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Star Trek

Any other books you hate, Kirth?

Anything by Ayn Rand. Chick had a chip on her shoulder, coupled with a seriously misplaced case of idol worship, and willfully refused to look at reality when it conflicted with her Nietzschean imaginings.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

—Kung Fu Monkey (blog), March 19, 2009.

Very cool! Can I ask where you had the table made? I've been looking into having something like that done myself.

Sure you can ask! The table and chairs were made by:

If there is anyone else that wants to know where I got anything in the photos let me know!

Dresden Files

Shadowrun

Call of Cthulhu

From my own campaign, some things that worked:

-- use traits to link the PCs to goals. For instance, one PC had a trait that linked him to a particular noble house. I kept that house a distant but real presence in the background, until they became involved in politics. Another PC got "bastard" as a trait, and so was the bastard son of the king's (female) cousin -- he's touchy and needs to prove himself to his royal relative, and wants to help the king in the civil war. Etc.

-- In the first 2-3 books, link the PCs actions to the greater kingdom. So, halfway through Book 1, the paladin got knighted and mentioned to the King. At the end of Book 1, the paladin got the title of "marcher baron" and two other PCs got knighted. Between 1 and 2, they got to attend some parties in the capital and be alternately congratulated and condescended to by members of the more established nobility. Throughout 2, settlers start showing up, and messengers from the King, and whatnot.

Then when the kingdom falls into chaos and civil war, there's a pleasant sense of being cut off and isolated. (Well, pleasant for the DM, anyway.)

-- Foreshadow, foreshadow, foreshadow. A little goes a long way -- don't have every encounter tie into something three books down the line -- but make sure you have the major BBEGs and plot twists at least hinted at well in advance.

-- Occasionally look back. Frex, in the first book there's a crazy old hermit who's a potion maker. In the books, he's never mentioned again (though you do meet his brother). I had him pop up a couple of times in later books, always in a wilderness area, and always grumbling about how it had "gotten too crowded" with "neighbors just half a mile away -- so close you can smell 'em!"

It's a great AP. Somewhat demanding for you, the DM, but there's plenty of payoff.

Doug M.

I chose to vote for Prop 8 in CA because there wasn't enough information (in my mind) to logically make the change that would allow gay marriage. My choice was not really affected by religion.

DISCLAIMER: I have one question, and it is an attempt to try and understand where you are coming from. Your stance is very contrary to my thoughts and opinions, so I am trying not to sound snarky, but I may not succeed. If I come off that way, I apologize.

In a democratic society based on civil rights, if you can admit that you don't have enough information to take a formal secular stance, isn't the de facto response to NOT deny someone rights and benefits? Isn't the burden of proof in the hands of those that wish to deny rights?

There is a latin phrase "res ipsa loquitur" which means literally "the thing speaks for itself".

The point is one cannot describe as "good faith" the conduct of a person who offered a pre-ordered product, take your money, and consistently fail to deliver the said product for several years now running, moreso, when you consider the lack of feedback from said person relative to demands for refund.

Would I call it "bad faith"? Sure I am.

There is another latin phrase I am reminded of. "Succurro EGO sum in incendia!" which means literally "Help! I am on fire!" I find it to be extremely useful in cases where you are in a latin-speaking country and are on fire.

Sounds like you had a bad experience with a DM. I think, at this point, it's important to remember the two things PLAYERS should never do:

1. Never forget that your DM is playing the game, too. S/he puts more effort into the story and campaign than any single player character, and as such deserves to have as much fun as the rest of the group.
2. Never play AGAINST your DM. Don't exploit a clever reading of a rule to make your character unbalancingly powerful, and never get angry when your DM tells you no for that very reason.

Champions/Hero/Justice Incorporated. I honestly don't even know what's system and what's RPG name anymore. It looks like the engine has been used both for similar-but-not-the-same RPGs, then codified. Then used for five (six?) editions of the codified version. And it's all fairly compatible, which I'm sure did not help my experience.

But in addition to a fair amount of online corporate hype (some, i confess, about being able to stop a bullet with their rulebook), one group of players just *gushed* at me about the game system. They were totally convinced, given my playstyle, that once I touched Champions I'd have a gamegasm and never use any other system again.

Creating a character took three days. I think those were four hour days, too, so it was a part-time job. I was promised it was worth it, because I could make my character be *exactly* what I wanted. I wanted to be precognative, and was told it didn't handle that well. Or being significantly weaker than an average person. Or being rich. or... sigh. Whatever.

I see why the people who love it love it. And I might have been able to. Until we had a fight. And it took 9 hours. To get through 14 second.

For. Teen. Seconds.

I rebooted the whole campaign with me as GM in Mutants and Masterminds. Worked much better.

So the rat bit through his thigh artery and he bled out in seconds. Stuff like that happen to everybody. It's called life. I will never make my characters immortal, simply because the risk of death is what makes combat fun. If you know that you will not die because you're a hero then what's the point of playing? have the GM tell you the story he has written and go home. It's the same.

I'm not interested in playing real life. The whole point of playing an RPG is because its NOT REAL LIFE.

I mean there is a reason I don't take running leaps off of bridges and land on the top of cars. I might fall off and be run over, and I can't afford the hospital bills.

I'm not really interested in playing RPGs where I can't run and jump off the roof a building and land on the back of a carriage because a bad die roll might kill me. I would rather play a game that rewards and encourages being heroic and having an awesome adventure than play a game that encourages staying home and being safe.

And what's this nonsense about "have the GM tell you the story he has written and go home?" That's actually MORE LIKELY to happen if character death is an ever present threat. If the story doesn't require my character to live to be resolved, then the story isn't about my character. It's about the DM's setting. It's the DM's story, and the individual characters are just place-holders, participants in the DM's story who are, ultimately, irrelevant to the story.

Star Wars isn't the story of the Rebel Alliance's defeat of the Empire, it's the story of Luke Skywalker discovering the truth of his own existence and confronting and redeeming his father. Star Wars doesn't work if you kill Luke Skywalker half-way through Empire Strikes Back and replace him with some other hero.

If the story can be continued and finished despite constant changes to the cast due to attrition, then the story isn't player driven. It's DM driven.

Actualy, i myself am a scientist, a chemist to be exact. Most of my players are scientists too. But they do not get worked up over a dead NPC shot in the eye. They do not look into every possible thing in order to understand something. It can be annoying at times.

When i describe a corpse with an arrow sticking out of his eye, they treat it as good fluff, not some obscure mechanic. That is why i hate metagaming. Metagamers in general have zero ability to actualy understand fluff.

Me too. I have a scientific degree and I'm a trained accountant. I work in financial regulation. You want pedantic, here it is. I appreciate that Kirth and his players want to regard the rules as the "physics" of the setting - in other words they describe the world and how things interact.

But for me, the rules are there to provide the players with a level playing field for the PCs so they don't get inadvertantly ripped off or fail to be appropriately challenged by their encounters. But they do not represent the be-all and end-all of possibilities - just what the PCs can expect can happen to them if someone decides to try to kill them.

I wouldn't see Kirth's approach as metagaming - it's just a decision based on gaming preferences. I do find it odd when someone might suggest that sticking a crossbow bolt manually into someone's eye is unlikely to kill them because, y'know, a crossbow bolt does only 1d8 damage and that guy is probably level 10, so... When in real life, it's pretty obvious what sticking a crossbow bolt in someone's eye is going to do.

But, as with all of these things, it's preferences. It is maybe worth restating (or maybe not) that I wouldn't do it to a PC. My problem with Kirth's approach is basically narrative - I don't want to get tid in knots trying to justify in rules terms what might be a cool scene that might have good plot ramification, or might simply make the players go "Ooo!" or "Aaaah!" or "Ouch - that's nasty!" But if your players push you in that direction, to some extent you will want to accommodate.