saundby's page

Welcome, Savannah!

Ah, Bend. Former home of the Micro Cornucopia SOG. Beautiful place!

I would expect them to dream of large sides of mutton. With chutney.

For my game, there are basically two reasons characters die:
1. The player made a series of bad or extremely risky choices and the dice didn't deliver the "one in a million" they needed to pull it off.

2. The situation looks really ugly and they choose to have their character make "the greatest sacrifice" for the sake of the rest of the party/the quest/etc.

For this reason I build my encounters with a lot of scalability and usually a deus ex machina built in. Because you just can't tell how things are going to go in planning it. A player may not show that you expected, the dice may choose to be less random than you'd hope, a player may not be on top of their characters' abilities (how dare they come to a game tired and foggy after a double shift!) Etc., etc.

I do try to get them all thinking really hard and pushing their characters while trying to rescue a situation. The risk of character death has to be there, in their minds, at least, even if you're not necessarily going that far.

Sometimes it happens (see 1. and 2. above.) But if it happens well, nobody starts thinking about what else they could be doing with their evenings. Instead, they're all talking about the character, how their absence will affect the story from an in-story perspective, how the character lived and died and how their characters are reacting to it.

My advice: play it as it's fun to play for you and your players. Don't let "what's right" get in the way. Figure out what gets everyone to the table and deliver that with lots of flavor.

I'm a GM

I'm a Klutz

I've managed to
spill blue soda all over the carpet
have the blue soda I touched and handed to someone else spill all over the carpet
trip and knock the game bits everywhere
slice my hand open on a plastic glass
spill (thankfully cold) coffee on the crotch of the person next to me
drop pizza onto the game

Should I hand in my gaming dice and my GM's screen?

Aside from your choice of drinks (Blue cream soda? Once was a favorite of mine, too) I recommend a change of table setup. We use TV trays or side tables stuck in next to the main gaming table when possible.

When space doesn't permit (like when we'd be knocking them over whenever someone gets up) we have a separate table as a goodie table. People often eat while standing away from the game table or in their chairs, pushed back from the game table a bit.

Food and drinks get handed around the game table, books and papers get handed over the table.

We have minimum of 1 spill per game. Question isn't whether it happens, but what happens when it does. Have something on hand to clean up whatever goodies are in play.

Everyone pitches in on cleanup after the game session. It's part of the wind-down routine, recounting daring deeds and in-game mishaps while emptying trash cans, vacuuming, putting up chairs, and otherwise turning the place back to normal.

Whatever the company makes, or makes things for that they are likely to work with regularly, assume that they've weaponized some of it and build encounters with both traps and constructs from those items.

If they're a monopoly, they'll have "friends" whose pockets they're lining. Perhaps the party can encounter a group of crooked politicians and their bodyguards on the premises. There should be some reasonably tough hombres among such a group.

And a lab with a secret, incredibly powerful, but temperamental weapon. Like I needed to tell you that. ;)

Using NPCs is good when information may be invalidated later--the info is just what the NPC understands to be the case. For general information about the setting or background, you can reveal it when you think they know it as "what your character knows is..." or "your character has heard..."

Basically, if you're not entirely sure whether something's going to come along and undermine their trust later, express it as "good enough to get on with" information. So long as you're not actively misleading, your players aren't likely to have a problem with that.

Even with proficiency with a sword, would there be a -4 on the attack for using a weapon that doesn't have a range given? Or does the ability eliminate that?

"This attack is treated as a ranged attack with a thrown weapon..." seems to imply that you'll get a -4 unless the weapon has a throwing range.

Also, what about two-handed weapons? Normally they require a full-round action to be thrown. Can a universalist take a feat for proficiency with a Lucerne Hammer and start tossing it around as a standard action? If so, that might make up for a missing spell slot at low levels! :D

Coffee is now under scrutiny for the amount of dihydrogen monoxide it contains. How will you ever get a caffeine buzz again?!

No worries. One of the largest government agencies in any area is one dedicated to extracting, purifying, and distributing this substance to its users. Once the government gets involved, you know it'll never be banned.

I happen to have my own personal mechanism for extracting it from the ground. If your supply gets cut off, I'll make you a deal. ;)