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rexxz
Where's your band?

Joined: Sun Apr 18, 2004 8:45 pm
Posts: 9094
Location: United States of America
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 11:27 pm 
 

Finally got around to starting Storm King's Thunder for 5e. When I finish my next session I'll do a cool write up/post-mortem of the introductory chapter. Anyone else play that one, or for that matter any of the other published adventures for 5e?
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Metantoine
Slave to Santa

Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:00 pm
Posts: 12030
Location: Montréal
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 11:49 pm 
 

rexxz wrote:
Finally got around to starting Storm King's Thunder for 5e. When I finish my next session I'll do a cool write up/post-mortem of the introductory chapter. Anyone else play that one, or for that matter any of the other published adventures for 5e?

Oh yeah! I'm playing this module with my Dwarf Paladin, pretty fun so far.

Elvira (Wizard lady) update: Played from 10 am to 5 pm today and it was a great session. More than 3 hours of just roleplaying and it was so cool. We built a house, we all have followers now (I have an ugly wizard named Catelyn as my apprentice. In exchange for her training, she makes me fancy clothes like a silk evening gown. Elvira is a noble lady with a lavish lifestyle so she's totally fine with that.

A good story happened during our downtime. When we gain levels, we need to train for real (that's cool) so we do have lots of downtime and it's ok. Drannor, my half elf bard companion wanted to be trained with thieves tools but he was fooled. He thought he was being trained by the secretive thieves guild but it was in fact the Assassin guild. They stole a chest full of gold from the Temple of Thor and made Drannor picklock it. He did it and he was given some gold for his effort. He didn't know it was the Temple of Thor chest. When our half elf fighter Merik saw him the day after at the tavern, he automatically noticed the Thor hammer symbol on his forehead since he's a follower of Thor and he's becoming a member of the temple... He knew that the Temple would wreck havok in town if the situation goes out of hand. Drannor apologized and paid 3000 gold pieces (double the amount of the chest) and the Temple was quick to forgive him. Now, we need to discover why the Assassin guild tried to frame our group and tried to start some sort of civil war.

Oh after that, we received a bottle of distilled herb from our Lizardfolk friends and decided to drink the whole thing. We were transported into a dream (I think?) The DM wanted to play a lighter session than we're used to so he used the old AD&D module Fluffy Goes to Heck and it's incredible! We need to save this city and find the dog of this young girl who's, well, in Hell. We fought giant prairie dogs, gummy worms, a soap dragon and now we encountered an obese pit fiend in a diaper who wants us to steal the amulet of a rival before giving us the dog back. We're not done yet!

I got a bunch of new spells for Elvira. I love this character. I got Chromatic Orb, Mage Armor and some other spells that I managed to find in the spellbook of a dead wizard like Charm Person, Continual Flame and Mending. The DM decided to "punish" his 4 players by giving us something bad. Elvira got some sort of compulsion to write our story (1 hour per day) and if she doesn't, she needs to have sex with someone, an animal, a vegetable or a mineral (his words). This is gonna be very interesting and will turn this wizard into a sex machine!
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rexxz
Where's your band?

Joined: Sun Apr 18, 2004 8:45 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 12:06 am 
 

On your STK campaign, how far have you gotten so far and how are you enjoying it? I am the DM and my players have really liked it so far.
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

Joined: Sat Feb 21, 2009 5:55 am
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Location: Tyrn Gorthad
PostPosted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 9:25 am 
 

Man, D&D is dangerous stuff. After we killed that wereboar woman and her pet giant boar, the dwarf we saved sold us some pony kegs of enchanted ale that give a charisma bonus and restore hitpoints when drunk, so we bought as much of it as would fit in the halfling's bag of holding. After the session ended, the DM realized that this would be easy to abuse as we could just fight and drink our way through the whole dungeon crawl, not caring how drunk we got fighting with disadvantage because we had a massive supply of healing potion beer. So now there's this heated debate in Facebook about how it's overpowered and needs to be changed somehow to prevent us from abusing it, then this other guy who's always trying to min/max and metagame was real steamed about it, etc...
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Metantoine
Slave to Santa

Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:00 pm
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Location: Montréal
PostPosted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 1:44 pm 
 

rexxz wrote:
On your STK campaign, how far have you gotten so far and how are you enjoying it? I am the DM and my players have really liked it so far.

We're soon to be level 7. We're currently in a meeting with the Harpers. We killed a black dragon and got a monolith of adamantum. You can check my previous posts about the campaign of Solstron, we can also talk on IRC!

I'm moving to Montréal this summer and at the same time, I want to start DMing. I got Curse of Strahd since I fucking love vampires and it will my first campaign. Can't wait.
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failsafeman
Digital Dictator

Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 8:45 am
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Location: In the Arena
PostPosted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 4:51 pm 
 

iamntbatman wrote:
Man, D&D is dangerous stuff. After we killed that wereboar woman and her pet giant boar, the dwarf we saved sold us some pony kegs of enchanted ale that give a charisma bonus and restore hitpoints when drunk, so we bought as much of it as would fit in the halfling's bag of holding. After the session ended, the DM realized that this would be easy to abuse as we could just fight and drink our way through the whole dungeon crawl, not caring how drunk we got fighting with disadvantage because we had a massive supply of healing potion beer. So now there's this heated debate in Facebook about how it's overpowered and needs to be changed somehow to prevent us from abusing it, then this other guy who's always trying to min/max and metagame was real steamed about it, etc...

That's when the DM just needs to pull some shenanigans, like a sneaky wino halfling climbs into the bag of holding and drinks it all himself. Or you guys drink it all but it turned out the stuff went rancid and you just get really sick with no bonuses, or more basically, maybe you all just get hungover drinking it and can't stand the taste anymore...I mean only the most straitlaced DM couldn't come up with a creative, effective way of putting a stop to it. Some methods would be more ass-pully than others, but blatant attempts to abuse the system like that invite asspulls, imo.
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rexxz
Where's your band?

Joined: Sun Apr 18, 2004 8:45 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 5:18 pm 
 

I also talk with all of my players and basically let them know before any game we play that if something gets out of hand and ruins the fun of the game then I will do my best to fix it. That way they aren't surprised if something like that happens and they are also part of the larger social contract a group enters when people play these kinds of games; we're here for fun and not to bitch IRL about imaginary stuff.
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Grave_Wyrm
Metal Sloth

Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 5:55 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 6:38 pm 
 

Image
THE END OF THE WORLD: Zombie Apocalypse -- a one-off played over six hours in a cocktail bar (with adjacent taco truck).

After a brief 20 minutes of making a character sheet based on ourselves, filling out equipment lists with literally only what we had on our person at the moment, including the car we arrived in, and some generally frivolous fucking around expecting this to be a ghoulish romp through zombie town (I've seen the movies -- I just get the shotgun and an axe and a motorcycle, raid the Whole Foods, and I'm good!), the game begins wherever you happen to be sitting playing the game, and all you have is your real time conditions. In our case, it was along a main boulevard, at a small cocktail bar that ( ... isn't it wonderful?) just happened to be playing Night of the Living Dead.


Spoiler: show
As I'm spending the afternoon with my friends, enjoying my Dark & Stormy, I get a text from my girlfriend asking if we've checked the news. We check our phones, and apparently violence is happening at a lot of hospitals around the country, but not in our immediate area. Sucks for them, but the bar doesn't turn the movie off. The GM, my friend and I turn back to our drinks and chatting. Gradually, people start getting up to leave, low cursing, and we hear a couple sirens, but that's not abnormal for our area. Nothing really gets our attention until a call comes from my girlfriend, and connection's ok, but she isn't responding on the other end. There's just garbled commotion and screaming in the background. "Something fucked is happening at my house. I can't hear her, she's not responding to me. I have to leave now!" (IRL: Symptoms of genuine low-level panic creep into the group) The three of us run out of the bar, and the street is already filling with traffic; it looks like rush hour, but it's the middle of the day. We run up a couple of blocks and see that some residential streets are clear, so run back to the car and make it a half mile or so before we hit gridlock. (IRL: The GM has his iPad out and is using Google Maps Satellite View as a general info narrative tool)

As we consider what to do, we hear an oncoming, semi-regular percussion of metallic crashes, and a convoy of emergency vehicles is barrelling down the street behind a fire truck acting as a battering ram, bashing cars out of the way. My friend has the presence of mind to fall into the wake of this convoy and we cover a lot more territory than any of us thought we would be able to. Cars start filling in behind us, and we're effectively trapped in a fast-moving pocket of hair raising driving for several miles before we're able to peel off and do some potentially debilitating offroading of our own through side streets and sidewalks.

We get almost all the way to my house before my friend manages to drive over the median (no mean feat in a '98 Corolla) where we get T-boned by a pickup doing the same thing from the other direction, disabling the car and badly bruising my friend's ribs. While the GM takes care of him, I sprint the four or five blocks from there to my house leaving all my stuff behind. Even though I know the neighborhood's short cuts, I have to stop a half block away from my building because a frantic crowd is running down my street away from the direction of the hospital, a group of teenagers firing handguns back up the street at a group of slowly advancing people in suits, gowns, and civilian clothes. Three people are shot and killed in my intersection, and in a lull in the firing, (by virtue of a roll that miraculously doesn't leave me paralyzed with terror at having watched people shot and killed fifty feet from me amidst pandemonium) I'm able to dash across the street past a felled woman reaching for help and get through the front door of my building.

Three of the four doors into the lobby are open: one has blood all over the knob, one is my door without blood, the third is open and there's yelling and the sounds of messy combat coming from inside. I scramble up the stairs calling for my girlfriend. She isn't there, and the cat carrier is gone, but her phone is on the stairs. She's left a note on the table: "Went with police to marina to go to Alcatraz Island." I pocket the note and the phone, grab a big chef's knife from the kitchen and run downstairs to the fight in my neighbor's house. The GM and my friend have caught up to me from the car, and they're at the front door banging on it, my friend leaning back to break one of the glass panels with his carabiner when I let them into the lobby. They follow me into my neighbor's hall where he's down on his back, desperately clawing at a person atop him who's biting him horribly, blood everywhere, his wife and child nowhere to be seen. I'm able to succeed a highly challenging roll and I lunge forward, burying the whole knife into the lower neck of the attacker, who tries to turn and look back at it, giving my neighbor a chance to shove him off and stand up, gored, bleeding, and livid. The stabbed person gets up, grabs him from behind, and they struggle into the dining room, toppling out the window and landing on the ground outside. I chase them to the window and look out to see my neighbor with the attacker back on top of him, wrenching away at his throat, a large shard of glass sticking out of my neighbor's neck spurting thick dark blood as he struggles, dying. I freak and backpedal, and we try to get out of the apartment, but are met at the door by two more people "who are clearly 'off.'" Before we can do anything, their heads explode from being shot from behind by a stranger in the doorway. The GM and I are frozen in shock, covered in head gore and face, but my friend is somehow able to have a conversation with this guy.

Once we're able to move again, the GM and I get upstairs, hurriedly gather what supplies we can, and meet the driver and the stranger in the back by my neighbor's garage. My friend is able to break into the garage, we get bikes, grab tools. The stranger says, "You got all the supplies?" The GM says yes. The stranger shoots the GM in the head and grabs his backpack. My friend is able to get his hammer in the spokes of the stranger's wheel, and he goes down. I'm able to grab the gun, and I point it at him, but I blow the roll and can't bring myself to shoot him in the head despite the GM's (IRL: a really good friend of mine) corpse lying right there in my driveway. The stranger drops the bag of supplies, and is able to scramble away. My friend angrily takes the gun from me, checks the mag. 4 rounds. He pockets the gun, and I'm staring at my dead friend, the GM, in shock when we see a crowd of weird people moving down the block toward us.

We get on the bikes, each with a backpack (mine has fucking garbanzo beans, canned tomatoes, a gallon of water, and 4 cans of cat food, which is what I had on hand IRL. YOU DON'T KNOW TO GO SHOPPING BEFORE THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.). We get as fast as we can to an out of the way place on the frontage road next to the water a few miles away where we're able to regroup.


IRL pause: Time for another round (I move definitively from beer to whiskey at this point), a pee break, and a minute to try to shake it off and get our hear rates back to normal. All of us are legitimately stressed out. Our characters have taken a bunch of stress, and are able to convert some of the stress built up over the course of our rolls into lingering traumas (mine was designated as "loss of loved ones") so as to avoid the impending nervous breakdowns.


Unpause: I break off a branch from a bush, tie my undershirt to it, and I wave it like a flag of surrender as my friend and I ride up the frontage road toward the marina. We see helicoptors overhead, dozens of police boats, coast guard, and national guard transports out in the water, and a sea of people massed in front of the marina outside what is clearly a hastily-erected chain link fence connecting to more established fences of the park and tennis course. Soldiers and police are trying to contain a wide group of people trying anything they can to try to swim, climb, or fight their way past the cordon.

Some of the helicoptors have long ladders extending down from them with a person standing on the lower rung, usually holding, sometimes dropping a flare into the huge mass of people on the otherside of the clogged, but abandoned freeway. Some of the helicoptors have made their way inland, and they're starting to arrange themselves in a rough curve facing away from us.

We gradually make it through the processing bottleneck, turning in the handgun and the knives that I threw in the backpack at the gate, and start moving toward the shuttle boats. We hear gunfire at the back of the crowd, screams and people gather like a wave moving toward us, and the helicoptors have assumed a broad, hovering, convergence when from the north we hear the approach of rapid aircraft. Massive explosions detonate beneath the curve of helicoptors: following the path of flares, the military has just bombed a huge number of people, shaking the earth. The marina becomes an open stampede, and my friend and I break for the boats.

Since we both have experience sailing, we're able to get a 20' sailboat out of its mooring and into the bay. Supplies and a young girl with a kitchen knife are found below. Because she doesn't speak English and is only about 7 years old, it takes a while to convince her that we aren't a threat, and we learn that this is her parents' boat, but they're gone. We spend the next two days off of Alcatraz Island in a huge floatilla of some 200 boats corralled by coast guard, watching the fires spread on the shore, and buildings topple in flame on the peninsula. We eat cat food and tomatoes. There's cell service but the network is full.

Eventually, we're processed on the more habitable Treasure Island, but separated because my friend's ribs are all fucked up and he's taken to the medic. After being severely interrogated and physically examined, the girl and I are assigned housing and driven out to it by a US marine who promises he'll look up my girlfriend for me. Family reunification is something the military was taking very seriously. The girl and I get settled, and go for a walk. After a while of walking around and fretting, I see the cat carrier sitting by a door. I recognize the blanket inside, I smell the blanket to be sure. It's unmistakable! My girlfriend walks out, and I collapse in weeping. She was transferred there after spending a day and a half on Alcatraz Island during an outbreak of whatever is out there on land. She managed to lock herself in a cell and survive until the island was contained, meanwhile murderous people reaching through the bars at her the whole time. Our cat has died, and she can't explain it, but she's kept the carrier. I'm reduced to nothing but misery, relief, and sobbing.

Unbeknownst to me, my friend has somehow managed to piss off his guards and get locked in his interrogation room when a text from his wife comes in, asking where he is. He's able to send an OK and location just before the battery dies. He's wracked, but knows she's OK. Somehow (IRL: I'm not clear on this because I was buying beer and trying to compartmentalize the RPG aspects of this intense and frantic game) he finds out that his doctor is not who he says he is, that it's weird that he was put in here without having been bitten and is starting to get a really bad feeling about this, but is left alone for hours. During that time, he is able to make friends with Phillips, the US marine guarding him. Abruptly Phillips leaves the room. Contact has gone dead with his superiors. Contingency is to get to the boats, and my friend is able to convince Phillips to let him out and (amazingly) to hand over his side arm, while he keeps the automatic rifle. They get to a jeep together. Apparently, some infected had arrived by bus, and the contagion is beginning to spread. Sirens and gunfire are heard near the parking lot, and are beginning to move west.

My girlfriend and I have been able to trade texts with the dead GM's girlfriend who was with my friend's wife when he got the text that she was OK. The dead GM's girlfriend has just arrived on the island by bus. She's able to meet us ahead of the growing swarm, and the jeep and we manage to convene near the shuttles as the garrison's marines fan out and fall back as slowly as they can before the advancing crowd that quickly widens to span most of the island. Most of the shuttle boats are overflowing with people. There's figting on the majority of them, and one has people jumping by the dozen into the water to excape the marauding infected mauling the nearest person.

As a group we run up the dock to one of the abandoned boats, and my friend takes aim at the blood-soaked, savage mutilator. He fires. He hits him in the back. He fires again. The infected's head blows apart, its body and the body of the person it had been feeding on topple into the water. We charge for the boat, my friend holding the dock against a group of approaching infected. I help my girlfriend and the girl into the boat, but the dead GM's girlfriend and I fall into the water as my friend falls back to the boat, and by jumping on, is able to get it far enough from the dock to be inacessible to the infected. However, they start walking into the water after me and the dead GM's girlfriend. We swim as hard as we can alongside the floating shuttle boat, and are helped aboard, soaked, panting, and terrified.

My friend goes up to the raised cockpit and finds a body on the floor. He goes right to it and aims the gun at its head. It opens its eyes. He shoots it at point blank range, and tosses the body overboard. He gets the boat out into the bay and drops anchor. He rejoins us on deck. We're all silent. The dead GM's girlfriend hands my friend's wife's cell phone to him. "I'm sorry." (IRL: His head drops and he and the GM have to fight to not start crying. I dismally stare at the table.)


This was the most intense, stressful, and emotionally upsetting game I've ever played. The vividness of imagination brought on by the use of locations and people all three of us are intimately connected with was unmatched in its immersion. A unique, gruelling, immediately gripping, and viscerally potent role-playing experience.

When we left the bar, buzzed and emotionally raw with cortisol securely entrenched in our systems, we repreatedly commented on how almost euphorically relieving it was that none of that had ever happened. The sirens we hadn't actually heard, the commotion we hadn't actually seen, and the frantic peril that had never actually abducted our lives weren't memories that left us quickly. We were each stressed out for hours afterwards. My friend was hearing actual sirens near his house and couldn't relax. I woke up still somewhat haunted this morning, and have kept nearby my girlfriend and cat since then. The GM is still drained, and his girlfriend suggested that he not play this game for a while.

We used approximately a tenth of the material in the handbook.
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~Guest 282118
Argentinian Asado Supremacy

Joined: Sat Dec 24, 2011 2:16 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 8:16 pm 
 

Holy. Fucking. Shit. Like... Jesus, man. I don't even think I'd call that game session intense. More like "soul sucking". That's awesome, but also really, really crazy. I'd like to try it at some point, even if only out of morbid curiosity.

My friends play themselves in my homebrew campaign, but as it's a fantasy setting and we're all genre savvy nerds, we take it as more of a chance to make fun of several common fantasy tropes and satirize the medium in general. It's hilarious and a lot of fun, but it's never gonna be as fuckmothering demented as what you described, Wyrm.

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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

Joined: Sat Feb 21, 2009 5:55 am
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Location: Tyrn Gorthad
PostPosted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 9:56 pm 
 

failsafeman wrote:
That's when the DM just needs to pull some shenanigans, like a sneaky wino halfling climbs into the bag of holding and drinks it all himself. Or you guys drink it all but it turned out the stuff went rancid and you just get really sick with no bonuses, or more basically, maybe you all just get hungover drinking it and can't stand the taste anymore...I mean only the most straitlaced DM couldn't come up with a creative, effective way of putting a stop to it. Some methods would be more ass-pully than others, but blatant attempts to abuse the system like that invite asspulls, imo.


Yeah, I think the DM guy would've normally just not said anything and thought up some in-story thing that would spirit away our unlimited healing ale or at least make it less overpowered, but from what I gather he's had some ongoing issues with this particular player. They just don't see eye-to-eye on how the game should be played - the halfling guy is always trying to metagame or take advantage of any loophole he can to trivialize content, but not in cool/interesting in-character ways but rather trying to bend or subvert the spirit of the rules. Supposedly he's gotten a lot better about it over time but I guess this was another example of him immediately pouncing on some minor slip-up in order to trivialize the upcoming climatic end-of-campaign dungeon crawl.
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failsafeman
Digital Dictator

Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 8:45 am
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Location: In the Arena
PostPosted: Mon Apr 03, 2017 9:45 am 
 

Grave_Wyrm wrote:
THE END OF THE WORLD: Zombie Apocalypse -- a one-off played over six hours in a cocktail bar (with adjacent taco truck).

That's amazing, dude. Seems like it would require a lot of stars to align for things to work so well (knowing each other very well, knowing the same locations, knowing each other's family/partners/etc.) but align they did.
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Grave_Wyrm
Metal Sloth

Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 5:55 pm
Posts: 3928
PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 3:23 pm 
 

failsafeman wrote:
That's amazing, dude. Seems like it would require a lot of stars to align for things to work so well (knowing each other very well, knowing the same locations, knowing each other's family/partners/etc.) but align they did.

No shit. They're both good friends of mine, have been to my house a bunch, our SO's are all friends, and the majority of us work together (or used to), we've lived in the area for years, and everything took place close to home (in fact TOO close to home, in fact INSIDE my home), so even a few days later I think about it and gives me a hint of the sinking feels. Luckily, a week with a sinus infection gave me something else to think about, and the gloom has lifted. In hindsight, when a sinus infection is a psychological boon, that's .. um .. well, it's somethin'.

Xlxlx wrote:
I'd like to try it at some point, even if only out of morbid curiosity.

I highly recommend it. I'm basically positive that you would immediately take to the system and do very well with the world building/story telling. I think it's right up your alley. And, just for the record, even our GM didn't think it was going to be this emotionally cheese grating. It was more that way because of the stars aligning just right, but .. I mean .. you never know. The game is set up to be pretty immediate.

It should also be mentioned that the designers take repeated pains to point out that the game has a high likelihood of triggering people who have experienced trauma, and exhorts prospective GM's to be sensitive and trustworthy with their players. It has a lot of flexibility in it, too. Like I said, we only used a dime of the book. I'm really looking forward to playing one of the other scenarios, particularly Alien Invasion and Revolt of the Machines.
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squidrick9042
Metal newbie

Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2012 9:11 pm
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Location: Asheville, NC
PostPosted: Tue Apr 11, 2017 9:53 pm 
 

I've been playing a D&D campaign with my band for a few months now but lately we haven't been able to play since our drummer just had a kid and he needs to focus on that for a bit haha. The campaign was The Curse of Strahd which is a Ravenloft campaign and it has been pretty fun but once this is over we're looking to branch out into other games since we have kinda had to improvise a lot of stuff to keep things more interesting such as my character getting lycanthrope and randomly spiraling out of control and attacking anything nearby, even friendly characters. The best part is that for a long time the lycanthrope was kept as a secret to my character and while I personally knew about it my character was essentially unaware and every time I became a werewolf my party would just tell me that I got blackout drunk the night before.
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~Guest 282118
Argentinian Asado Supremacy

Joined: Sat Dec 24, 2011 2:16 pm
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2017 3:39 am 
 

So, I commisioned some drawings to this friend of mine who's an artist, and I'm FUCKING PUMPED, Y'ALL. I'm paying him to make representative illustrations for each of the civilizations in my homebrew setting; as in, he's drawing a typical individual of each culture, and he's mad good at his job. Take a look, these are the ones he's made so far:

Spoiler: show
Image

Image

Image

Image

In order, they're:

1) A socarian mage of the Ivory Kingdom, a place where sorcery is very common and well accepted, to the point where it's not strange for young children to know a simple spell or two. This one in particular is affiliated with the Circle of Sapphires, the kingdom's most important magical society. You can tell by his attire, as his longcoat (which would be deep blue in colour) marks him as a high ranking member of the organization, and the small sapphire hanging from a chain works as a badge of office.

2) A huntress of the Ypdarian Empire, an ancient and powerful nation led by its strong, stoic women, and with Nayubhet IV, the Moonborn Empress, currently at the helm. This woman works as a beast tamer and animal handler, searching the searing grey sands of the desert for formidable creatures, so that they might be captured and handed to the Flesh Priesthood, who shall then transmute and hybridize them into ferocious but loyal sphinxes, or even the empire's most feared fighters and peacekeepers; the Feral Guard.

3) A grizzled warrior, hailing from the harsh northern lands of Rakrya. In Rakrya, things such as politics and bureaucracy are considered feminine pursuits, and thus, most men know nothing outside of heavy manual labour, hunting, and especially fighting, unless they decide to become scholars and acolytes of the Church of the White Hand, that is. This man in particular roams the nation's snowy forests and frigid plains as a mercenary and a monster hunter, putting men and beast alike to the sword for coin. His first kill on the job left him with two mementos; scars, and a cape to stave off the cold, fashioned out of the creature's hide.

4) A venerable shaman, the spiritual leader of one of the many tribes of reptilian akked that wander the Thasian continent. Save for those established within the sacred city of Umanjou, the akked are known for being nomadic, as they consider all of Ogande (their goddess and their name for the earth itself) their home. This old patriarch, blind with age, leads his tribe with the wisdom of centuries, and is the link between them and the Nexus; Ogande's extraplanar home, and the place where all elemental beings hail from. Here, we can see him manifest one into the physical plane in the form of an ethereal cicada, with the help of fetishes known as mokumbos.

Hope I'm not boring you guys with all of this self-indulgent prattle, but again, SO. FUCKIN'. PUMPED. Y'ALL.

EDIT: Forgot to answer to Grave_Wyrm!

Grave_Wyrm wrote:
Xlxlx wrote:
I'd like to try it at some point, even if only out of morbid curiosity.

I highly recommend it. I'm basically positive that you would immediately take to the system and do very well with the world building/story telling. I think it's right up your alley. And, just for the record, even our GM didn't think it was going to be this emotionally cheese grating. It was more that way because of the stars aligning just right, but .. I mean .. you never know. The game is set up to be pretty immediate. .

Aw, hell yeah. Usually the kinda horror games I like to direct are a bit more on the slow-paced, atmospheric side, but a more frantic pace where everything just goes to shit and you gotta cope as quickly as possible sounds like stupid amounts of fun. I'm in.

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Grave_Wyrm
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 14, 2017 9:39 pm 
 

Xlxlx wrote:
Usually the kinda horror games I like to direct are a bit more on the slow-paced, atmospheric side, but a more frantic pace where everything just goes to shit and you gotta cope as quickly as possible sounds like stupid amounts of fun. I'm in.

Just wanting to reiterate that there are many ways to play this game. Ours was a one-off, and it was the GM's choice to make it pell mell. There are loads of options for prolonged and atmospheric campaigns or more tense unfolding with violent, sudden punctuations. It can really be whatever you want. The game materials are really versatile and supportive.
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Metantoine
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 23, 2017 12:56 am 
 

So in the game with my paladin, we got to fight 2 Cambions (with an evil bald lady wizard too), not too rough of a fight for level 6 (we level uped to 7 after the fight), right? Well, my paladin who, of course made a run at the fiends almost died when the DM rolled 2 natural 20s for both attacks of one cambion (they have the multiattack option). He confirmed the critical with... another 20! (he rolls in the open) so his spear attack got TRIPLE damage and did like 50+ damage and took down my paladin! The bard healed me, got me to 15 HP, I stood up and went berserk on him with a divine smite (my great axe 1d12 +5 + 4d8 of radiant damage) and killed the motherfucker. Great game.
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Grave_Wyrm
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 23, 2017 1:33 am 
 

Holy shit. Spear through the fucking brain pan.
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

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PostPosted: Mon Apr 24, 2017 11:34 pm 
 

Since the main campaign I joined is nearing the end of their year-long quest with a bigass dungeon crawl (we're all camped outside the entrance waiting for the next session where we'll all be there), the DM took the opportunity to use two sessions where some players are missing to start a side adventure further south along the Sword Coast with some newly rolled up level 2 (now level 3) characters. I didn't play in their first session with this second campaign as I was on vacation, but I'm joining them this weekend with my new level 3 sorcerer!

I put quite a bit of work into fleshing this guy out. The DM offered up some campaign-related choices for our bonds to choose from, so I started from there. I chose one where my grandfather was a famous dragonslayer, so I've got that reputation/baggage, recently had my ass kicked by some dragon cultists and decided to lay low in the town central to this story for a while. So I spun that bond thusly:

"My grandfather was the famous Geth of Easting, an Illuskan paladin in service to Torm, known far and wide for having slain a dragon. His son, my father, Koth of Easting, basked in the glory of my grandfather's achievement and likewise took up arms in service of Torm with even greater faith than my grandfather. He took a high-elven wife, had a son, Urth of Easting, and decided it was his divine calling and birthright to go find a dragon, and kill it. So he found one, and was promptly eaten. After years of being inundated with expectations to follow the family tradition, and taunts regarding being the son of a failed paladin, upon adulthood I left Easting for the Far Hills, spending a decade surviving mostly alone in the wilderness, going by my childhood Elven name and mother's family name to avoid association with my paternal lineage and its baggage. Eventually, a desire to redeem the family name and the knowledge that Torm had clearly not been the reason for my grandfather's success, I decided that faith and martial prowess (of which I had little) were not for me, and instead sought out ways to learn magic.

I went to Berdusk and found a sage named Sillari Kern. As my first task, he said I had to prove myself worthy, and he sent me into the forbidden Reaching Woods north of Berdusk, to retrieve a small item sitting upon an altar of one of the "forbidden gods." He gave me a map, and I found it. A small black sphere of unknown material engraved with an open eye on one side. From the eye in eight directions point eight arrows, wrapping around to the back of the sphere. At the point where the arrows meet is a part of the sphere I cannot discern or touch; it is impossible for me to focus my sight on this location or feel its texture. The moment I retrieve the sphere from the altar, I feel a surge of energy through my body, and immediately know of strange magic effects I can cause to happen at will. Sometimes, strange and undesired side effects result from my use of these powers.

When I returned with the sphere, the sage was gone. No one knew who he was, or where he went.

I wandered the lands trying to learn to control my new powers. I returned to the Far Hills, and practiced with my powers, and traded with dwarves. (3 levels) Eventually I decided I needed help understanding my powers better, and finally having sufficient gold in hand, decided to travel to Baldur's Gate to pay someone to help and/or teach me.

On my way to Baldur's gate, I stop in Berdusk again. Just outside of town, I am attacked. They tell me "The cult of the Dragon never forgets!" They think they left me for dead, but I survived. They said something about the small town of Greenest nearby.

I follow them to Greenest, trying to figure out exactly who they are and what they want with me. Two days after I arrive, the town of Greenest is suddenly attacked at sunset, by a large army of dragon cultists, mercenaries, kobolds, and giant lizards, and even a large blue dragon. I manage to ride out the night in safety.

In the morning, I am questioned by the town guards - they don't recognize me, and I look suspicious, so they take me to the Keep for interrogation. I oblige and play along, hoping to learn more about who attacked the town.

The dwarven master of the Keep recognizes my name (threatened me until I gave my old one), asks if I am the grandson of the dragonslayer. When I acknowledge, he tells me that a small group of adventurers were just sent to follow the army a few hours ago, and to rescue an important monk who was taken prisoner, who knows all about the cult. They ask me to follow the army's trail, and try to catch up to the party of adventurers, since they will need all the help they can get. He says the monk is "very important and well connected" and is positive I will receive a reward if I aid in his rescue. He is also positive I will get some answers about the men who attacked me in Berdusk that I tracked here."

So, I'm a sorcerer with the Wild Mage origin, which hopefully should lead to lots of fun with that Wild Magic Surge table and Tides of Chaos. Thankfully I got some pretty crazy rolls on my stat creation, which will hopefully help offset a restriction I've imposed on myself: each time I learn new sorcerer spells through leveling, I'm going to choose them randomly from the available spell list through a roll of the dice. As a reflection of my efforts to learn and control my magic powers, I can replace one known spell with another from the list on level-up (per the RAW) to help get a more useful spell list.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 25, 2017 9:21 pm 
 

Sounds rad dude! Have you checked out any of the Unearthed Arcana yet? They've added some super rad things over the last couple years, including a ton of new archetypes and spells and feats. Even a whole new class, the Mystic. They're only semi-official, so it's up to your DM whether he wants to allow them or not, but check them out:

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles-tags/unearthed-arcana
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iamntbatman
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2017 12:14 am 
 

Yeah...with bad results. There's this one guy in the regular campaign that the DM constantly butts heads with, the DM always accusing him of being a modern-day "munchkin" (apparently a term for younger siblings back in the day who'd want to get in on games, not "get it" and fuck everything up) who is too focused on the video game-like aspects of D&D, including min-maxing his character, trying to metagame as much as possible to always get the best outcomes, etc. I haven't played with these guys enough to know for sure whether that's a serious issue, but I can tell for sure that it has kind of made the DM guy have a really reactionary attitude toward "munchkin" playstyles.

Anyway this is relevant because he accused me of similar behavior when I originally wanted to use one of the Unearthed Arcana sorcerer origins. I just wanted to play sorcerer because I was eager to try a pure spellcasting class, and the munchkin guy is playing a wizard in this side campaign and another guy is a warlock in the main campaign, so I just wanted something different. The dragon bloodline origin was ruled out due to the nature of the campaign we're running, and I initially didn't want to do the Wild Magic thing just because it seemed like a lot of extra rolling and chart consulting that could slow down gameplay for everyone else and possibly annoy them a lot. I saw the "Favored Soul" sorcerer origin in Unearthed Arcana and wanted to try that, since it would make me less squishy and give me access to some cleric stuff, which I just thought would be useful, and the DM guy accused me of Googling the most overpowered min-maxed builds or something.

Basically I just wanna avoid anything at this point that could get me labelled a munchkin trying to min-max, rather than just going for pure RP considerations.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2017 11:26 am 
 

Wow, as much as I hate min-maxing, your DM sounds like an asshat. If it's just a side campaign and you're a new player anyway, why would it even matter if you're picking something based on it being powerful?
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acid_bukkake
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2017 11:38 am 
 

Do any of y'all use Roll20? I registered an account there maybe a year ago and haven't had much time for it, but with my moving soon meaning a little more free time in the near future and if people with actual game experience were to set up a game...
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2017 2:25 pm 
 

failsafeman wrote:
Wow, as much as I hate min-maxing, your DM sounds like an asshat. If it's just a side campaign and you're a new player anyway, why would it even matter if you're picking something based on it being powerful?


Haha nah, he's alright. Like I said I think he just has had bad experiences with other people trying to do shit like that to abuse game mechanics and it frustrates him as a DM because it makes it way harder to make encounters challenging and interesting for everyone. And I did get a glimpse of where he's coming from; like last game we rescued that dwarf merchant guy who offered us some ale, and drinking it healed 5 HP and gave a temporary charisma buff, so immediately that one guy was like, "how many barrels of ale can I fit in my bag of holding" with the intent of having an unlimited healing beer supply for our impending dungeon crawl, which yeah, would've trivialized it. So if that guy is always causing the DM headaches, I can see how he'd get mad at me if he thought I was doing the same thing. (I did actually Google that Favored Soul sorcerer build after he criticized me for choosing it, and people were saying it's stupid OP and needs a nerfing...whoops).

It's not just a one-off side campaign; it's taking place in the same setting as the other campaign, but further south. The intent is to eventually merge the two so that we'll have a bigger stable of characters to choose from for more flexibility. Like if in one week only two or three out of five people show up, rather than continue the main story where they're halfway through a dungeon or something, we can use some "alts" to go on a mini-adventure or something that might help out our main heroes or advance the story in other ways, rather than just cancelling the session or doing a one-shot with no real consequences.
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Resident_Hazard
Possessed by Starscream's Ghost

Joined: Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:33 pm
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 10:45 am 
 

I'm going to throw a cheap plug in here.

My son and I have been making a board game together. Actually, we made two, and here's the second one, called "Dictators!"

Image

We made a game that is, at least now, called "Ray Gun Gothic: Land Rush" which is absolutely massive, detailed, and very involved. When I was looking into what it would likely cost to put it into production of some kind, I realized it was too big and required too many pieces. So, the image above was a deliberate attempt to make something small, fast, simple, and straight-forward.

The game is played with cards and pretty much just involves attacks. It's intended to be a fast-paced strategy-lite kind of game. The board and cards printed up pretty nicely, which I was pretty excited about. For our previous game (I don't think I have images online), we did everything ourselves, did crude print-outs of cards and boards at Kinkos, and had to cut everything up ourselves. All the player pieces in that one are Legos which made the leveling system to work much more easily.

The next step on this is for me to finish the box art and for us to finish the instructions, and then see about a way to actually manufacture the thing. There's a few steps there I need to figure out...
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 29, 2017 7:33 am 
 

Had my first session with my southern campaign alt, Rinn Moonwhisper, just now.

Playing a low-level sorcerer is weird and hard. Rolling just a flat 1d10 on my basic attack cantrip (fire bolt) is rough...even when when my barbarian flubs a damage roll he still gets to add a substantial strength modifier to it, so it feels like I accomplished something. Hitting a 1 or 2 on a 1d10 for fire bolt feels like a wasted turn. In general just not having anything available to drop big damage numbers on tough enemies was rough. Also, I hit an ally with an AoE. She passed the save but still took half damage, which brought her just low enough that she was incapacitated by the half-dragon dude we were fighting in a single round, so she was out of action for a really long combat. Whoops. The guy playing her says she will never trust me again, so Rinn's gonna have to use all of his charisma to try to mend that bridge and hope he doesn't hit her with anything else.

I did have some really powerful moments, though. I put a pack of kobolds to sleep and we went along one-shotting them with auto-crits as they slept. Then, we were gonna descend this staircase into a dark cave, so the dorky paladin tossed a dead bear down the stairs, setting off all the falling rock traps as its body rolled down the steps. I had cut the head off a goat from a meat storage room earlier, and took the time to douse it in oil from an oil lamp, set it alight, then sent it floating aflame down the steps with Mage Hand while shouting spooky noises. I rolled a Wild Magic Surge on the Mage Hand cast, which forces me to roll on this big table of chaotic magic outcomes, and wound up getting free bonus action teleporting for a full minute. Well, after the flaming skull got to the bottom of the steps and scared a huge pack of Kobolds, I teleported down, teleported across the room in front of the pack and cast Thunderwave, blasting them all with thunder damage and knocking them back against the wall and killing them, then bonus action teleported to the other group of kobolds that had just come running up another flight of steps, Thunderwaved them down the steps to their deaths, teleported down the steps and wiped out another group of them. I think I killed like 17 kobolds in under a minute, clearing out half the dungeon with Thunderwave-teleport chains.

I can't wait until he's higher level, so I can try out some of this madness with even more powerful spells.
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Grave_Wyrm
Metal Sloth

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 29, 2017 6:27 pm 
 

batman, sounds like your session went very cool-ly, despite roasting a friend. Nice varied use of your spooky talents.

Can you tell us about your play-testing process, Resident_Hazard?
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Rosenthorn
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 29, 2017 10:06 pm 
 

acid_bukkake wrote:
Do any of y'all use Roll20? I registered an account there maybe a year ago and haven't had much time for it, but with my moving soon meaning a little more free time in the near future and if people with actual game experience were to set up a game...


I've played a few campaigns on roll20 and an currently DMing a 5e campaign using it. So far I've found it to be a great way of doing things, once you get used to it. DMing is fun, but I'd love to play a game just as a player for a change. I have a few pretty fun ideas floating around in my head.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Sat May 06, 2017 4:09 pm 
 

OK so we finally ended the thieves' guild war by accepting kickbacks from the sneaky guild and forming a professional wrestling league with the violent thuggish guild. What can I say, our grappler has some high charisma. So now our tavern includes a wrestling arena in addition to the strip club and bar. I have no fucking idea where this is going but I LOVE IT.
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Resident_Hazard
Possessed by Starscream's Ghost

Joined: Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:33 pm
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PostPosted: Sun May 07, 2017 2:44 am 
 

Grave_Wyrm wrote:

Can you tell us about your play-testing process, Resident_Hazard?


Play testing usually involves my son and me. Then maybe my girlfriend, and maybe my mom.

Our two board games have gone through numerous prototypes and revisions. Our super-giant board game first had two sample boards made entirely out of Legos--which, by the way, are fantastic for prototyping this kind of thing. We took our basic rules and applied them to these boards. Then we had a full overall print-out of a new board. Applied current rules to that. We then modified the big board into 6 smaller boards--use all six for 3-4 players, just 4 for 2 players. Applied gameplay and current rules. We adjusted one more time, slightly smaller boards, printed on foam board. And of course, modifying rules to adjust gameplay flow the whole time.

Because of the massiveness of the original game we made, we have done dozens of playtests, and for the most part, have finalized boards, finalized rules, and... Are still using Legos for the character pieces.

It was seeing how extensive the work on this would need to be for any kind of production is why we deliberately made a smaller game (pictured above). This one has been tested by my son and me, girlfriend, and friends. This weekend, we have Glitchcon, and we got to set it up for a bit for attendees to play, and he was in charge of explaining the rules and goals, and he did pretty well and the feedback has been positive. Prototyping on this was a lot faster and simpler due to reduced complexity.
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Grave_Wyrm
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PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2017 10:01 am 
 

Neat! Sounds fun. A friend of mine is in game development and his game testing sessions with his buddies are really interesting to watch. They come up with points that I didn't even notice. It's pretty cool when know-it-alls can use their frustrating powers for good. Kublacon is at the end of the month, and we'll be playing one of his prototypes into the ground. Conventions are a great place to get a sample of strangers.

Did many veterans or developers play your prototype, or was it all just wandering enthusiasts? What kind of constructive feedback did you get, not just the positive stuff..
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Resident_Hazard
Possessed by Starscream's Ghost

Joined: Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:33 pm
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PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2017 1:28 pm 
 

Grave_Wyrm wrote:
Neat! Sounds fun. A friend of mine is in game development and his game testing sessions with his buddies are really interesting to watch. They come up with points that I didn't even notice. It's pretty cool when know-it-alls can use their frustrating powers for good. Kublacon is at the end of the month, and we'll be playing one of his prototypes into the ground. Conventions are a great place to get a sample of strangers.

Did many veterans or developers play your prototype, or was it all just wandering enthusiasts? What kind of constructive feedback did you get, not just the positive stuff..


Actually, I think most of the feedback for the Dictators! game was pretty positive. My son practiced the night before for instructing people on the game. I'll have to see if he remembers any other notes people had. I talked to a guy at Glitchcon who had a successful Kickstarter for any pointers, and one of them was simply to get out there more with the game, so we'll have to do that. Mostly, it was a few people who were wandering around that tested it, and once, I forced people in my dev team to give it go.

We tested a game for another guy, but his was in much rougher shape. He didn't have several rules ironed out, but then, that's the point of the play-test, after all.

You don't partake in the game testing sessions for your developer friend?
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Thoth Amon
Metal newbie

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PostPosted: Thu May 11, 2017 8:24 pm 
 

Currently doing Tomb of Horrors with our long running 1st ed. group.
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

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PostPosted: Sat May 13, 2017 8:35 am 
 

Today's session was good stuff. First one with the full roster of main characters, doing some heavy combat. Fought off some gnolls who were attacking the newest addition to the group (a sagely ranger elf), got ambushed by some air cultists and while finishing them off some approaching giant fire-breathing monstrosity, fled into the cultists' lair in an ancient dwarven city and went about doing a room-by-room clear. Lots of good axe-work today.

Highlight: I grabbed a sleeping cultist, held her in a bear hug with one hand over her mouth while the other folks took turns trying to interrogate her. The warlock just pissed her off, so she spat into my hand and then bit my hand. Next up was the dwarf cleric, who spat in her face, missed, and spat in my face. When she started laughing hysterically at all of this (muffled by my bitten hand), the cleric tried to deck her in the nose, rolled a fumble and punched me right in the eye. Uproarious laughter from our captured cultist. Snapped her neck, dropped her in the middle of the floor and announced that next time, I'd handle the interrogations.

Edit: almost forgot about the ending! After killing a bunch of nasty cultists, we rounded a corner to see some wacky bard leading a terrified group of them playing this on bone flutes. The warlock decided to immediately try to eldritch blast the bard over the cliff behind him (no dice) so while he was waving his arms around or whatever I just walked over and yanked the flutes out of their mouths. Madness ensued. Bard guy teleported away, cultists happily revealed information to us because they didn't seem to even consider the fact that someone would try to disrupt the cult's plans, then merrily jumped into the abyss to demonstrate that they could definitely fly. Well, except one guy. Had to toss him in myself, and he shrieked a fair bit. Can't bode well for next session, but whatever!
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Grave_Wyrm
Metal Sloth

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PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 9:31 am 
 

Sounds fun. My party hasn't seen any combat at all yet. I'm about to participate in a tournament, but that's about it. We hardly ever have aligning schedules, and in a couple months one of the guys is moving away, so this game is doomed. Your games sound pretty gritty. Are the other players fun to get together with? I forget how well you know them..

Resident_Hazard wrote:
You don't partake in the game testing sessions for your developer friend?

He's a designer. I used the wrong word before; he's not a developer. I do partake, I just don't have the design chops or experience to be able to offer much other than where theme and mechanics work or not, or basic play experience opionions. I'm not sure I'm much help in making a game better in a legitimate sense. In a way, I'm just an honest person who will play whatever he puts in front of me and give him my thoughts. His friends are also designers, so they can give him way better feedback on categorization, layout, balancing, and turn structure than I can. I'm getting better at it as I play with them, but still pretty novice to the process.
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

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Location: Tyrn Gorthad
PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 10:36 am 
 

I didn't know any of these people when I joined the group. I literally was just searching Facebook pages with my city's name in them and saw the D&D page and decided to join. So of course it was a bit strange jumping into a mostly unfamiliar game with a bunch of total strangers, but I'm getting to know them better. They are mostly older than me, or at least have been in Korea longer than I have, and most of them are married. No problem at all for me.

Actually, after that last session I had a good chat with some of the other players, and did some mild bitching about the DM. I've defended his calls a couple of times in this thread, but between that chat and reading stuff on the internet, I think it would be somewhat fair to say he's a rather inflexible and controlling DM. The woman who's the new addition said that she had many of the same problems I had when trying to make her character, namely that she was encouraged by the DM guy to be creative but had her toes stepped on when she did things incorrectly or in a way that would be hard to RP or fit into the story. He's also really inflexible with the rules and such. There are some house rules about additional combat actions, such as climbing onto larger creatures, disarm attempts, shoves aside (instead of attempts to shove prone as in the PHB), tumbling through a creature's space, etc. that are cool on paper, and the DM has encouraged us to try to be more creative in combat, but then he hamstrings us by being really draconian with combat mechanics. For example, I was reading up on grappling and how to play as a grappler, and basically the entire playstyle would be a no-go for my DM. It relies on kind of abusing the RAW to make the most out of it, such as how it never states you need both hands free (only one) so then, if you do have both hands free, you should be able to grapple two different targets. Grapplers also do stuff like use multiple attacks or bonus attacks to do multiple things like grapple two guys, or grapple a guy then knock him prone, or grapple a guy then stab him with the second attack, or whatever. But my DM told me that all of these things are "combat actions" that take the place of attacking at all.

So, instead of making multiple attacks with the chance of getting even more attacks proc'd from things like Great Weapon Master, potentially doing ridiculous damage or killing multiple foes in a single round, I can choose to attempt to disarm one guy and not damage him at all, or attempt to put one guy in a grappled state, or whatever. It just seriously gimps all of these other combat actions by saying that they take the place of any and all attacks and makes it almost never worthwhile to try anything cool, which is kinda killing my fun.

I know he's doing it for balance reasons, but it just sucks that he's not more flexible with balance to let us do cool shit that's apparently the way most other people play just because he doesn't know how to balance a barbarian disarming a guy, killing a second guy then killing a third in one round. He also gets *really* mad whenever he gets the slightest hint that the players are trying to game the system - for example close to the end of the other session I asked what time it was in-game because we've done two full sessions since dawn full of shitloads of combat, and I was just wondering how long it had been since it seemed like it had been forever, and when the guy who the DM constantly accuses of being a munchkin piped up to agree that it was still super early considering how much had happened, the DM guy literally shoves a print-out of days/hours in his face and says like, "here, you wanna tell me what time it is, because I'm wrong?" or something super hostile like that. I think he was pissed because he sensed that we were pushing for a long rest or something in order to trivialize the dungeon he had put so much work into balancing.

So...hopefully he gets easier to work with rather than more frustrating as time passes.
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Metantoine
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Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:00 pm
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Location: Montréal
PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 2:10 pm 
 

Man, your DM sucks. I guess it would be hard to find a new one in Korea though :(

I'm glad mine are pretty good and open. My DM for the Elvira campaign is impressive. We played this campaign Saturday from 10 am to 7pm hahaha, it was insane. We got a message from Brigga (the monk in the party) that her brother was in trouble so we traveled to her home town, the city of Brindingford, an apparent calm city ruled by a baron. We rapidly encountered some wererats that took over the thieves guild. Voth, Brigga's brother was put in jail for his protection by the guard's captain (he disappeared, we'll find him soon, I guess!) when things went south. He's a rogue that was paid to infiltrate the guild but things got out of hand. We quickly destroyed the entire wererat community, it was hiding in a tower. Elvira and the fighter got cursed by their bites though. In the meantime, we got deputized by the city guard to investigate some strange activities in the city such as an "accidental" death in a fringe bookstore.

On our way to the temple of Mithra to get the curses removed (I might need to learn the "remove curses" spell lol), we were attacked by two huge creatures coming from a otherworldly portal. I didn't get the name but they're giant trans-lucid monsters with tentacles. They were hard to beat but my Chromatic Orb spell was quite effective. We arrived at the temple to see the 2 paladins (it's more like a shrine than a temple) being attacked by cultists. We killed the cultists (strong sorcerers) and the paladins cured us for free! They followed us to the bookstore (the source of the otherworldly activity), we encountered a gibbering mouth there and a bunch of tough cultists. We weren't quite prepared to fight them and they used spells like Sleep and Magical Darkness to their advantage. The DM didn't use the Sleep spell correctly and he almost TPKed us because of this but we talked about this afterwards and everything is fine now! He's not a cruel DM so the rogue brother appeared to save the situation! So we killed the cultists but not everything is finished yet!

We'll start at level 5 next game too and a wizard is becoming quite powerful at this level because my proficiency bonus is now +3 (so my spell save DC is 15 and my spell attack bonus is +7) and I also have access to the 3rd level spells like motherfucking FIREBALL and LIGHTNING BOLT! I'll also take Counterspell and possibly Slow too.
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failsafeman
Digital Dictator

Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 8:45 am
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Location: In the Arena
PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 4:56 pm 
 

iamntbatman wrote:
But my DM told me that all of these things are "combat actions" that take the place of attacking at all.

Well, I sorta agree with your DM, but I see where you're coming from. The thing is, certain classes (like Battlemaster) get a specific move that lets them do a disarming attack, so I agree that it would be lame to let people just try to disarm using a bonus action and then also attack. An attempt to disarm should be your combat action and should be a Dex check and should take the place of any normal, non-bonus action. A big part of 5e is trying to limit the number of things a single character can do in a single round in order to make turns go faster. Doing a ton of things per round sounds fun, but in previous editions it really bogged the game down. Remember also that anything you can do, an enemy humanoid can do.

On the other hand, being a Grappler in vanilla D&D is totally gimped and basically not worthwhile, unless you bend all kinds of rules or try to slip through loopholes. Personally I think it's silly to have the same chance to grapple with one hand as with two, just because the rules don't specifically state that you have to use two hands. Mayyyybe I'd let you do it if it were at a disadvantage. However, because it's so broken, there's a Grappler homebrew class floating around, with its own rules and archetypes and such. It's pretty well-balanced and I think would let you do what you want to do. One of the players in our current campaign is playing one as like a fantasy luchador, and it works out pretty well. A more flexible DM (like mine) would suggest that option, rather than just shutting you down.

Basically I sorta agree with your DM on some of these rules issues, but totally agree with you that he's being a dick. A good DM won't just shut you down when you're trying to do something that's against the rules; they'll help you figure out a way to do it within the rules, or even come up with some homebrew rules that are balanced but also let you play the character you want to. The goal of D&D is fun through roleplaying, not rigid adherence to a set of rules written by strangers.
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

Joined: Sat Feb 21, 2009 5:55 am
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Location: Tyrn Gorthad
PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 11:47 pm 
 

I mean on the flipside of all of this moaning about his rigidity, he's also a great DM in other ways. He does put tons of effort into writing this stuff, getting maps he puts up on the monitor with revealable fog of war, prints out all kinds of cool shit and does things like make paper documents look worn and aged or even torn and stained, gets huge maps and stuff shipped that we found as loot, has all kinds of cool playlists and sound effects and stuff, does a great job adlibbing voiceover for NPC's, etc. It's mostly just that he's really inflexible and not great at playing off the cuff for combat encounters so gets super frustrated by any sort of perceived "powergaming" that might wreck his efforts to balance things.

On another note: next character I roll up will definitely be an Artificer. Zany gnome building magical contraptions, robot pets and a bigass gun? Yes please.
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Resident_Hazard
Possessed by Starscream's Ghost

Joined: Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:33 pm
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PostPosted: Tue May 16, 2017 9:14 am 
 

Grave_Wyrm wrote:

Resident_Hazard wrote:
You don't partake in the game testing sessions for your developer friend?

He's a designer. I used the wrong word before; he's not a developer. I do partake, I just don't have the design chops or experience to be able to offer much other than where theme and mechanics work or not, or basic play experience opionions. I'm not sure I'm much help in making a game better in a legitimate sense. In a way, I'm just an honest person who will play whatever he puts in front of me and give him my thoughts. His friends are also designers, so they can give him way better feedback on categorization, layout, balancing, and turn structure than I can. I'm getting better at it as I play with them, but still pretty novice to the process.



You don't have to be a designer, and indeed, sometimes someone unfamiliar with game design aspects will ask better questions. When I tested games at Activision, they had a wide range of people there, because everyone sees things a little differently and those of us going to school to be designers/developers were in the minority. So, I wouldn't dismiss your feedback. When showing these games to people, you need to cast a wide net, so your input, while less of it, is probably just as valuable.
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Grave_Wyrm
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PostPosted: Sat May 20, 2017 10:33 pm 
 

"My job as a DM is to make sure that you guys are having fun." That's a direct quote from my own DM, which is the best possible point of view, as far as I can tell. He isn't a softy when it comes to rules, but there aren't protracted out-of-game arguments. Things either happen or they don't, and everything is explained very clearly. That said, he's our friend. I suppose I can understand a DM getting frustrated with people he didn't know and wanting to run a tight ship. Still, there are better ways to do it than aggro-waving papers in players' faces.

I feel kind of bad for him, actually, because he's put a lot of time into a campaign that's going to get aborted when one of our players moves away. Hopefully the semi-wife and I will be able to make some use of it in a small-party campaign minus the others. Sucks because the guy who's leaving is fun to play with. He's playing a gnome alchemist who has a collection of dwarf moustaches that he's surreptitiously cut off dwarf corpses along the way, using them in surprisingly effective sleight-of-hand tricks during negotiations. His gambling devotion to his god has earned him a lot of money and the respect of many miscreants, the crown jewel of which was winning a purse of silver after successfully quaffing a stein of hagfish bilge water on the second try. I'm going to miss that compulsive little drunkard.

In any event, my DM rolls with whatever we throw out there. He's intentionally working against the unfortunately common adversarial positioning of a DM vs. the characters.

iamntbatman wrote:
next character I roll up will definitely be an Artificer. Zany gnome building magical contraptions, robot pets and a bigass gun? Yes please.

Fuck yeah.

Metantoine wrote:
Elvira ... is becoming quite powerful at this level because my proficiency bonus is now +3 (so my spell save DC is 15 and my spell attack bonus is +7) and I also have access to the 3rd level spells like motherfucking FIREBALL and LIGHTNING BOLT! I'll also take Counterspell and possibly Slow too.

Bitchin. Really glad my imaginary philanthropic bad ass girlfriend didn't die by accident! I would have cried!

Resident_Hazard wrote:
You don't have to be a designer, and indeed, sometimes someone unfamiliar with game design aspects will ask better questions. When I tested games at Activision, they had a wide range of people there, because everyone sees things a little differently and those of us going to school to be designers/developers were in the minority. So, I wouldn't dismiss your feedback. When showing these games to people, you need to cast a wide net, so your input, while less of it, is probably just as valuable.

I appreciate the support, but it isn't even as complicated as thinking I don't have value. I just don't have much to say. I keep my feedback short and specific. Otherwise I basically stay out of it because I learn more that way, kind of how I am around here, actually. I might chime in when one of the other guys points out something that I noticed and didn't make a point out of, but that's it. I agree that casting a wide net is important, but a novice needs to avoid muddying the water. I make it my business to focus only on the basics: are the rules explained clearly, are the components usable, is it engaging, is it a fun game or just a cool idea. "I don't know what I'm talking about, but I like everything so it's a great game" is literally the most useless thing I could say. I always qualify a positive or a negative note with examples that are hopefully easy for him to remember.
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