate our battle with a werewolf and two Gabrielle hounds.

It’s been a deadly game so far, one of the players lost his character on the first session - but accepted that he’d come back as Harrowed (possessed by a demon) who raised his head this session, shooting our healer, Dr Rope, in the back.

My wheelchair bound, ex Madame, now mad scientist, came within a lucky dice roll of being one shotted by the said werewolf - saved by my exploding dice exploding three times to reduce the attack by one wound. Ms Cox has a secret - she has tentacles instead of legs (an experiment gone awry in her past) and they very nearly came out from below her skirts to say hello, this session.

But we dealt with the beast as a group, I had the silver bullets, our shaman teleported me next to the blind gunslinger, who just took two bullets, we aimed him at the beast - when he rolled two 1’s. That’s when he shot the doc in the back.

Our card sharp ended up having to toss a magically charged card through the wolf, separating his head from the rest.

Still, we got what we came for, a combination to a safe back in town.

I am now regretting having never played Deadlands.

I’m enjoying it as a system - the exploding dice make for the occasional surprise - and it can be deadly - 3 wounds and you’re down.

Charlie, our GM, is an RPG genius, 15 years younger than me with thirty years more experience! He very kindly plays in my Lord of The Rings game and doesn’t laugh at me too much!

It's no Tomb of Annihilation, but my party's crawl through the modified Lost Mine of Phandelver continues.

After a 3-session-long initiative (my fault, I should have run it better) culminating in a very close-cut encounter with a pair of mind flayers, we had a much more sedate session this week, as they mainly just explored and did some RP. Everyone wash gust about tapped out, even before a brief (optional) fight with an irritable undead mage, but the paladin managed to smite/intimidate him down, then the wizard pulled out a 27 persuasion check to get the guy to teach him a new spell.

They also found more loot (the starter sets really do just hurl magical shit at the party), and ended the session settling down for a long rest in a fairly defensible room, which should make the handful of remaining monsters much easier to deal with… assuming they don't get a random encounter.

A friend and his 14 year old daughter have asked me to run Mines of Phandelver - online - I think I need another parent/child - anyone looking for a Saturday morning game over the summer?

FoundrtVTT is 20% off for the rest of the month of anyone has, like me, been considering trying it.

Modiphius have released a free quickstart guide for their 2d20 Dune game, if anyone's interested.

Has anyone tried Foundry VTT - I’m tempted, but can’t see why it would be better than Roll20

I just bought it today on the recommendation of others, I haven't tried it yet though. It's better than Roll20 because Roll20 is awful.

Roll20 is slow, glitchy, it messes up when you try to zoom into a text file. Uploading and organising assents is a nightmare. Selecting things on a map is difficult. It just sucks.

Foundry, apparently, doesn't have any of these problems. The Foundry community is good and has implemented character sheets for most of the big games and are constantly improving on what's already there. Unlike Roll20 which hasn't fixed anything since I started using it a year ago.

One thing to consider is that you need to host your Foundry session yourself. I've got pretty good internet and two OK laptops so I'm hoping I'll be OK to host it myself, but I haven't tried it yet. Some people hire a server for a modest fee to run it for them.

That's Tomb of Annihilation finished. 59 sessions run since 2 April last year. The PCs almost hit level 11. 10 PC deaths throughout the run and I lost count of the number of NPC allies who died. I got to roleplay a lot of squeaky frog people and the big bad is basically Skeletor, so that was good. Particularly because he was finished off by a Luchador frog person.

It's been fun, but often that's been despite the system, not because of it. I don't see myself running 5e again for this group. The Adventure had some good bits, some boring bits. It was fairly open for the players to tackle however they liked (within the limitations of what characters can do in 5e) but the overall structure is Jungle for 20 sessions-Ruined City for 20 sessions-Dungeon for 20 sessions and mixing those up a bit would have probably been more satisfying. I am very much looking forward to kicking of my 13th Age campaign in a few weeks.

I bought a licence for Foundry VTT yesterday, seemed rude not to.

And no, peer pressure is not a thing!

I’m hoping that the second edition of The One Ring will get some support, so will hedge my bets and keep Roll20 for a while (I’ve been a subscriber for nine years now!)

Considering the massive enthusiasm for the TOR2 kickstarter I'm sure there will be plenty of support on Foundry.

There's some good deals around just now:

This Humble Bundle will get you the whole run of Tales From The Loop and the first few books of Symbaroum an excellent dark fantasy RPG. All about £12

This Bundle of Holding Contains the core books of one of the latest editions of the Traveller RPG, Mongoose Traveller 2nd Ed. It's probably as good as Traveller has ever been and could easily generate years of play as space traders, mercenaries, spies, psionics… Whatever takes your fancy. Conversion from dollars is pretty good just now so that about £21.

The other half of the deal is This Bundle of Holding for the Pirates of Drinax campain. A 600 page book detailing a massive area of space for your groups to explore/loot/liberate/subjugate. It's supposed to be excellent. It's about £18.

I really loved the Mongoose Judge Dredd, would love to go back to that.

Did feel that the character creation was a bit limiting.

I don't know how they adapted it for Dredd but I love Traveller's lifepath character gen. You end up with a fully formed character with a history and an odd selection of skills and it's a fun process so if you don't like the character, just make another one.

Each step was a year in the Academy, allowing you to specialise in the later years to Street Judge, Psi, Tech or Accounts or SJS.

It's tricky with Dredd RPGs because Judges are all pretty similar really.

I'm reading Hardwired Island. It's a leftist cyberpunk RPG set in the far flung space future of 2019 on board a space station. It leans on its 90s anime inspirations a lot and is very good and - gasp of gasps - an actual, honest to god attempt at Cyberpunk rather than the milquetoast neon-liberalism of Shadowrun and CPRed.

I started my 13th Age campaign tonight using Foundry VTT and it was fantastic. I can't believe I've been slumming it on Roll20 for so long.

worst question ever but what modules have you installed?

I bought a licence last month, but have been so confused by all the stuff you have to install to make it work.

I feel it’s the Mac v PC debate - Foundry is great if you love to tinker with settings.

I did very little. We had to tell our modern and our router to forward the right port to my laptop and I installed the 13th Age toolkit which adds in all the character sheets and macros you need.

My laptop is a four year old machine which cost £300. It can't run bit.trip Runner 2 (the last 3d game made this millennium which I tried to run on it) but it managed to host Foundry for me and for players perfectly. I do have pretty good internet though.

If you ever have a vacant seat at that table…

I might soon. I run two games each week for the same for players and they keep threatening to drop the Monday session so that they can go spend time with other friends… But lockdown keeps getting extended and they keep coming back for more games. At some point they will leave and I'll be looking for a new Monday group.

5th best selling product on RPGDriveThru at the moment. I hate it.

Wow. We've really hit that stage of the D&D lifecycle again then. Stargate 5e, various 5e Cyberpunks, Hellboy 5e… I'm sure there are others.

I started my 13th Age campaign tonight using Foundry VTT and it was fantastic. I can't believe I've been slumming it on Roll20 for so long.

On the one hand I'm starting to get fed up with Roll20's limitations, but on the other I'm not sure I want to spend $60 on a replacement.

If you want to try it out I can give you a log in for my game.

Yeah, I'd like to have a poke at the 13th Age stuff – the online demo version is some flavour of D&D and utterly bogged down by crap that people have added.

Cracked and bought a Foundry license. It's a little bit overwhelming, to be honest - the amount of control it gives you over stuff is miles beyond what Roll20 provides, but it might take a long time before I feel confident enough to run anything in it… 😅

Hey I bought a Foundry licence the other day too. It's neat!

Excellent!

I'm setting up my first session right now. It's new and confusing for sure but I'm getting there.

The One Ring 2nd edition beta rule book and character sheet came out over the last couple of days.

I’m going to try setting up Foundry to move my 5e game over to that.

If anyone using Foundry can figure out a way to add, for example, a ship on top of an existing map without adding it as an NPC token, that would be extremely helpful right now.

Don't really want to have to break out image editing software just to have a boat in this dockyard.

@aniki It you go to to the drawing tool and select settings there is an option to choose a file path for the desired fill texture. Can you point this at your boat image and and draw in a boat?

We only played through a little goblin fight yesterday but it was so good. Players can select their target and when they roll to attack the game reports if they hit. I can select all combatants and roll individual initiatives for all of them. You can run multiple tokens off of one character sheet or have multiple tokens for the same character. There was other stuff I liked too. Turns out it has dynamic lighting too. I'm really pleased and the 13th Age implementation is excellent.

One player lost connection once, but I suspect that has more to do with my eldest downloading a 112gb game while I was trying to host for four players. Also reconnecting only took 10 seconds, so it was not a big deal.

I've discovered that the "tiles" tool actually lets you drop in images at arbitrary sizes – my history with videogame tilesets had me assuming that they had to be similar groups of fixed size textures that would get painted into the grid.

Ran my first 13th Age session in Foundry, which went pretty well – bit of a learning curve, but we got there in the end.

Unfortunately its support for the other systems I run games in is extremely patchy.

The Expanse RPG has a dedicated system that just plain doesn't work in the current version of Foundry (and I can't roll back far enough to support it without breaking 13th Age); there is a more generic AGE System sheet but it's very clunky and ugly, and seems like it'll require a ton of admin on my part anytime anyone's character changes.

With one of the players dropping out for the next few weeks/months due to a baby's imminent arrival, I was looking at starting a Monster of the Week game, but Foundry's Monster/Week system doesn't load half of the character sheet.

Which leaves me with the only other system I'm considering running: Electric Bastionland, which is somehow working perfectly. Now I just need to finish writing up my Gardens of Ynn reskin…

I ran Ynn with Into the Odd with zero prep and had a great time. That was face-to-face though, in the before times.

The quality of the various Foundry sheets does seem to be a little random based on how much work the community has put into it. I expect that building a sheet would be something you would be able to do yourself, but I honestly have no idea how time consuming it would be.

I've had a look but the documentation isn't great at first glance. Might have a proper dig over the weekend, see if I can at least fix the Expanse sheet bugs.