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Tabletop gaming thread
This is a thread for tabletop games. That includes board games, standard card games, collectible card games, self-contained card games, board games, tabletop RPGs, and more!
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I'm making a D&D 3.5 character, human rogue, starting level 4, skill monkey and exploration junkie, stats are 10/18/12/18/14/8. will have melee and ranged weapons.
Got any ideas for feats? I have three feat slots. The first feat slot can be weapon finesse or quick draw, and any feat slot could be rapid reload, dodge, improved initiative, or point blank shot. The third slot could be precise shot if I take point blank shot.
Comments
I enjoy a large number of board/card games, but I don't play them as often now since the members of my regular game group are now either married or working more nights. In our heyday we would roll Catan or Munchkin twice a week, but now it's mostly Dominion or a trivia-type game once a month or so.
I actually just met a fellow student who lives nearby and likes these sorts of games; we could get together for games sometime.
I was really into Bakugan (that counts right?) until it died outside of Japan. I even went to a couple of tournaments.
I never invested in much stuff (so I have less than 300 cards and about 90 Bakugan/Traps/Gear/Things) but I really enjoyed it (even with the constant need for calculators). Mostly played by myself, but I did play in a few things like promo tourneys.
Considered getting into Monsuno, but I hate the show and the spinning aspect is ridiculous.
Yeah, I wouldn't be opposed to that, GMH. We could either meet at the LGS or at my place.
Right now I'm trying to write my own tabletop RPG, but I've been trying to write tabletop RPGs for years before actually playing them (I spent a lot of time reading the rulebooks, kay?).
roll20.net allows for live ttrpg
Courtesy of @Kraken (via IRC): http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/587342.html
I said it there, and I'll say it again.
If you don't like that, you have no soul.
I posted it on the TVTF D&D thread and it already got reposted to the Trash Heap thread (i.e. the classic "motherheap" that spawned HH). So it's definitely getting good reception.
Thanks for posting it.
That was way too cute.
I've been recently interested in a specific take at cyberpunk one local RPG had. This is more about the setting than anything else, which arguably makes this post a better fit for a literature thread (sci-fi subgenres), but I'll let myself indulge. At the least, the thread will resurface, which probably is a good thing... I guess.
Sort of like, post-Google/post-Snowden cyberpunk + conspiracy theories + local peculiarities. The characters could be your typical crew of hackers and social misfits in a mega-city of the future, who try to figure out just who's pulling the strings behind the scenes, all the while being college students hiding their less legal ventures from the police and, here comes the fun part, the Church fundies who run the country. All in all, this is about the fears of a modern-day Polish urban dweller as, I guess, baseline cyberpunk was about the fears of 80's-era American urban dweller (not in the Black sense of "urban", mind you). Interestingly enough, another cyberpunk staple the megacorporations are presented as benign and in one case even heroic, probably because of the influence of Apple on the mind of a typical tech-whiz and the fact that a Polish urbanite dreams of working for one rather than of not having to.
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You mean, me? I didn't came up with it, if that's what you meant.
By the way, folks worked long enough on it that people joked whether it will be sooner than Duke Nukem Forever.
The fun part in the backstory department is that the rulebook gives only the "official" version of the world's future history - as in, the version that is the mainstream view in-universe. The closest to the creators' fiat about the reality has a form of several optional versions (they call it "versions of the world" even), and while it seems the mood fits some of them better than the others, it's explicitly stated that what is or isn't true is all up to the GM. In, say, Deadlands, where secrets behind the scenes are all laid out for the GM, figuring out what's going on can only work on the first playthrough, here it depends every time on whatever the GM can come up with. I've gotta say I like the idea.
There are some iffy ideas too, I have to say. I've got a feeling that full-body cyborgs got into the story only because the developers liked Ghost in the Shell, and I've already mentioned what does the backstory imply about the creators' mindset. But that's bit of a nitpick.
Can't say anything about mechanics, as usual. I'm the kind of person who doesn't really mind mechanics as long as my inner powergamer doesn't whine about the low chance to hit, so I can't say much. Apparently it's deadly. A small curiosity lies in the fact that the RPG includes a secondary set or rules for those who want to play the game like an action movie. Interesting, but I don't much get where it comes from, in cyberpunk. Doesn't sound too gritty when you do that.
What I like a lot: the game gives you bonus points at character creation for making an interesting backstory that ties you with the rest of the party. In other systems, GM can give you a bonus point or skill if you can convince him to do so, here this is explicitly laid out in the rules. The players have higher and/or more skills to roll dice for, the GM has a bunch of ideas to use at any moment, and the characters are fleshed-out and actually have a place in the world instead of being murderhobo killmachines.
That does sound interesting.
Oh, and they also had a somewhat amusing idea that full bisexuality is a liability, because it means you can be seduced by both sexes with no penalty on part of either.
I just remembered I forgot to mention it before, so I'm adding it as a new post rather than editing.
Speaking of which, to not let this post go to waste, I'll add some stuff about what's the basic frame for a backstory. Aliens, heh heh. Early XXI-Cent. Earth was invaded by aliens, and since they were more like a bunch of raiding parties than an army - or so it seemed by the results of their actions - most of humanity was herded into huge, easily defensible cities or smaller, but just as heavily armed enclaves devoted usually to some sort of resource gathering or processing. The aliens were beaten back, but the system stuck. Then there was some other mess involving lots of social unrest and war, mostly soothed by the post-invasion UN armies. Of course, as I've described in the previous post, the exact details of what went on and how are all dependent on the version you're playing.
Personally, I'm curious if they're going to provide more info about the non-urban regions. Hardly a typical scenery for cyberpunk, but it sounds quite interesting. Some Mad Max influence seems to be inevitable, especially with it being recognized in-universe. Plus insular communities, scavenging, and certain regions of deadly mutated wildlife.
If I come up with something else for this thread later, I'll doublepost, unless you have any other ideas. Perhaps any of you have any thoughts or questions concerning this, for one. Otherwise, I guess that's all for now.
I don't really like how so many tabletop RPG players focus so much on character builds.
Sure, you can make a totally OP character by using this class and these skills/feats/abilities/perks/etc. and these equipment/spells/affinities/etc. and you can pick and choose the perfect stuff from whatever splatbooks you need.
But then again, this is all make-believe anyway. Why are the rulebooks' texts so important in the first place, when tabletop RPGs are a realm where reasonable GM fiat is meant to be able to overrule anything stated in the rules text, and so many homebrew possibilities exist, and furthermore the point of the game isn't even to build the strongest character? I mean, you can trivially create an obnoxiously overpowered character. All you have to do is to simply rewrite the rules.
Maybe for some people they like seeing this as sort of a sandbox challenge, wherein, given a set of rules stating possible alternatives, create the strongest character. And yes, I know, the point of good rulestext design/planning is to make a reasonable balance between the characters that people might play.
But to me it seems mostly meaningless to aim for some sort of character power measure, or to argue whether one feat or another is more or less powerful (or sucky), since the point of the characters one creates is to fit in some way into a narrative and/or setting...so why try to break it or optimize it in the first place? I mean, the characters themselves, in-universe, don't actually think like this, they don't actually optimize options for themselves by looking through a rulebook and analyzing the alternative skills and spells and such. All these rulestext details and calculations are actually supposed to be abstractions/representations of what "really" goes on in-universe anyway.
because you're playing a specific game that has rules. if you were just going to ignore all the rules, you'd play a different game in the first place.
Since you've changed the topic.
You know, Dragon Age II ruined that one idea for a character that I had. The system is not so relevant beyond the fact it's point-build and has mad scientists and cyber enhancements. The character was supposed to have once been a random lowlife, then abducted or enslaved or something like that, and turned into a nanite-enhanced cyborg by some mad scientist. Outside of the game, it meant lower-end values for almost every skill, but I'd put all those points into buffing him with cybernetics. The rest of character history was that he finally got free and now makes a living as, I dunno, a black ops freelancer, or bouncer, or something of that sort.
Now, how DA2 factors in: months later (I haven't had an occasion to try the character out - no group), I tried out the game. Turned out there's a character who is a
nanitemagic-enhancedcyborgelf once enslaved by amad scientistwizard - and that it's a stealth-parody of "everyone's first D&D character".So, seems like I can't try it out without making sure the group I'm playing with aren't really much into D&D, I guess.
First few times were pretty interesting, mostly in the sense of having more ideas for play than I had opportunity to do. I joked that I'm just finding it fun to do stuff, though, and I'm no good at winning, but I still felt pretty interested in playing.
Remember that curve where initially I become interested in something, then it tapers off after a while, especially after a few subsequent bad experiences? I had a great time in ny first D&D campaign, a feeling that has not been replicated since. Well, after a long and drawn-out losing game of Tanto Cuore, I also feel somewhat less enthused about playing it.
Alternatively, I do find it fun to do lots of things, but while I can think of the strategic possibilities of a situation, it does become a little tedious after a while, so while I could force myself to be competitive, it's not something I'd enjoy. And I'd much rather enjoy my games than be competitive at them.
Recently, to stave off the effects of RPG-deprivation, I've been binging on roleplaying blogs and discovered a curious thing. I was never deep into the community and apparently came a bit late, and now it turns out that apparently there was an entire style of playing that eluded me because of that.
Case A: on TVT somebody wrote that Warhammer is popular in Poland because a typical Polish roleplayer is a grumpy bear who enjoys Warhammer's cynicism.
Case B: there was a joke "fandom taxonomy" circling the Polish Internet around the early 2000's, where one of the groups described were folks playing a popular system (implicitly Warhammer) in a very grimdark way.
So, now I know to what these two cases refer: the so-called "Autumn Tale" (translation mine). Turns out, back then some guy wrote a series of articles, under this very heading, on how one SHOULD play Warhammer. In short, total grimdark before that was a (well-recognized) thing. You know, the sort of stuff your killer GM pushes on you as "realism": every other stunt leaves you with broken limbs, broken limbs end up gangrenous, and half of the session is about the character lying delirious by the fire, and so on. There were some anecdotes quoted about Autumn-inspired GMs randomly killing players' female characters under the justification of "peasants declared you a witch".
For a while, it caused quite a stir and deeply influenced the way people played Warhammer, but apparently, by now it's had its course. The comments on it that I've read were highly critical, in general. Turned into a punchline of jokes much like Warhammer 40000 gave us the term "grimdark". Nevertheless, much like Anakin, there still is good in it: between the player punches remains plenty of advice on how to generate emotional response from the players.
What type of fantasy setting even has gangrene.
Like a magical realist novel?
I have no idea if this is sexist or just plain ridiculous.
Low and dark fantasy types play up the medieval grimness, but the point is that most of them stop short of being that nasty to players. I've been told that Warhammer, specifically, is meant to be darkly humorous about it all, but looks like not everyone got the hint.
Delirious in the sense of "you're in so much pain you're hallucinating and I, your GM, am gonna describe your misery vividly for half an hour".
Kind of both. Autumn Tale + cluelessness about the details of setting and historical reality + your stereotypical neckbeard. The last could also be worded "cluelessness about women" or something like that. You know what to expect from such a specimen. Mind you, I haven't met with any case personally but it sounds quite believable to have happened.
What I meant was that it seems like the resource management aspect plays out very differently between videogames and actual tabletop sessions.
Like, in D&D (at least 3.5e; I haven't played other editions yet) you get some number of spells per day, and these reset every day (or at least after you've had 8 hours of sleep). But typically you don't get that many encounters, at least not with the GMs I've played with. Maybe one or two big battles. With a challenge rating that pretty much makes you go through all you resources.
Compare that with any videogame, say FF1 or FF3. You go through a dungeon and you expect to run into a large number of encounters, but each of these encounters is something you don't expect to burn all of your resources on, just a little bit. And the challenge is surviving the entire dungeon full of an indefinite number of these encounters.
Perhaps another way to look at it might be the following: in a videogame RPG dungeon you might get into ten battles each with 2 goblins, and a goblin boss in a separate battle. In a tabletop RPG dungeon you might get into one battle with 20 goblins and a goblin boss.
But you know, D&D has been going on for fifty years already, and what made sense at the beginning could have been forgotten and rediscovered like half a dozen times. And the folks who tell you how it was at the beginning have an agenda, so it's tricky whether or not you can trust them, and that's leaving aside the issue of whether it's any relevant today.