I don’t wanna go back in the box!
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Due to the ever-accursed “having a job” issue, one of my players may need to drop out of my Big Undead Campaign, which I’m extremely mournful about. Hoping we can find a way to keep him in at least sporadically. Several players dropped out very early on, but we’ve been stable for a couple of years now. Also gosh I need to finish my campaigns faster.
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Full speed ahead with Champions this week, after last week’s character generation session. Players opted for a mix of methods, some preferring the more usual point-buy system and its complete freedom while most tried, at least to some degree, the Champions Character Creation Cards which give a range of pre-bundled choices but offer a greatly simplified method of totalling the points. Perhaps I should have insisted on everyone using exactly the same method, but after a number of tweaks I think we’re getting there.
Response to the first session was reassuring and everyone has been helpful and patient in trying out an unfamiliar and detailed set of rules. I’ve done more prep than usual (I’m typically a back-of-an-envelope GM) and deliberately chosen to run only as far as I have prepared for each week, which has helped to lesson the nerves and fear of being overwhelmed by getting the rules and the scenario right.
Good fun so far.
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Certain players shuffles being dim and overlooking the second PDF of cards was a contributing factor. It turns out you don’t HAVE to be a teleporting undead elementalist with a utility belt. I was puzzled by the extremely specific options they seemed to think covered basic superheroing…
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There’s a tendency when initially offering a game like Champions to allow players too wide a choice. After all, if I restrict what sort of things are on offer then I’m cheating the players of one of the key selling points of the game, aren’t I?
In reality it makes a lot more sense to keep the choices simple for a first run. Probably a lot easier to present that when we’re all sitting around a table and able to easily share books and discuss the restrictions and choices.
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Last week we finished Tomb of Annihilation which started in June last year. We played pretty much 2 times a week all that period, 2 hours at a time. All on roll 20.
It was great. A bit of work for the DM especially in the has crawl phase but some memorable locations throughout. Campaign could have been longer but they stumbled on a short cut which was probably for the best in the end.
Started now (at their choice) Curse of Strand and seen one pc death already. We are also up to 4 players with older boy rejoining us after not playing for a while. Unfortunately it was his character that bit the dust!
Different atmosphere in this adventure and I think likely to take less than the 9 months for the previous one!
On a side note, having finished Tomb one of my players (who worries about such things) googled ‘What they had missed’ and is worried about bits in the book they didn’t do. By the nature of a hex crawl (or indeed any printed adventure I suppose) you can indeed miss stuff. Though for this group they are methodical about dungeon clearance! It’s almost as if he feels he has missed out on stuff despite a triumphant result in the Tomb! Does anyone else get that FOMO?
I think I would have this feeling in a computer RPG. I poke into every nook and cranny in a video game. In a tabletop game, though, getting out alive would be good enough for me.
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I have taken a break from running my 5e Dolmenwood campaign number 1. Still running 5e Dolmenwood number 2. Now playing 5e Eberron, CoC Masks of Nyarlethotep, 5e Curse of Strahd and True20 Greyhawk.
A lot of d20 games for someone who didn’t use to like D&D.
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So the unprecedented happened this evening whilst we were playing D&D. One of my mates offered, completely out the blue, to DM the next campaign (which will still be a while off).
I have DM’d since 1983. I think I have been a player approximately 4 times in that period. My first ever game of D&D was one afternoon in 1983 (and gave me the bug); Once, later in the 80s - lasted about three sessions. Two sessions of the Aliens RPG from Leading Edge, and part of troupe play Ars Magica - where I did most of the lifting but others contributed short adventures - in the 90s.
I have run D&D (BECMI, AD&D 1 & 2, 3.0 and now 5), Traveller (in all forms!), WFRPG (All of empire in flames in the 80s and much more), Cyberpunk 1 and 2 (very freeform), Space 1889, Runequest, Ars Magica, Call of Cthulhu, Achtung Cthulhu - pretty constantly over that time.
I hope to goodness I am a good player!
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Just pretend you are playing an NPC. If you have GM’d that many games, you must be used to that and do well enough to keep your players coming back.
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Thanks! I may need to go beyond my stock (read - culturally insensitive) German and Somerset accents. Both used for Warhammer to great effect!
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I’ve been trying to give each province of the Empire a different accent. Nuln is Brummie for example
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Ask a German or a person from Somerset (they have no demonym but great cider) if they mind, neither are oppressed so it’s doubtful… but yes if it ever comes to your table… I did stop trying Welsh once I had players from an Indian/Pakistani/Bengali origin at my table since it was so dreadful and more Mumbai than Cardiff.
In fact… I have largely given up on accents.
The other night we played with a Swedish lad with a deep accent who then layered a rolling Scots (Glaswegian) accent over it for his dour dwarf, not quite replacing it. It was delightful!
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The Welsh/Indian subcontinent accent is a pitfall I’m familiar with.
Normally I have to focus the accent by saying, “Would you like some ice and lemon.”
For West county the phase is.
“Sorry about that, I was waylaid in the car park.”
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A couple of years ago, I found myself faced with portraying a historical person, whose autobiography I’d recently read. I could think of his words, but his accent was Canadian Welsh. I could get nowhere with the sound, and gave up before the start of the game session.
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I can do Welsh reasonably well (but then I am half-welsh) and tend to mix between a deep kind of Llanelli accent and a lighter Cardiff one. Can’t do North Wales tho
My accent repertoire is probably:
1: Posh “RAF” British
2: East End Gangster
3. Brummie
4. Glaswegian
5: Generic Irish and can sometimes pull off Northern Irish
6: Scouse
7: West Country
8: Yorkshire
9: German
10: French
11: Aussie (my sister in law’s Aussie accent for a barman in the deep North of Faerun was a quite a highlight of that campaign)
12: Deep South American
13: An almost certainly insulting Netherlands a la Goldmember (had an NPC Necromancer with this accent once - became the players’ firm favourite)
14: Italian
I hasten to add that most of these are dreadful but I enjoy it and the players seem to appreciate the effort. I try and mix it up by adding lisps and stutters etc to differentiate the NPCS
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I can attempt various accents and they’ll be of varying quality, but I can’t ever do any of them consistently. The only ones I can keep consistent are:
- Me but more posh
- Me but less posh (Bristolian/West Country)
- Korg
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In one of my current campaigns, Tapestry (an anthropological/historical fantasy set in a created world), which has been running since before we left San Diego in 2016, I just did something unusual: I ran a session that was largely combat! The protagonists are on their way to Montes Nubili, a troll realm that is the homeland of one of them, to try to sort things out with its ruler, the Winter Queen, whose ambitions are causing problems for other realms. This meant passing through Regio Pugnae, a land inhabited by elves and trolls who are perpetually at war. They’re travelling with a troll trade caravan (carrying its goods on tamed mammoths) organized by a troll hero named Wangchuk, who has recruited four allies to help guard them. Things have gotten hard in Regio Pugnae, and they were attacked by a raiding party of two dozen elves. Three of the protagonists joined in defending the caravan, along with a companion of one of them (the other two rode the lead mammoth, making minor contributions of various sorts).
About two-thirds of the session was one long series of designate attack, roll to hit, roll location, roll damage, roll to defend, take damage (not a lot of that)—but the players showed every sign of enjoying it. I haven’t run a session like that in that campaign in a long time, so I was pleased to see that I could still manage it!
Though perhaps the most spectacular moment was the attempt of one of the protagonists, Bengta, to intimidate her immediate foes into retreating when the fight started clearly going against them: she got +1 from her penetrating voice (a racial trait of selkies), another +1 from using Singing as a complementary skill, and another +1 because that specific form of intimidation was a good cultural fit to elven targets . . .
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Thinking back, I don’t know about this. I actually feel that Champions has an excellent combat system, but I don’t like its treatment of powers. Back when I ran my last Champions campaign, which was a pulp campaign of masked mystery men, I told the players that any powers not mediated by gadgets, and any characteristics over 20, would cost double. They didn’t seem to have much problem with that; they were quite ingenious about coming up with ways of rationalizing their special abilities within those strictures.
I’m getting out of my comfort zone (“investigative adventures in the real world plus minor weirdness, Victorian to near future”) and running a dungeon bash; first session last Wednesday.
Which means for me GURPS Dungeon Fantasy + Cold Shard Mountains as a setting, because I don’t want “town” to be completely abstracted. Party of four PCs + 1 ally. And a slightly perverse virtual tabletop: I wrote code to superimpose a grid (of arbitrary type and scale) onto a bitmap as SVG, and I load that into Inkscape then screen-share it into the videoconference. That lets me turn a published dungeon floor plan into a tactical map onto which I can easily add obscuring blocks (though of course I have to get a bit more cunning to hide secret doors).
And because I’m a sucker I’m being a real-time translation layer for a Pathfinder adventure into GURPS combat. Thanks to @Shimmin for advice on what sorts of capability PF expects PCs to have; I think the most crucial point is that D&D/PF is basically an attritional game, where most things will do you some hit points of damage and you trade off healing resources against that, while in GURPS it’s quite usual for an actual loss of hit points to mean you’re going to die. So when a Pathfinder trap says “4d6 poison damage, save for half” the GURPS interpretation might be more along the lines of “HT roll to resist, and if you don’t you’ll be at -3 to DX until it wears off”.
It doesn’t hurt that the Pathfinder Bestiary PDFs are built with software that gives you both a monster image and an opacity mask for it, which can easily be combined into a transparent PNG to use on the map. People really don’t realise how extractible a format PDFs are.
Seems to be going all right so far, after the introduction and one encounter.
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