littlemute – Page 38

Gary Con tomorrow!

We didn’t sign up for jack shit, but we’re going. Last time I was in Lake Geneva for a convention it was probably 2007 or so for Gaming Hoopla. It was held in a small community center (with big fireplaces) and was a great time. It was also within walking distance of Tom Wham’s house, so he was there as well.

This is a big OSR con, so it should be quite a lot of fun. I’m going to try to get in on some Dungeon Crawl Classics and pick up a physical copy of INTO THE ODD. Probably will spend too much money on old modules and shit as well.

I’ll try to post from my phone with pictures of bearded Wisconsin types sitting around circular tables with paper on them!

DAT1

13th Age and the Halfling takes a savage beating again

halfling

The group is still in the mine/ dungeon crawl for the last session and upon awakening an earth elemental, the halfling was smashed into a wall instantly, only saved by the Paladin’s guard skills on a hit that would have taken him out. I noticed reading the session summaries that nearly every battle the Halfling took the brunt of nearly all the damage, and is the only character that consistently goes down during fights, even with a near-guaranteed dodge skill for those nasty blows. Now, the group has some squishy characters, three in fact, but the other two (Elf Ranger and High Elf sorceress) don’t seem to take nearly as much of a beating as the Halfling does. Why is this? It’s not like it’s a gnome that I would go out of my way to kill off out of general principles, it’s a Halfling and a bard no less.

They also seriously discussed cramming him down a lavoratory hole to see if it ‘led to the 2nd level.’

Later in the session, during the post fight decompression, the paladin mentioned off hand: “I still hope to lower him into a toilet.”

Quake was played

runes000001

We used the zip file that keneda had compiled over the years and the Rune mod. Some of the levels I hadn’t played since 1997 or so.

13th Age session, Interview with Raggi, other stuff

It’s been 10 months and we finally got back on Roll 20 for some 13th Age. Unfortunately, the group was right in the middle of a dungeon, so the break between sessions sucked for everyone. I blame this on 1) Summer 2014, 2) Runequest 6 which most of the same group played in person after summer 3) people not showing up on Thursdays on Roll20 (myself included!). 4) Me taking it too seriously and building a huge campaign area and series of prepared adventures (whether original or pulled from wherever) instead of going the lazy route, which 13th Age allows. 5) Moving.

I think it was a good getting back into the game session, but I still have problems spending player’s Icon rolls in these short 2 hour sessions, especially when they roll well and I’ve got a bunch of 5’s there. 5’s are the hardest.

More RPG stuff to read.

Interview with Raggi and the guy that finished the new TOWERS TWO adventure after the GWAR guy died:

– Provocation is the entire purpose of fiction

Raggi always has a lot of really interesting stuff to say and ways to say it.

As the Runequest name goes back to Chaosium and Gloratha for good, we have Design Mechanism’s new name for their BRP D100 game following the RQ6 ruleset: MYTHRAS. While I won’t need to buy this since I have RQ6 already, I likely will. Best thing is that any supplements based on Mythras will be RQ6 compatible, and that’s fucking awesome for you and for me.

What’s more, DM is coming out with Classic Fantasy, a hack of RQ for dungeon crawling old school style. Here is a preview of it.

For those playing/GMing 5e, below is an article detailing that you can stack your D20’s (like 3D20 and take the worst one or vice versa) and it works. Say someone is wounded, turning to stone, being eaten alive, etc. you can double down on the disadvantage roll and the math doesn’t turn to shit. Overall Advantage/Disadvantage is a great mechanic that has definitely trickled into my games.

Stacked disadvantage in 5E with maths.

Lastly, the Shinobigami translation will be ready for playtesting in about a month. This is a ‘get together for about 5 hours’ type of game like Carolina Death Crawl, so look for that on your calendars in May.

Edge of Empire – first play

I got to play Star Wars: Edge of Empire Saturday with Matt and run by Dan at this benefit thing. We could pay $$ for rerolls or the game’s version of bennies so it was good.

Thoughts:

I have a fucking sore spot for Fantasy Flights ‘special dice and cards’ style of RPG/board game after they fucked up Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition with one of the most complicated RPG’s that it could have only come out in 2009. I wanted to like it, bought a bunch of stuff in the fire sale but it was VERY difficult to learn, VERY difficult to play/GM and covered the table in crap. The core dice mechanic wasn’t terrible though, it was everything else surrounding that which had the suck.

Secondly, while I like the new film a lot, I’m not a big star wars GAME fan. Yes Xwing vs Tie fighter was awesome but I pretty much stick to the movies and that’s it. There’s just not much there that’s gameable to me. Two factions, one is on the run, the other one is cool for the movies, but otherwise boring.

Naturally when Edge of Empire came out I scoffed at it since it was a version of WFRP3. However, having played, it’s not that bad. Gone are all the stupid cards for attacks, and though the character sheet is about 4 pages of crap long, it played fast.

What’s more, while it uses some elements of those lame-ass story games like FATE and Dungeon World, it can be played entirely ignoring that type of stuff on the dice, and use those sides for entirely mechanical effect. It has some blammo sides to the dice (triumphs) but their effect is completely dictated by the GM, it’s basically a reason for GM fiat to hurt or help the players. This is without any mechanics if you want, unlike FATE which piles every fucking thing about everything in the game world into ‘aspects’ that are really just wholly mechanical +2’s. So if your group has realized that the FATE-style games are a total waste of time like ours has, you can roll and not care about that stuff.

We played with minis, but it was very abstract, like Numenera, 13th Age, etc. That is very good. No nurpling around with goddamn squares and five foot steps and all that 3.5 bullshit.

So, I have a plan, that may or may not happen. I want to run a 1 v 1 JEDI fight using Edge of Empire, the Star Wars West End D6 game from the 90’s and … Design Mechanism’s free Mod for Runequest 6 and see which is the most fun. I know where my hypothesis would tell me, but let’s see what happens. Volunteers?

World of Darkness post

A VERY frank discussion about Paradox’s plans for the World of Darkness.

This is the quote I liked most, but read the whole thing, there are others:

In the last few years, focused and easy-to-use products like Mutant: Year Zero and Lamentations of the Flame Princess are selling unexpectedly well. Their brevity and low threshold makes them perfect for introducing new players to the hobby, while the monumental classic-WW-style books generally sell poorly and are more read than played. If future editions of WoD are actively used rather than collected we have done our job.

Que a discussion of the pile of Exalted books in my house and how much we actually played it compared to…well nearly everything. And fuck, I tried, I really tried.

If you want to discuss it, please let me lend you my Fair Folk 2E book so you can read that first.

annike

Older but PHAT

This kept coming up in my Pandora and it’s pretty fucking tight.

Especially you Japanophiles (matt).

When is the point where we should destroy all thinking machines?

Recently an AI created by Google beat a top player at Go. This AI is scheduled to play against THE top player in the world right now in March. Chess, with it’s closed puzzle-like gameplay has been solved by computers who can never be beaten by a human player again, which is understandable since the game is so limited in scope. Go is different since it’s such a wide open, piece-free board with such an incredible number of possible, good, fairly good and very good moves, that computers couldn’t crunch puzzle their way out of it– there were too many lines of play based on a single placement of a stone to figure out. Humans can do it because of fuzzy logic, and just knowing where a fairly good place is to play as well has having a general plan of what they want to do. The AI doesn’t crunch all lines, it learns how to play like a person does.

So, I think this March may be a marker in human evolution where we may in the future say: “The day Lee Sedol lost to an AI in Go is the day we should have destroyed all thinking machines across the planet and slaughtered every Google employee down to their families and even internet acquaintances just to make sure, because after that, it was too late.”

Just sayin’.

From Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Chapter 9,

“… about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book (from which I propose to give extracts later on), proving that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life. So convincing was his reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect, that he carried the country with him and they made a clean sweep of all machinery that had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years (which period was arrived at after a series of compromises), and strictly forbade all further improvements and inventions”