Tabletop Game Thread

[Random Gal]

I've started a new Pathfinder campaign. Currently, we have five characters starting at fifth level. I'm playing an elven hunter (see here for details), and the other characters are a halfling rogue, human wizard, hobgoblin barbarian, and human warpriest.

We're apparently a team assigned to investigate what's on the other side of a system of mysterious portals recently discovered by the reigning empire in the campaign setting, a project from which only a handful of people have returned alive.

[SCarpelan]

We'll be starting a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire -campaign on Saturday. It will be interesting to see how the group dynamics develop with the different characters this time specially since we have a newbie player joining the group.

My character is a sentient OOM-model combat droid who went AWOL during the Clone Wars and has lived as an outlaw since then. His passion/obsession is efficiency and he sees it also important to encourage the same approach in others. He is trying to figure out what the function and the properly efficient use of different biological intelligences actually is and at the same time he is building and reshaping his world view according to his observations. Unfortunately, being a combat droid he has no people skills at all so things might get interesting with the other characters.

[Svata]

So I find a guy to play some MTG with. He implies we're just playing casual, so I bust out my silly Myr deck. (seriously, one shatterstorm someone sideboards in fucks the deck completely.) This cocksucker busts out goddamned 8-rack.

[Askold]

Does anyone know of a good program that would allow you to make edits onto a map online? On layers so that you can remove certain marks without wiping the entire map preferably.

We often use maps in a certain RPG and being able to mark our movement and such on the map would be really nice and although you can use a pencil and then erase the marks when you play live this is much harder for online games and editing a map and saving every individual version and then uploading them etc. etc. would get annoying soon.

I am aware that Roll 20 allows at least some of these things but we aren't using it for this particular game so if the program was independent from Roll20 and the likes it would be really bueno.

Also the ability to measure distances on the map would be cool and if there's a program that let's you put links onto an image that would be amazing... (Like the GM could write an article about a town or other important locations and when moving on the map we could just click that link to find the relevant article and see what notes we have about it.)

[ironbite]

It ain't perfect but Maptools is what my group uses and it's worked fine for us.

[Askold]

Nice program but the scale is too small. We can handle movement of individual characters inside a building or something, what we need is a way to play with regional maps and the way to measure distances on said map to count travel time. (It's enough if the program can measure cm/inches or something on the map, we can convert that to the real scale.)

[SCarpelan]

Fuck Bang! Tonight I played it for the third time and I can't help but think it probably is the most overrated game I have played. A chaotic, straightforward, light game with a strong take that -element is precisely the kind of game I usually like to play with my friends while downing a few beers and taking the piss out of each other. The thing is, according to my experiences the game's mechanics are utterly broken and maybe beyond repair. Let's review why.

My first game: I was a deputy so on my first turn I wielded the Vulcan, attached a scope and fired away at the player that was tactically in the most dangerous position for the Sheriff. He had a hand full of Miss! cards so my rapid fire attack did no damage. This turn was the only turn I have ever played where I was able to something this constructive - I actually caused an opposing player to use all of his Miss! cards. Unsurprisingly, after this show I was targeted by several other players who thought I was too dangerous to leave alive. On my next turn I had 1 HP left, drew only useless cards and the next player finished me. The game lasted for maybe 30-40 minutes after I was eliminated.

The next game my character had the same ability that Vulcan gives: I could use as many Bang! cards as I wanted. Since I was sitting next to the Sheriff he deemed me too dangerous for himself so he stole half of my cards and then locked me to jail causing me to lose my first turn. When I finally got to play a turn I again had only 1 HP left and no useful cards and was killed immediately afterwards. Again, I sat out while the game went on for half an hour.

Tonight, I asked to play the game again since I wanted to see if it could actually be fun and third time the charm etc. This time I was an outlaw but I was again jailed for my first turn. On my second turn I had only one wound but due to a bad draw (again) the only thing I could do was to heal myself back to full health. The game ended before my third turn when the other outlaws killed the sheriff since they had drawn ridiculously well.

So, I have played the game three times and the total time is around 80-90 minutes. During this time I have had one fucking turn where I have had a chance to actually influence the game. My friends tell me this game is a blast and the first two games where I mostly spectated it did look like it was really fun when it got rolling.

Yes, I'm aware I've had really bad luck. The problem with the mechanics isn't that luck plays a big role - that's a part of the fun in this kind of games. The problem is that bad luck prevents you from actually playing the game. That - is - not - fun. Despite that I see more add-ons and hype for Bang! than its much better - but still flawed - successor Samurai Sword.

/rant

[Svata]

So, just started a new campaign as a DM. The party thinks the villain is a hero for some reason...

[Askold]

I am currently playing a "Pirates of Drinax" campaign with the first edition Mongoose Traveller rules (I've talked about it in this thread occasionally) and we kinda maybe took the campaign slightly off the rails. One of the players decided early on that trying to rebuild Drinax with money from piracy or trying to make the other planets willingly ally with Drinax is simply not going to work. Instead we invested most of our filthy lucre into "Drinax Trading Company" which would be part of three different projects to MAKE DRINAX GREAT AGAIN!

Operation 1: Privateering. This would continue as usual and of course the pittance of money gained from it would be nice but the real benefit would be that it would give us a battle-trained fleet to serve as the core of the new Drinaxian fleet and the pirates could do some undercover work to gain allies to Drinax as well.

Operation 2: DTC. The company would aggressively expand to gain control of local markets and tie the neighbouring planets to Drinax financially. Let the planets have their independence for now as long as they are paying money to Drinax one way or another.

Operation 3: The Mob. A criminal organization spanning several planets would be formed to not only steal, smuggle and blackmail money for Drinax but to also influence the local governments from the shadows.


We were mainly playing as the pirates but every now and then there would be a board meeting and we would find out how much money DTC had earned for Drinax (and the characters who were board members.) Well... The second year of the company made 11 Billion credits for each of the four characters who were board members ...that's right: 11 BILLION CREDITS per person. I am even not going to mention how much king Oleb and the rest of the investors made in total. This is the point where the GM thanks everyone for completely breaking the campaign and asks if we could retire DTC and instead we would concentrate on the other aspects of the campaign. We agreed. (For comparison, the privateers have made perhaps a billion or a bit more during the same year by stealing ships.)

...King Oleb now has a nice fleet to defend Drinax star system, our characters built a massive ship building facility on the orbit of Tech world (which is one of our closest allies) and there is a new city being built on Asim where we are bringing in colonists. That last part is mainly because Drinax basically ran out of potential recruits and we need to hire crewmen for our ships and workers for our projects from somewhere.

So, how about you guys and gals? How badly have you broken Traveller campaigns in the past?

[SCarpelan]

So, we had our third session in the Star Wars -game I mentioned earlier. The GM uses a published adventure so I'll use the spoiler tags.

(click to show/hide)

The group ended up helping a small Twi'lek village in their home planet Ryloth. Mostly we did it to get in their good graces and take advantage of their Ryll mining operation - i.e. start a drug smuggling operation. A run-of-the-mill adventure became a laughter fest when we realized the boss of the human construction company terrorizing the village pretty much was Donald Trump. The GM hadn't realized it herself but when we pointed it out she took full advantage of it.

Most of the stuff was in the class of "you would have to have been there" but there are two things I have to say.

1. Shooting a helpless bad guy to the face has never been this satisfying before. Interrogation attempts directed at "Trump" failed but his last surviving minion (that he had just fired in a fit of rage) promised he'll tell us everything about the facade operation if we do him a favor and shoot his ex-boss.

2. My favourite thing about the character was that while it sounded like he would be a minor boss he was in the end just a thug in a badly fitting suit. Thug is a mechanical term in this case: it's just one step above a common minion and the encounter didn't qualify as an actual boss fight. I don't know if it was intentional commentary but it was glorious on the meta level.

[ironbite]

God I love Shadowrun.  Tonight I had my semi-weekly game session of Shadowrun and one of the other players had the perfect combat round.  Basically what happened is he rolled more then half of his dice pool as a success giving him a critical success.  The other guy rolled 1 of his dice as a success causing a critical glitch.  Now this means the player gets to describe where his shot landed.

Right in the balls with a stick and shock round.

Ironbite-and we got a job running for the Triads so all in all a win win.

[Askold]

Shadowrun is a interesting game and I certainly want to play it but so far I haven't had the chance.

[Tolpuddle Martyr]

Cyberpunk with orcs, yeah it's a lot of fun. Anyone who has read their supplements knows that they delve right into politics and social issues in really interesting ways-all while being more swashbuckling than a moshpit filled with pirates and ninjas.

It's almost as if the pouting puppies was formed on the basis of a false dichotomy.

And did the guy who off handedly quipped that he couldn't be bothered following the drama that closely just start quizzing Askold if he'd read all the works in question?

[Svata]

Wrong thread Tol

[Tolpuddle Martyr]

Wrong thread Tol

Apologies to all and sundry. Shadowrun is still awesome.