I put all my "good with your hands" ranks into cooking. People forgive your googly-eye battery when you bring fancy pastries to gaming sessions (I'm making a Paris-Brest for next week, since, well, Christmas is coming up and I want to make one and I shouldn't eat it all myself.)
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"My character identifies as a dodecahedron."I was an AA battery for a whole campaign recently (Aether/Air Kineticist).
I... I'm not sure I could play at the same table with you.
We used to have a player in our group who was not very interested in minis, although he had a huge collection of plastic minis to use for NPCs and monsters. He just didn't care much about the mini for his PC. The rest of us are pretty heavily into collecting, painting, and modding minis. When this guy decided to use a really old, poorly painted Grenadier halfling mini that someone had left at his house for his PC, we couldn't bear it. One of my friends bought a nicely painted Reaper mini on eBay and presented it to him. The guy's response was pretty much, "Eh." He used it because it was a gift, but not because he liked it.
Spent literally hundreds of dollars on dice, thousands on books, never bought a miniature.
I've never purchased a single miniature. I have a box of 12 unpainted pewter ones from the 70s or early 80s a friend gave me, but they just sit on a shelf with some other things.
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I have a big weakness for adventure path pawns. :-)
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I'm too scared to try putting any of my figurines together. And I've got a bunch.
I had a ton of minis I bought in the 80s and 90s that I gave to one of my players that loves painting minis. The only deal is he has to paint for me for free (which he was doing anyway, so this was my way of paying him when he said he didn't want to take money).
I had painted a few back in the day, but just didn't have the drive to paint all of them. Gave him the GWS case I had them all stored in too. Probably about $750 worth in total. I think I've had him paint 6 Hero Forge for me. I might break even eventually, but he's really, really happy all the time.
I'm too scared to try putting any of my figurines together. And I've got a bunch.
It gets easier the more you do it. just got to get past the first few.
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Our group doesn't even use minis (even though one player has tons of them and paints them as a hobby); we just put a character's initial on a magnet for the whiteboard.
We have one game where we don't use minis, or even a whiteboard or initiative tracker. We just talk. I will admit there is a certain amount of freedom to not being tied to a grid map, but it drives me crazy. I bought those minis to use them!
We just don't have room to set up a battlemat or a whiteboard. I learned how to play using just theater of the mind and if a place holder was absolutely necessary an extra d20 was put on the table.
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We just don't have room to set up a battlemat or a whiteboard. I learned how to play using just theater of the mind and if a place holder was absolutely necessary an extra d20 was put on the table.That... that sounds suspiciously like 'imagination.' HERESY.
That was actually how I learned to play-- I never used minis up until my last gaming group got together about five years ago.
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Oh and then there's all the background detail that will never come out about the character's family, childhood, favourite food, embarrassing secrets etc that I end up knowing somehow....
A campaign journal is a good way to get this stuff out for other people to read.
You know, in case you want to feed this obsession. :)
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I will find any excuse to make a spreadsheet.
Need to track our loot? Why that's a spreadsheet. Need to figure out the sale values of those items? Well, let's add some automation to the spreadsheet. Automatically calculate magic item sale values and provide links to the item descriptions on one of the srd sites? Sure, let me just add that automation to the spreadsheet. Oh, you want this info on a wiki? No problem, I'll just add a column for wiki markup to the spreadsheet. It never ends and I like it that way.
I have spreadsheets to track XP, for managing leveling plans, to calculate values and times and DCs for magic item creation, to track our caravan in Jade Regent, to calculate weight from coins and treasure, to keep our game's timeline...
Someone needs to design a game where you spend all your time preparing for the game by creating and managing data in spreadsheets, and whether or not you ever actually play the game is irrelevant. (Actually, I think those games exist, and they are called "Pathfinder" and "D&D".)
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I hate keeping track of loot and silently hope and pray that one of the other players will pick up the slack.
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That was actually how I learned to play-- I never used minis up until my last gaming group got together about five years ago.We just don't have room to set up a battlemat or a whiteboard. I learned how to play using just theater of the mind and if a place holder was absolutely necessary an extra d20 was put on the table.That... that sounds suspiciously like 'imagination.' HERESY.
Even in OD&D we used them, but mostly for party order.
Until 3.0 we didnt use grids. One of the worst ideas to come about.
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I remember going through reams of graph paper making dungeons, but that's as close as we ever got to using grids back in the day.
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I remember going through reams of graph paper making dungeons, but that's as close as we ever got to using grids back in the day.
Yep. Used those black books full of graph papaer
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I remember going through reams of graph paper making dungeons, but that's as close as we ever got to using grids back in the day.I still have a graph paper notebook with like 20 dungeons I designed for a campaign I never ran :(
I've got a file drawer full.
Spent literally hundreds of dollars on dice, thousands on books, never bought a miniature.I've never purchased a single miniature. I have a box of 12 unpainted pewter ones from the 70s or early 80s a friend gave me, but they just sit on a shelf with some other things.
I was really into painting lead minis back in the '80s and early '90s. I still have all of 'em, plus a very large collection of unpainted minis from that era. I also still have all my old brushes and paints... the former have probably lost their bristles by now, and I'm sure that the latter have long since dried up. It's all in a box in my attic that I haven't opened in well over a decade.
I use pawns pretty much exclusively at my table... at least when I'm playing a game that requires them, such as PFRPG or D&D 5e. I tend to use a mix of Pathfinder Pawns, Pathfinder Paper Minis, and homemade paper minis.
Almost every RPG book or supplement I've used since the 90's have either been photocopies of friend's materials or SRDs.
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Just like no one is a good roleplayer, at first.
Speak for yourself. Why, I've been a master since the day I was born!
I remember it well, the warm, right crawlspace. The cold hands of the doctor. The harsh burning of my first gasp of air.
I looked back at my mother, still aglow even after the ravages of labor. I looked at my father, beaming down with pride.
And I told the nurse, "I'm sorry, there must have been a mistake. I was supposed to get off on the next floor."
...And I would have gotten away with it, too, if I'd had the cognitive function to wait until they had cut the cord!
Oh and then there's all the background detail that will never come out about the character's family, childhood, favourite food, embarrassing secrets etc that I end up knowing somehow....A campaign journal is a good way to get this stuff out for other people to read.
You know, in case you want to feed this obsession. :)
If I could write worth a damn, I'd do it. Almost all of my characters have backstories that never find a way to leave my head except in tiny chunks whenever it happens to become relevant (which is usually never).
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I will find any excuse to make a spreadsheet.
All my Pathfinder character sheets now are spreadsheets. Once you program in all the math, it becomes really easy to figure modifiers on the fly, you can just set the "Rage" field to "TRUE" and it will automatically tell you everything you need to know about your raging self.
For a game with this much math, it makes things so much easier.
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I will find any excuse to make a spreadsheet.All my Pathfinder character sheets now are spreadsheets. Once you program in all the math, it becomes really easy to figure modifiers on the fly, you can just set the "Rage" field to "TRUE" and it will automatically tell you everything you need to know about your raging self.
For a game with this much math, it makes things so much easier.
Of course there are those of us who find making spreadsheets the same as trying to translate the Linear A language of the Etruscans.
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Just like no one is a good roleplayer, at first.Speak for yourself. Why, I've been a master since the day I was born!
I remember it well, the warm, right crawlspace. The cold hands of the doctor. The harsh burning of my first gasp of air.
I looked back at my mother, still aglow even after the ravages of labor. I looked at my father, beaming down with pride.
And I told the nurse, "I'm sorry, there must have been a mistake. I was supposed to get off on the next floor."
...And I would have gotten away with it, too, if I'd had the cognitive function to wait until they had cut the cord!
Dang railroad plots... :)
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Of course there are those of us who find making spreadsheets the same as trying to translate the Linear A language of the Etruscans.
/pedant
Linear A is Minoan, not Etruscan./pedantoff
Yes, I am a bit of a history nerd.
1. I'm addicted to paizo's cardboard pawns, I started sorting them into different sized crafting material boxes, of which there just happened to be a brand that had variations with perfectly sized compartments for the small medium and large pawns. But every time I get a Bestiary n Pawn Box or [Insert AP here] Pawn Collection, i have to start moving all those pawns up in their boxes to make room for the new ones to go in the right category and Alphabetical order. I already have 6 boxes full of Medium and 2 each of Large and Small pawns, and I suspect there will be more. I definitely have a lot I will never use, yet there are still so many things I don't have a pawn for. If I knew a place that could print and cut them I'd probably design my own pop-out sheets (I do have the know-how), so I could fill all the gaps myself.
2. I reuse characters I came up with before and grew to like all the time, whether as a PC in a different campaign or even game system, or as NPCs. Sometimes they become deities in my homebrew settings, or I rebuild them in a Videogame RPG. I also have a small group of recurring NPCs that I put into every campaign I GM, no matter if those are happening in different settings or even game systems.
I have conversations with my characters in my head.
I even have conversations between different characters of mine who somehow met up in a bar somewhere to figure out their different take on things.
That sounds more like a good idea than an embarrassing confession to me.
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That sounds more like a good idea than an embarrassing confession to me.I have conversations with my characters in my head.
I even have conversations between different characters of mine who somehow met up in a bar somewhere to figure out their different take on things.
Oo yeah, I'll have to try that.
I have settings that have been going on for more tan 10 years. I try to make new stories fit into the World that we have been developing with former campaigns so everything is related at a point and old stories are often mentioned.
I'm so attached to this personalized settings that I sometimes lose interest in GMing a story if I cannot make it fit.
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Of course there are those of us who find making spreadsheets the same as trying to translate the Linear A language of the Etruscans./pedant
Linear A is Minoan, not Etruscan.
/pedantoffYes, I am a bit of a history nerd.
I am, too. I just got my civilizations crossed. Thanks for the correction!
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I have settings that have been going on for more tan 10 years. I try to make new stories fit into the World that we have been developing with former campaigns so everything is related at a point and old stories are often mentioned.
I'm so attached to this personalized settings that I sometimes lose interest in GMing a story if I cannot make it fit.
I have a similar outlook. My homebrew world started in 1991 and it's continued to be built upon during adventure after adventure. The current campaign is set in a different part of the world than where it's always been traditionally placed, but it's still the same world and the parts are all connected in some way or another.
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If I could write worth a damn, I'd do it. Almost all of my characters have backstories that never find a way to leave my head except in tiny chunks whenever it happens to become relevant (which is usually never).Oh and then there's all the background detail that will never come out about the character's family, childhood, favourite food, embarrassing secrets etc that I end up knowing somehow....A campaign journal is a good way to get this stuff out for other people to read.
You know, in case you want to feed this obsession. :)
Don't worry about the quality of your writing. Write. As with anything it is constant practice that brings improvement. Plus, some of the journals may have fans; but in truth they are for the player/GM to express those extra thoughts and ideas. So how well you write isn't half as important as writing.
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Of course there are those of us who find making spreadsheets the same as trying to translate the Linear A language of the Etruscans.
I just figure that if I ensure I can get all of my character's accurate statistics with a few keystrokes if they suddenly became gargantuan, that increases the odds of that actually happening some day.
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I once spent a good deal of two consecutive combat sessions complaining I couldn't seem to roll higher than a 12 on any attack roll before realizing I was in fact using a d12 instead of a d20. So I no longer take my pain meds during game sessions.
Ow. :-)
I own 48 plastic bead organizing containers (about 14x8x2) full of RPG minis. Each container is labelled with the dominant race(s) in the container. Most of them are more than one mini per section... (like, my dwarf one alone has about 40 dwarves in 16 sections...)
...And 14 photo storage boxes for bigger than Medium-sized minis, each labelled with their "theme" (giants, insectoid & desert, dragons, demons, elementals, etc...) All with a dozen or more Large, Huge & Gargantuan minis in it.
...I like minis...
But then again, I was a miniature pro-painter for over a dozen years.
Don't worry about the quality of your writing. Write. As with anything it is constant practice that brings improvement.If I could write worth a damn, I'd do it. Almost all of my characters have backstories that never find a way to leave my head except in tiny chunks whenever it happens to become relevant (which is usually never).
I second, third, and fourth this. My wife teaches writing at the middle school level. If you ask her she'll say that the best way to become a better writer is to 1) read other peoples' writing and identify what is good about it, then 2) write your own stuff based on what you learn by doing #1. It also helps to 3) have someone who is a good writer critique your writing, but in general, just writing and writing and reviewing what you wrote will make you a better writer over time.
Of course, we all have a finite amount of time to spend on getting better at the stuff that interests us. So I get it if the issue is also one of time/resources.
Of course, we all have a finite amount of time to spend on getting better at the stuff that interests us. So I get it if the issue is also one of time/resources.
Hit the nail on the head right there...
I have conversations with my characters in my head.
I even have conversations between different characters of mine who somehow met up in a bar somewhere to figure out their different take on things.
After playing Poker Night at the Inventory, I started thinking of a poker game between my characters from disparate settings, imagining their unique tells, their general behaviours, and their quirks as they claim the pot.
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Not the embarassing confession, but the setup for one: My GM not only thinks the alingment system works perfectly, but thinks it can easily be applied to real-life individuals, and has held discussions on what the alingments of various people are.
The embarassing part is that when I dismissed such a discussion as trying to apply a game construct to reality, and real life isn't so easily broken down into such neat piles, (And, indeed, there are issues doing so in the game) he made me feel foolish by asking why I think that, and wanting an explanation. "You can't just leave it at that. Why can't you apply alingment to real life?" Without preparation, I'm not a good debater, so I dropped the topic. And here I thought that even those that liked alingment would agree that the real world is not so black and white.
(And just in case anybody asks, my GM is an atheist.)
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I think the alignment system can be applied, to an extent. It just doesn't mean as much as some people think. For example: A huge quantity of beloved historical figures would be classified as "Evil", and that's okay. It doesn't mean we can't recognize the good they did.
I think a lot of people's holdups with alignment would go away if we changed the wording, to be honest.
I came to RPGs from the wargaming community back in the 70s, so I have always insisted on minis. I was born to the genre as a DM. The embarrassing confession is that I find I despise using grids for combat and usually convert all combat to the wargame style of measure and move. For example, if you can move 30 feet this round, that means you can move 6 inches in any direction on the table. This works easily for me and allows me to use wargame tables and terrain in RPGs without modifying it to have a grid.
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I once spent a good deal of two consecutive combat sessions complaining I couldn't seem to roll higher than a 12 on any attack roll before realizing I was in fact using a d12 instead of a d20. So I no longer take my pain meds during game sessions.
I had a DM do the exact same thing said man I haven't rolled above a 12 all night we looked. "Ah yes that would be because your rolling a D12"
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I once spent a good deal of two consecutive combat sessions complaining I couldn't seem to roll higher than a 12 on any attack roll before realizing I was in fact using a d12 instead of a d20. So I no longer take my pain meds during game sessions.I had a DM do the exact same thing said man I haven't rolled above a 12 all night we looked. "Ah yes that would be because your rolling a D12"
He didn't have the pain med excuse however!
I had one guy rolling a 20sider numbered 1-10 twice, old school, and didnt know it. ;-)
I was rolling a D3 (six sider 1,1,2,2,3,3) for damage a few times. In a bunch of other d6s for fireball. ooopps.
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Still not sure if it's 'embarrassing' but it's more serious than my last one and it relates to my experiences doing Play-by-Post here. I have a hard time relating when people tell me that they've legitimately cried over PC deaths (whether theirs or someone else's) or have gotten emotional writing a post or have actually experienced sleeplessness or other out-of-game distress relating to the game.
There's nothing wrong with not getting emotionally invested in your characters. Or maybe you just haven't found the right combination of character, game setting, GM, and fellow players to cause you to develop that kind of emotional attachment.
Years ago our group had a campaign in which the PCs were cohorts or family members of some higher-level NPC adventurers. When the NPCs suddenly went missing our PCs had to form a party to fulfill their mission and find out what had happened to them. My PC was married his related NPC. I started writing a campaign journal in the form of a diary he was keeping so he could tell his wife about what happened while they were apart. I became very emotionally invested in that character, how much he missed his wife (they were elves, so they'd been married for 70 years), how he refused to admit to himself that she might be dead. When they were finally reunited I felt intensely happy. It was that act of writing from his point of view that made me feel like he was a real person with whom I could have empathy.
As a GM, my goal is to try and gain that degree of emotional investment from my players. Which leads to confession #1: The moments I am most proud of is making my players cry (and no, not in the adversarial d*ck sense). Those times in games when I am going for a tragic moment in the story, and the players have bought into it to the degree that there are tears at the table? To me, those are a standing applause.
My second confession is that I have killed 2 PCs in over 17 years GMing. One was basically assisted suicide (long story involving gun powder and an evoker), while the other was by (secret) request from a player as they had a contingent teleport running to get their body back home, and felt it would help the drama and tension at the time.
#3 is that I despise dungeon crawls (with the sole exception of Warhammer Quest), both as a player and GM. I find them tedious in the extreme.
#4 is that I really, really, really do not like special snowflake races. Unless they are something that has some business being in that part of the world, I tend not to allow them in my games.
#5 I really dislike small sized races for (counts) about five different major reasons, and as a GM tend to ban them from most games. And make halflings medium sized (as tall as a dwarf, but much lighter) for Cheliax based games.
#6 Gimmick characters make me want to beat my head off a wall (see #4 as it is related). I often run games with a bit of length to them, and in most games at least one person comes to the table with a cool/funny gimmick in character form they insisted would still be fun to play after 20+ sessions.... and turned out not to be.
As a GM, my goal is to try and gain that degree of emotional investment from my players. Which leads to confession #1: The moments I am most proud of is making my players cry (and no, not in the adversarial d*ck sense). Those times in games when I am going for a tragic moment in the story, and the players have bought into it to the degree that there are tears at the table? To me, those are a standing applause.
I tend to get too emotional with characters. When I have a GM who allows me to do some character developement I get too attached to the point I almost think of them as they were real people. I even realize my mental proccess changes to fit my character, thinking things that I wouldn't think of and not thinking things that would be pretty obvious for me. It's scary.
2. I also hate killing characters. I hate doing random killings, even though I like it when it's dramatically appropriate and sometimes I have to do it when a player messes it up really bad. But a random death only adds a sense of defenselessness.
3. I used to hate dungeon crawls too, as a player and as a GM as I found them boring and long. Recently I'm learning to enjoy them by adding more planning and roleplaying to them but they are not my favorite thing anyway.
4. I try to avoid exotic races with zero justification for taking part in the story but I like them when they fit. I am playing RoW with a changeling and my bf is playing S&S with an undyne. I find them fitting and cool, but if you put one in the place of the other they are suddenly special snowflake races with no real reason for being in the story (of course it could be worked).
6. Gimmick characters might be fun for a session at best. They are frequently only fun for the player, while everybody else grows quickly tired of that character. In a story I was in there was a character who had a scar across his mouth in a Joker fashion. He kept repeating "I'm always smiling" all the time. We all ended wanting to punch him in the face until he no longer could smile xD
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I tend to get too emotional with characters. When I have a GM who allows me to do some character developement I get too attached to the point I almost think of them as they were real people. I even realize my mental proccess changes to fit my character, thinking things that I wouldn't think of and not thinking things that would be pretty obvious for me. It's scary.
As a GM, my goal is to try and gain that degree of emotional investment from my players. Which leads to confession #1: The moments I am most proud of is making my players cry (and no, not in the adversarial d*ck sense). Those times in games when I am going for a tragic moment in the story, and the players have bought into it to the degree that there are tears at the table? To me, those are a standing applause.
Some people have told me they've noticed my mannerisms changing for characters I've played to long. that is how you know I've invested into a character.
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I sometimes have to get off character to tell my fellow players and the GM that everything is OK , that I'm only playing my character and I'm not really sad/angry/etc.
Once I was in a game with a player who was kind of new to our group. His character accidentally mutilated my character's arm and she was very harsh to him from that point. When we were not playing I was kinda nice to him but most of our interaction was in character.
Now this player and I have become good friends and not a long time ago he confessed that because of my unnecesarily realistic portrayal of my character grudge over his he thought for a long time that I was genuinely mad at him for mutilating my character.
I felt a bit bad for him as it wasn't my intention and probably I made him feel unconfortable despite I found all the mutilation thing to be very interesting for my character's developement. I never thought of saying "hey, everything is OK" but it was a good lesson for me. Now I'm more aware and I try to make clear that no matter how real things may look, it's just my character, not me.
I had a ton of minis I bought in the 80s and 90s that I gave to one of my players that loves painting minis. The only deal is he has to paint for me for free (which he was doing anyway, so this was my way of paying him when he said he didn't want to take money).
I need one of those for my warhammer minis. Or two. Or Five.