TTRPGs & D&D

I need to read the other two Locke books. The first one started out a bit too Dickensian for me but that vicious twist in the third act went dark fast.

I do like short series that share a world. Abercrombie is great for that sort of thing.


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I ran session zero for my Traveller game yesterday. Phew.

It's a five-player game. I'm pretty anal about sticking to four players because five gets cacophonous. To fit an episodic session in a 3.5-hour session, I have to seriously strip down the plot. I'd rather run for three people than five. This particular group is also a lot. One player was two hours late. I expected to fit character creation and a mini-adventure into a 4–5 hour session. Nope. Character creation took about six hours.

I think the late player has pretty debilitating ADHD. I had to hold his hand through every step, literally to the point where I had to explain how to roll ability scores (2D6 six times) and where to put the scores in his character sheet at least three times. This is not his first RPG.

Traveller character creation is a beast unto itself, too. Through a minigame, players simulate their lives up to adventuring. I honestly think it's most similar to the game of Life. Each four-year period in a player's life is broken down into a term. In a term, you can go to university, the military academy, or enter into a career. Each career has three different assignments players can choose between. The Agent career, for instance, allows players Law Enforcement, Intelligence, or Corporate. They have to make a roll to enter the career (if they fail they're drafted into the military or become a space drifter), a roll to see how well their term goes (success will give you an event, which may grant you an extra skill, while a failure will grant a mishap—usually an injury, enemy, or a disaster forcing you to leave the career), and a roll to see if they advance in their field. Advancing gets them more benefit rolls at the end of character creation, giving them more/better rewards.

In old-school Traveller, players would exit their career to become an adventurer in their 60s, 70s, or 80s. In the updated book, they incentivize you to leave your career around middle age. It's often joked about as a midlife crisis simulator. Despite spending six hours on character creation, I had a good time. The players get extremely fleshed-out backstories thanks to the character creation process, and as a huge boon to the DM, they even enter the game with a list of allies and rivals.

Despite it all, I'm excited to see how this goes.

(I can only imagine how I sound in this thread, basically just bitching and moaning about my players/DMs and venting my anxieties.)
 
Every week we have at least one one-liner for the ages during the Weds night D&D game I run, but tonight as the monk was nearly devoured by a purple worm, the player turning to his real-life wife, who is playing his in-game wife, and saying "wouldn't it be cool to play a widow?" might be the best throwaway line we've had in years of playing together.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
I ran session zero for my Traveller game yesterday. Phew.

It's a five-player game. I'm pretty anal about sticking to four players because five gets cacophonous. To fit an episodic session in a 3.5-hour session, I have to seriously strip down the plot. I'd rather run for three people than five. This particular group is also a lot. One player was two hours late. I expected to fit character creation and a mini-adventure into a 4–5 hour session. Nope. Character creation took about six hours.

I think the late player has pretty debilitating ADHD. I had to hold his hand through every step, literally to the point where I had to explain how to roll ability scores (2D6 six times) and where to put the scores in his character sheet at least three times. This is not his first RPG.

Traveller character creation is a beast unto itself, too. Through a minigame, players simulate their lives up to adventuring. I honestly think it's most similar to the game of Life. Each four-year period in a player's life is broken down into a term. In a term, you can go to university, the military academy, or enter into a career. Each career has three different assignments players can choose between. The Agent career, for instance, allows players Law Enforcement, Intelligence, or Corporate. They have to make a roll to enter the career (if they fail they're drafted into the military or become a space drifter), a roll to see how well their term goes (success will give you an event, which may grant you an extra skill, while a failure will grant a mishap—usually an injury, enemy, or a disaster forcing you to leave the career), and a roll to see if they advance in their field. Advancing gets them more benefit rolls at the end of character creation, giving them more/better rewards.

In old-school Traveller, players would exit their career to become an adventurer in their 60s, 70s, or 80s. In the updated book, they incentivize you to leave your career around middle age. It's often joked about as a midlife crisis simulator. Despite spending six hours on character creation, I had a good time. The players get extremely fleshed-out backstories thanks to the character creation process, and as a huge boon to the DM, they even enter the game with a list of allies and rivals.

Despite it all, I'm excited to see how this goes.

(I can only imagine how I sound in this thread, basically just bitching and moaning about my players/DMs and venting my anxieties.)
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Yeah, sometimes running can be rough. I've gotten super particular about who I play with, and how many folks just because I do not have a lot of energy to run stuff anymore and when I do I want it to be good. I've let in a sixth person (I usually run for 5) for an Alien RPG I'm running right now and I'm realizing, even though he's a good guy, that's probably a mistake. Thankfully this is cinematic mode (for those who might not know it has two modes, cinematic for short term horror movie play and campaign mode for longer stuff) and I doubt it'll go for more than 3-4 sessions. It was mainly for me to try out the system.

I've heard about Traveler's life path thing before and it always sounds interesting, but I think I'd only go through it with a group of folks I was dead certain would be on the ball about it. It'd just frustrate me otherwise.

I think the next two games I'd like to run are a game using the Masks: The New Generation rules to play an X-Men game (the players basically replacing Generation-X in the comic continuity). Then I think I want to do a short-ish (like 10-12 sessions) Vampire the Masquerade game. For that one the plan is to have the players be a group of newly sired vampires in a band who are touring before their first headlining gig. During the first session a Sabbat attack and massacre interrupt the first show they play, and every session after is them traveling from city to city doing gigs getting closer to their big headline debut, while the Camarilla, Sabbat, and Inquisition are all hot on their tails for being the only survivors of this horrible event.

Definitely the stuff I'm looking forward to now is all short to mid length games. I finished a nearly 6 yr long campaign a year ago and I don't want to do anything that long again for a while.
 
My first campaign was 17 sessions. Looks like my next fantasy game is going to clock in at about 20. I'm running the Traveller game in perpetuity, though we're only playing once a month.

If you guys are interested, I'd be willing to run Traveller for you once Doc's done. That game would not be played in perpetuity.

I'd also love to force Jake to run Masks for us. That would scratch the superhero RPG itch I have without making me wrangle my superhero-ambivalent players into a campaign.

VtM is another system I'd like to try. I don't think I have the players for it or a story kernel in mind, though.
 
I've been trying to get a professional Actual Play going of VtM for a few years - I live in Salem and I want to cast local performers for a Salem by Night show. The thing holding me back at the moment is I hate sound editing.

Cinematic ALIEN is such a great short run game. I'm curious how their 2.0 rules improve things (and if they put any meat on the campaign style game - Alien: Earth has my brain spinning a bit for longer stories there.)

It's funny, was just talking with my longest running group and we've been playing for about six years now, but we're on our fourth campaign together. I've never done a count on "episodes" but I know we just hit our 25th session for the 4th campaign. It's rare I run a game that doesn't last a while. Even when I was DMing that anthology actual-play, IIRC the "seasons" were 13-17 episodes. I kind of think if we'd done it as a long-form story the show would still be on the air.
 
I'd do a Traveller game. Still gotta force Doc to run Draw Steel as well.

All this talk of different systems got me thinking about one of my favorite games that is absolutely not good; Decipher's Lord of the Rings. I have no idea why I liked it so much because it's not great. Very simplistic, so it leaves a lot of things up for GM discretion, and it feels like the kind of game that makes a lot more sense if you already know RPGs pretty well, even though it is simpler than most of them. Which is a super weird place to be in.
But for some reason.. I just like it. I think it captured Middle-earth better than any other game I've seen.
 
Damien said:
I'd do a Traveller game. Still gotta force Doc to run Draw Steel as well.

All this talk of different systems got me thinking about one of my favorite games that is absolutely not good; Decipher's Lord of the Rings. I have no idea why I liked it so much because it's not great. Very simplistic, so it leaves a lot of things up for GM discretion, and it feels like the kind of game that makes a lot more sense if you already know RPGs pretty well, even though it is simpler than most of them. Which is a super weird place to be in.
But for some reason.. I just like it. I think it captured Middle-earth better than any other game I've seen.
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I've got a bunch of "how to run this thing" podcasts queued up for Draw Steel. I think I want to wait til I have the physical book in hand though so I can really dig into it instead of looking through PDFs.

On a less combat heavy game note, I keep staring borderline romantically at Vaesen.
 
Once we finish this 5e campaign, we're never going back to D&D, are we?

This'll just be the RPG test group.
 
JakeEkiss said:
Yeah, sometimes running can be rough. I've gotten super particular about who I play with, and how many folks just because I do not have a lot of energy to run stuff anymore and when I do I want it to be good. I've let in a sixth person (I usually run for 5) for an Alien RPG I'm running right now and I'm realizing, even though he's a good guy, that's probably a mistake. Thankfully this is cinematic mode (for those who might not know it has two modes, cinematic for short term horror movie play and campaign mode for longer stuff) and I doubt it'll go for more than 3-4 sessions. It was mainly for me to try out the system.
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How are you liking the Alien RPG? I really enjoy the Free League stuff I have (Tales from the Loop and Blade Runner).
 
TheSameIdiot said:
I ran session zero for my Traveller game yesterday. Phew.
...
Traveller character creation is a beast unto itself, too.
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I've never played Traveller before, but as soon as you mentioned its character creation, I was reminded of this.

I think my favorite character creation process in an RPG is from an indie RPG called Beyond the Wall, which is a low-magic YA fantasy setting with an OSR game system. The character creation assumes your party all grew up together, so part of it involves rolling from random memory charts, which detail formative experiences you had with other people in the group, and the relevant characters get stat bonuses for each one.
 
I have everything Beyond the Wall. I've never played it, but i find a lot of the world-building really smart.

I especially like how they turn setting creation itself into a shared game. It's basically the players will suggest some rumors or adventure sites they've heard of, and the DM will make appropriate skill checks to secretly determine how accurate they are.

I love sandbox games because of the player agency, but this was a new level of player involvement in saying up front the kinds of adventures they want.
 
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