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Games On Demand Online was fun! I only ended up running those two events: both were a ton of fun, and I think my players really liked them! The "My Life With Master" game I was supposed to play in on Sunday afternoon got cancelled at the last minute because he GM lost power.
I'm back up to three weekly games starting this week!
Tomorrow: I'm running the next session of Brindlewood Bay.
Wednesday: Playing PF2 "Age of Ashes". We will be starting Book 3, Tomorrow Must Burn.
Thursday: First session of a four-game Swords of the Serpentine series on The Gauntlet. I'm both excited and a little nervous: One of the leaders of the community signed up to play!
I cancelled Tyrant's Grasp this weekend. They had made it through everything I had prepared/converted last week and I didn't have time to get ahead of them again. Neck/shoulder issues have been acting up and work has been a zoo (more so than usual).
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Turns out, assaulting a wall with armed guards can go badly. We retreated and are considering new approaches.
"They're...fighting back? Can they do that?"
No game this weekend. GF was going to come down but some unexpected expenses hit her bank account pretty hard so it's going to be just another weekend with me and the dingoes.
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I'm stumbling through learning Roll20 as well. We'll be having our first session using it tomorrow.
Probably not gaming this weekend. Found out earlier this evening that my mom had surgery today, so I'm heading to the hospital tomorrow morning to assess.
Oh my! I hope she's ok. Please keep us in the loop.
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Yikes! Best of luck to your mom, Vanykrye!
My week looks to be gameful!
Tonight, in about two hours, I'm running the next session of Brindlewood Bay. (Episode: "Dad Overboard, Part 3")
Tomorrow, I'm playing in PF2 "Age of Ashes." I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to remain in this game: I'm not having all that great a time with it, and I'm seriously considering resigning. I'm not sure if it's the GM's pacing or that I'm becoming less patient with d20/OGL games in general as time goes on.
And Thursday, I'm running Session 2 of Swords of the Serpentine on The Gauntlet.
Oh... I'm still in the process of selling off more of my old PF1e stuff. It's all on eBay now.
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We concluded our first Brindlewood Bay mystery last night, and it just sang!. The "gather the suspects, walk them through what happened, accusation/confrontation/confession" scene played out beautifully, and we ended the session on a pitch-perfect note.
This game is freakin' amazing! It's absolutely my favorite new RPG of 2020.
Highly recommended!
Hi, all! What's going on this weekend? My dice remain dormant. My GF is coming down tonight to stay for the weekend and right now, at this very moment in time, I don't want to be around ANYONE. I'm in a very foul mood (thanks, anxiety issues).
Hope everyone has a great weekend!
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Gotta fix my fridge. Gotta do a tax thing. I'm still the primary form of socialization for my two small kids.
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Still at my mom's place. Giving her post-surgery home care. Hoping to be able to go back home in a week and a half.
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I've started yet another game design project while letting at least five earlier projects sit idle.
This is a full game: "Naked City Blues". It's a 1940s-era hard-boiled/noir detective game, Powered by the Apocalpyse.
The rules are based very heavily on Brindlewood Bay.
(Still idle are: Version 2.0 of Ultraviolet World, prepping my Trophy Dark incursion "Ritual of Water and Blood" for publication, prepping my Trophy Gold incursion "Harpy's Maw" for publication, my Star Trek framework for Fate Condensed, and my Starfinder setting notes for the game Impulse Drive.)
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I think we finally have most everything down in Roll20 that we need.
I need to do more setup with monsters than usual, but not too much. Will just need to budget time each Saturday before game for that.
Ebon's crazy busy with her school reopening, so I'm handling putting Tlanextli's sheet together for her, which I'll need to find time for that this week as well.
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I just did it: I resigned from the Pathfinder 2e game I've been playing in for about a year.
The other players have been a lot of fun to play with. But I have not been having fun in the game the past few months. To be honest, the most fun I've been having is when we've been freely roleplaying in-character with ourselves and NPCs. My enjoyment of the game plummets whenever we engage with game mechanics. Every time we engage the rules, I keep thinking how one of the other RPGs I play would do a better job with the situation.
And I am now completely frustrated with the "bad roll = lose your turn" mechanic that's baked in to d20/OGL games in general. (i.e. "I try to do X..." <rolls a 3> "...nope. Next character!")
I've come to the conclusion that Pathfinder/ Starfinder/ D&D just aren't for me anymore.
And this makes me sad: I've been playing Pathfinder since 2011, and D&D since 1981. But the core resolution mechanic is still stuck in 1974, and there are so many other, more innovative games out there that really resonate with me.
But at least I now have Wednesday nights free.
Still at my mom's place. Giving her post-surgery home care. Hoping to be able to go back home in a week and a half.
Is she recuperating pretty well?
And I am now completely frustrated with the "bad roll = lose your turn" mechanic that's baked in to d20/OGL games in general. (i.e. "I try to do X..." <rolls a 3> "...nope. Next character!")
That's pretty baked in to most games with dice rolls and goes back much further than D&D: Backgammon (3,000 BC), Pachisi (1000 BC), even that venerable preschool game, Candyland (1949)
At least in role playing games you can act out disappointment, and rage and fume about the fates in-character. Much better than watching a four-year-old have a meltdown and lose all emotional regulation.
Still at my mom's place. Giving her post-surgery home care. Hoping to be able to go back home in a week and a half.Is she recuperating pretty well?
Physically, mostly yes. One of the drugs causes drowsiness, and it is kicking her ass.
And I am now completely frustrated with the "bad roll = lose your turn" mechanic that's baked in to d20/OGL games in general. (i.e. "I try to do X..." <rolls a 3> "...nope. Next character!")That's pretty baked in to most games with dice rolls and goes back much further than D&D: Backgammon (3,000 BC), Pachisi (1000 BC), even that venerable preschool game, Candyland (1949)
At least in role playing games you can act out disappointment, and rage and fume about the fates in-character. Much better than watching a four-year-old have a meltdown and lose all emotional regulation.
A lot of newer games are moving away from that paradigm, so for Haladir I'd recommend looking into those.
The only one I've tried is Monster of the Week. If the player rolls a low roll, they still do whatever they were trying to do, but the success might only be partial, or there's an unintended consequence like an enemy getting to do a thing or the character taking an injury or some kind of penalty.
To use an example from the game I played, one of our group tried to drive a car down an alley to run over a monster. He fumbled the check he made to make the attack and driving check(s), so what the GM ruled was that while the car successfully went down the alley just fine, but the driver banged it up pretty good (since the alley was narrow and not made for car passage) and the monster got to jump out of the way before the car hit it due to being slowed by said wall-banging.
Physically, mostly yes. One of the drugs causes drowsiness, and it is kicking her ass.Still at my mom's place. Giving her post-surgery home care. Hoping to be able to go back home in a week and a half.Is she recuperating pretty well?
Some of my meds still make me drowsy after taking them for years. I hope she can shift away from those soon.
It's the anti-nausea medication doing it, so that won't be long term.
She's not on any pain killers at this point. The concern is the massive infection that was the cause of the surgery. She got bitten by a stray cat that made it into her house. I'm changing IV antibiotic bags for her, flushing the lines, adding anti-clotting meds, and doing all sorts of things around the house for her while she only has the use of one hand.
And of course working my job from her house at the same time.
It's not easy to balance work and care for a loved one, but it's worth it. It sounds like you're doing a really good job.
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And I am now completely frustrated with the "bad roll = lose your turn" mechanic that's baked in to d20/OGL games in general. (i.e. "I try to do X..." <rolls a 3> "...nope. Next character!")That's pretty baked in to most games with dice rolls and goes back much further than D&D: Backgammon (3,000 BC), Pachisi (1000 BC), even that venerable preschool game, Candyland (1949)A lot of newer games are moving away from that paradigm, so for Haladir I'd recommend looking into those.
The only one I've tried is Monster of the Week. If the player rolls a low roll, they still do whatever they were trying to do, but the success might only be partial, or there's an unintended consequence like an enemy getting to do a thing or the character taking an injury or some kind of penalty.
Oh, believe me—I have!
I started playing narrative-focused RPGs in 2015, starting with Dungeon World. In this game model, dice hit the table only when chance is a factor; usually the player and GM negotiate what good roll/so-so roll/bad roll means before the dice are thrown. Any die roll advances the action or storyline in some fashion—for good or ill. But even bad rolls advance the story, often allowing the player to dictate the results of the bad result or complication.
RPGs that have gotten away from the "bad roll = nothing happens" include...
* The entire "Powered by the Apocalypse" family of games (e.g. Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, Impulse Drive, Monsterhearts, Murderous Ghosts, Ross Rifles, Bluebeard's Bride, et. al.)
* The entire "Forged in the Dark" family of games (e.g. Blades in the Dark, Scum & Villainy, Band of Blades, Quitetus, Brinkwood, et. al.)
* The "Rooted in Trophy" family of games (e.g. Trophy Dark, Trophy Gold, Candlelight, Night Reign, In the Face of Our Despair, and others)
* Games based on the Fate ruleset (e.g. Fate Core, Fate Accelerated, Spirit of the Century, Fate of Cthulhu, Tachyon Squadron, #iHunt, Atomic Robo the RPG)
* And a whole lot of other indie games that don't fit neatly into a game family.
And then there are RPGs that don't use dice (or other randomizers) as a success resolution mechanic at all, like the "Belonging Outside Belonging" family of games (Dream Askew, Balikbayan, Wanderhome), or story-games such as Fall of Magic, For the Queen, The Quiet Year, and Lords of Gossamer and Shadow.
After playing D&D/Pathfinder, GURPS, HERO System, Call of Cthulhu and other games with a "pass/fail" resolution system for so long, it feels like the world had been in black-and-white, and now I'm seeing color everywhere.
And it's not like eschewing D&D/Pathfinder is limiting my RPG options. This realization has opened up a whole new dimension in how I approach RPGs.
(Oh, and I've been GMing a weekly Monster of the Week game since January...)
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As for what to do with my Wednesday nights...
I think I'm going to run an 8-week series over on The Gauntlet that I'm going to call "One Shot Wednesdays," where I run a one-shot game of a different RPG every week.
The October theme is going to be "Spooky". The games I'm going to run are:
* Trophy Dark
* Jinkies!
* Bluebeard's Bride
* Alien Dark
For November, I'm going to run sessions of games that had been part of the Itch.io "Bundle for Racial Justice" from back in July. I intend to run games that I hadn't heard of before that look like they'd be fun. (I haven't picked them out yet.)
I am admittedly a not-so-old curmudgeon when it comes to my games, I have all this 3e/PF material and I know the system backwards and forwards so that's what I use and run. Though I've been gently nudged into playing, not GMing, in 5e games over the past year. The MOTW game I was in was a one shot for a night when my 5e group was on a break due to some player absences.
I haven't even looked at PF2, except for the APs. I have no interest in learning the mechanics of another system. I'm willing to dabble in other games as a player, but I'm probably going to stick with PF1 as my game of choice when I'm running the table.
My me and most of my group decided PF1e will be the game we one day "retire" from gaming with. A couple of my guys are playing in other campaigns and use the PF2e and 5e rules. After really enjoying D&D3.5 and Pathfinder 1e we just decided that over the years, we've collectively spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours playing RPGs that we just don't feel like spending the money or the time to learn a new system. I guess that makes us PF1e grognards.
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Pretty much exactly where I am.
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I like playing Pathfinder Classic, Pathfinder 2, Starfinder, Rifts, Robotech, Macross, Nightbane, Dead Reign, and After The Bomb.
I also have Tales from the Loop and the Flood sequel but have yet to try them (they're quite a bit more rules light then I'm used to).
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I have the personality to go all-in on one particular rules system, but when I do that, I see places where it falls short, and that drives me to try out different systems. I'm playing in a PF2 game, but I don't have a handle on the rules, yet. I like the PbtA games; they can be very dynamic and lots of fun, but if the players and the GM aren't on the same page, things can bog down and sometimes get frustrating.
I am familiar with Monte Cook's Numenera game (using the Cypher rule system), and I would like to try it out.
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I haven't yet tried Tales From the Loop or its sequel Things From the Flood, but I have played Mutant Year Zero, which uses the same game engine. I'm not a big fan of the "Year Zero" engine: There's a stress mechanic that engages when you miss rolls that give you penalties to further rolls, and failing those causes further stress... which can put characters into a "death spiral" of failure that I find pretty frustrating as a player.
(I haven't yet tried it, but the Alien Role-Playing Game from the same publisher also uses a tweaked version of the YZ Engine. Friends who have played it report that it makes sense for the genre and totally works.)
I find that playing a diverse set of RPGs makes you a better GM in general: There are principles of gameplay from other RPGs that can inform and improve your GM abilities. On those rare occasions that I run D&D/Pathfinder now, I incorporate techniques I've learned from running games that use a different paradigm.
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I am playing a lot of diverse RPGs now, and I'm playing more than I have since I was in college. Right now, I have three scheduled weekly games through the end of November!
Here's what I've played in 2020 alone. (Yes, I keep a spreadsheet!)
Pathfinder 2e (d20/OGL) - 22 sessions ("Age of Ashes" campaign - 19; 2 PaizoCon one-shots)
Monster of the Week (PbtA) - 14 sessions ("The Invisible College" campaign)
D&D 5e (d20/OGL) - 8 sessions ("Mother of Crowns" adventure)
Trophy Dark ("Rooted in Trophy") - 6 session (1 3-sesion series; 3 convention one-shots)
Brindlewood Bay (PbtA) - 4 sessions (ongoing campaign)
Swords of the Serpentine (GUMSHOE) - 4 sessions (2 of ongoing 4-part series; 2 convention one-shots)
Fall of Magic (story-game) - 3 sessions (3 one-shots)
Escape From Dino Island (PbtA) - 2 sessions (2 convention one-shots)
Project Perseus ("Forged in the Dark") - 1 session (playtest with game author)
Night Witches (PbtA) - 1 session (wrap-up/retrospective of ongoing series started in 2019)
Lasers & Feelings - 1 session ("B-game" one-shot)
Honey Heist - 1 session ("B-game" one-shot)
Laser Metal (Tiny d6) - 1 session (PaizoCon one-shot)
Starfinder (d20/OGL) - 1 session (PaizoCon one-shot)
Star Trek Adventures (2d20 engine) - 1 session (aborted campaign)
Trophy Gold (RiT) - 1 session (convention one-shot)
Fiasco (story-game) - 1 session ("B-game" one-shot)
For the Queen (story-game) - 1 session ("B-game" one-shot)
The Secrets of Cats (Fate Core) - 1 session (one-shot)
Storm Riders (PbtA) - 1 session (one-shot)
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(Yes, I keep a spreadsheet!)
I like the PbtA games; they can be very dynamic and lots of fun, but if the players and the GM aren't on the same page, things can bog down and sometimes get frustrating.
It's really important to have a discussion about game principles during your Session Zero. One technique I really like is called "CATS": Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject Matter.
You can use this to present your game idea to your players to get buy-in and to make sure you're all on the same page.
Example: Running the incursion "The Flocculent Cathedral" for the RPG Trophy Dark...
Concept: Trophy Dark is a rules-light dark fantasy/horror game where the players should know at the start that their characters will likely not survive. This adventure is delving into an enchanted fetid swamp to recover rumored treasures of a lost temple to an unnamed saint. The PCs are not heroic.
Aim: The aim is to have a conversation between players and the GM to tell a dark tale of desperate treasure-hunters who, due to their own hubris, folly, or desperation, venture into a forbidding and accursed place that does not want them there... and their realization that they have made a terrible choice. This is a play-to-lose game where the fun is leaning into your character's ultimate fall and destruction.
Tone: This adventure will lean into themes of desperation, horror, hopelessness, and decay. It will be serious, with occasional darkly humorous flourishes to break the building tension.
Subject Matter: This game will include body horror, evidence of past treasure-hunters' grisly demise, insects and other creepy-crawlies, rot, snakes, and dark religious rites.
I like this set up before a game new game or campaign begins. I've done a similar thing for years but never really set it down in a coherent manner. I may just have to steal this!
I didn't invent the CATS Method.
I didn't invent the CATS Method.
Very cool. When you think about it, doing something like this is really just good planning for a new game. I remember so many GMs who would never have thought of doing something like this and some, who if they did know, would have refused to use the method at all.
I sent out an email to my crew today, telling them I honestly have no clue as to when our next game will be. We've had no luck with virtual games, having only managed to have one very glitchy session that no one felt really comfortable with. I've had to cancel several since then because of health or scheduling issues.
I've always run a Halloween game on the weekends as close to the holiday as I could, and this year it falls on a Saturday night, our game night. So in my email, I mentioned that if we don't manage to do anything else I am definitely going to run the annual Halloween adventure. So far three people have replied that either their office is having a Halloween get together (which one person said is the first time ever and of course they choose a year with a plague) and the other has a daughter (who plays with us) who might want to go trick or treating. She's kinda aging out of that, but she might want to go one last time, he said. So, even the Halloween game is up in the air now.
...sigh...
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I have come up with a plan for my Savage Tide campaign! Sort of, feedback welcome:
Heck, it might just be Dagon himself.
The party includes a star-pact Warlock/Dark Tapestry Oracle, so there's definitely some kinship to be had with tentacly primeval fiends.
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I'll be playing Ghost of Tsushima.
I told my players this week that I honestly don't have any idea when we'll be able to gather again. The remote gaming attempt didn't do well because of a lot of technical glitches. Plus it just didn't "feel right" for us.
I always run a Halloween themed game on the weekends closest to the holidays and I floated that idea and half of my crew have no idea if they can make it or not. ...sigh...
How about everyone else?
I'm on for three games this week!
Tomorrow, I'm running my regular group in the next mystery for our Brindlewood Bay campaign: "All Hallow's Scream". The PCs are invited to a Halloween costume party at the home of a rich local film director... who turns up dead at his own party (drowned in a tub being used to bob for apples.) It'll be a "bottle episode" in that nobody is allowed to leave the party until the police investigation is complete... and the PCs see that the local sheriff is bungling it.
Wednesday, I'm playing in a session of Bluebeard's Bride that's being run as a part of Magpie Games Curated Play Program. (There are still two seats open if anyone wants to sign up!)
Thursday, I am wrapping up a three-game series of Swords of the Serpentine. The characters are fantastic, and I am very much enjoying this game.
The Halloween Game sounds terrific!
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I'm heading back home today.
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I'm building a landing site for aliens.
Or a patio.
Depends on who you ask.
