littlemute – Page 48

Stores have stuff–free. No LotFP adventure this year, but DCC and 13th Age for sure. I think one of the key questions that people need to start asking is not how D&D and rpg playing started but how has it survived for 40 years and why is it so awesome.

For me personally:
1) Captures my imagination and focuses it while making up and running adventures. I’m not exactly the scatterbrained type, but I have a lot going on and I really like it when I can focus on JUST THIS ONE FUCKING THING because if I don’t it will suck for everyone. The pressure of being a referee gives imagination a purpose and goal.

2) Stress relief. I have mountains of potential stress, stress you can’t understand until you’ve had unprotected sex a few times and when before you had no cause to worry, now you have ALL cause to worry about everything. The RPG action is a huge stress reliever to me, even though prep and the actual act of running a game can be stressful in of itself. Once I get past the first 5 minutes, It’s all go go go and the stress of the actual world dissipates entire.

3) True social interaction. The one thing the smell nerds at the game store playing Pathfinder know is that they are actually interacting with other human beings in a meaningful way. Some of them will never have girlfriends or touch an actual human female bodies’ nether region, but they will have actually socially interacted with other people during their mountain dew time on earth. This is not social media pseudo-interaction either, despite it being about fantasy lands with robots and vampire dragons, it’s more real than that.

4) Exposure to art. While the actual physical modules are works of art themselves (some are shit and some are profound with lots in between), the process of play, which is the actual game, is also a collaborative work of art.

Enough sappiness and navel gazing– time to tear some players to shreds or send them to CARCOSA.

A very short academic paper on Murderhoboing.

The second Nicole Gingerbottom

This week I had the pleasure of running Lamentations of the Flame Princess again with a group of five wary but enthusiastic players. I ran, for the second time, the small adventure ‘A Stranger Storm” which was a layover part of a larger adventure that will remain unnamed at this time. Spoilers abound.

The first time I ran ASS (see that?) I had only two players, so they were very wary of fighting, especially since they were outnumbered by EVERYTHING, the Morris Dancers, the Merchants, the horses, and even the Inn staff if you count Nicole and both Innkeepers. They were extremely cautious and did not have a magic user or cleric with them to try to snuff out the changelings magically.

The second group from this week had 5 players: two fighters, a specialist, a pretty badass elf and an ancient cleric with terrible stats (a ‘zero’ as my players have started referring to characters that have no net stat bonuses). They were on the way to an abbey to ask the Abbess about some sort of magical box for their master when bad weather hit and a broken wheel brought them to the Incontinent Vicar where ruination ensued.

In both play-throughs, I think the moment the players realized that the insanity with the changelings was not going to let up but would continue unabated was when the second Nicole Gingerbottom arrived at the inn to make breakfast. This is when both groups of players started saying “we’re fucked,” which, when confronted with a LotFP “player-fucker” is the correct assumption.

The second group had shown the first Nicole the dead body of Doodles (the inn keeper) and Patrick Roktar in the common room, so she was near catatonic when the second arrived…. and then they showed the second one the bodies as well. As the merchants were trying to leave, I had one of the Nicoles change into the Elf and they fought and one of them (turned out to be the Changeling) went down in a single hit.

Eventually they made their way to the nearby village and met the local Priest (Father Naylor) who let in on the secret of the jewel in the changeling’s hearts. That’s that’s when the frustration and ‘we’re fucked’ became ‘we can make a lot of XP off this!’ and instead of wanting to get away from the changelings, they wanted to go straight at them! Matt had the quote of the night to Father Naylor with “You’re low fantasy, I’m HIGH fantasy.” He was playing the elf.

Given the knowledge about the jewels, when confronted with the duplicated knight on the road they just sat back and watched and then cleaned up the survivor. Afterwards slicing up all the bodies (horses and men) to get at the jewels. I wondered how long it would take someone to cut out a horse’s heart in the pouring rain.

So the bad part of ASS is coming next and we’ll see if the players can navigate the narrows of morality ahead. And what happened to the Morris Dancers?

Steam sale wallet rape – week 1

So far I have either held strong or already had the stuff I wanted from the sale. the one game I picked up for 4$ was APOTHEON which is a side scroller fighter where you need to go fight the Gods to get to Olympus. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks pretty cool. My thumb is still healing from some glass up in there so I can’t play Dark Souls 2 or anything on my controller quite yet but this is one I wanted.

Shit I’m checking out:

Invisible Inc. – Sneaky spy game that may scratch the Jagged Alliance itch.
Road Redemption – biker gang in real time. Reminds me of Mount and Blade a bit, except on motorcycles…
Shadow of Mordor – still expensive at 25$ but this is supposed to be a good one.
Abyss Odyssey – another side scroll fighter (like Castlevania). Looks great, but I need my thumb to heal up a bit before playing.

And what the hell is this monster game on steam?

Chaos Warbands! First play since 1993!

Last Saturday, Mouth was in town and we dragged Dan and Amie into a 4-square of the old-school Chaos Warbands using 8th Edition rules and a mish mash of stuff from the two wonderful and awesome Realm of Chaos books.

For those that don’t know about these, they are absolutely essential to any gaming library, whether you play Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer 40K or none of them. You simply must own them both even if you have to pirate the PDF’s. Inside each are rules for the four major demons of the Warhammer world, plus rules to make your own, plus a kitchen sink of rules for all three of the systems listed above. These are both a MEGA supplement, one that these days would have had content split across 16-20 separate books.

What’s more, there’s a fucking GAME in these books that’s separate from all three games they supplement where you roll up a character and his warband and fight it out to get favor from the dark gods. I played this in college a bunch, probably 50 or so battles with multiple warbands and only one guy “won” the game with his champion becoming a minor daemon. The rest of us either got turned into spawn, or died in pools of blood and urea. And that was fun as shit.

My champion was one MAGROK ROCKSLIDE a chaos dwarf with FITS and a flail. Pretty weak to start except he was accompanied by a Dragon Ogre! After four battles, I ended up with a chaos weapon, four chaos spawn who gave people the evil eye, and eight beastmen. My spawn had 6 chaos attributes a piece and here is where the old Chaos warbands rules start to fray a bit. You can end up generating demon weapons, attributes, spawn inside other spawn that transform into other types of spawn longer than you end up playing out the fights! Now a bit of this is a ton of fun, and the randomness is one of the fantastic elements, but based on the recent play, there would need to be a cap on the amount of chaos attributes at least.

In addition to the chaos attributes, all entities in your warbands that get wounds have them applied individually. What this means is when you have a unit of beastmen or humans, you need to know which one has -1 toughness and which has a busted leg. This gets tedious as hell. More modern designs like Mordheim (which had it’s own terrible problems*) and Legends of the Old West, solve this issue by differentiating between Champions and minions. Minions are treated as a group and have less complex rolls associated with them.

Overall, it was a fun day of gaming. I only got four games in, and probably could have had a bunch more if I had just an hour or so more. I worked on an updated set for Mordheim ages ago (here is the PDF) and I think based on rumors of 9th Edition WFB being skirmish based, it may be a good time to rewrite them for 9th Edition in the coming year. Note, statements in the PDF are contradicted below. We learn stuff over the span of time…

*Mordheim is a fantasy game with swords and stuff should have a focus on close combat, naturally , and yet, it’s sci fi brother with lasguns and bolters and stuff, Necromunda, has much, much better close combat rules. I wouldn’t say Mordheim’s close combat rules are bad, I’d say they are terrible.

What is the worst genre for games and why is it steampunk?

A question asked recently in a certain region of the internet and I wanted to capture responses before it went away for good.

The fat people.
All the fucking fat people.
Morbidly obese? Have I got a genre for you!

Near future, because it attracts the intersection of realism spergs and powergaming shits.

I really wish I could repeatedly beat the hell out of whoever started the whole “Tesla is literally science Jesus” bullshit

FUCK victorian england aesthetics.

It’d be the same as putting any 50 people on a desert island. They’re gonna fuck. Suddenly you’re not competing against the other 50000 guys in your city. You’re competing against that dozen guys over there, because you’re only kinda fat, and Susy doesn’t like any of the REALLY fat guys.