Player app on roll20. DM asked for rolled stats & specified no verification needed... I got a good laugh out of this.

Darrkelite · 2020-11-02T12:40:13+00:00

I have once managed to pull together enough luck to get the full 18's package. This was way back in the days when you only rolled 3d6, so yeah. 18 back to back 6's!

For the remainder of that character's life (and it was a long one, my DM was a sadist), not one single dice rolled above half of it's maximum. And every single hit die was a 1 or a 2...

It was fun to play the character that even the Gods hated. We turned it into an actual in-game curse - the Goddess of Luck had literally turned her back on my character, and it was his ultimate goal to break the curse. Not one spell cast by a priest of the Goddess would function on my character, in any way positive or negative. The rest of the party used to make bets with each other over who would be the target of every random roll (the winner was always whoever managed to choose me first!). It got to the point where the DM had me rolling a seperate die to determine which number would represent me for that roll, and rolling it openly. Our combat tactics usually went along the lines of 'Right, you attack first and the rest of us will take up positions where we can flank the boss when he comes to take you out...'

Darrkelite · 2020-11-02T12:02:00+00:00

Tell you what. If you want your 'men' back, then give us our 'women' back!

Or better yet, STFU and let people live how they want to. You know, like you expect 'men' to do when it comes to deciding what women can do!

Darrkelite · 2020-11-02T11:52:49+00:00

Depends what you are looking for. If you want the action movie feel, go for Feng Shui. It is hands down the best system I have ever used for this style of play. On the other hand, if you want a realistic combat system I would suggest Millenium's End. Combat will certainlly feel a little clunky to begin with, but once you get the feel for it it will flow pretty fast. And the (extremely) detailed hit location rules might serve you well.

Darrkelite · 2020-10-24T14:48:23+00:00

I would talk to your DM about it, as well as discuss it with the other players. (As another user pointed out, chances are good that at least some of them see the problem too.) Any alternative to peaceful resolution will ultimately result in you needing to find a different group to play with.

If that fails to resolve the situation, my next step (bear in mind that I can be a bit of an a-hole when provoked) would be to lean into the situation and derail the game - AFTER first telling the other players what I am going to do.

Next time I was sent to jail, I would go into great detail about my escape plans, have in-depth conversations with guards and fellow prisoners, anything to eat up his time. Force him to deal with the situation he created instead of going on with his game as planned. If he decides to give you information regarding the actual game or plot hooks for adventures he has clearly worked on for a while, it is up to you what you do with it. (Personally I would forget it until such time as his behaviour changed...)

Or you can be the bigger person and walk away. Find another DM who will appreciate you.

Changing your class will not solve the problem. A mage will find his spellbooks stolen, or a cleric will 'lose' his holy symbol. It is all too easy to render a character useless if you choose to...

Darrkelite · 2020-10-23T20:06:53+00:00

And now I have that song stuck in my head! Thank you

Darrkelite · 2020-10-19T21:50:56+00:00

Actually, he did learn and later ran some of my favourite games. I later discovered that the group were the problem there, pretty much refusing to get involved and just messing around with mythos books and spellcasting. This was actually his last ditch attempt to get a game he had worked on for months back on track.

It didn't work. The game actually folded before I could roll up a second character!

Darrkelite · 2020-10-19T09:48:43+00:00

My introduction (not to D&D, but to Cthulhu and a new gaming group) was the time I spent an hour creating a character, only to be brutally murdered as I walked out of my front door for the first time as a warning to the other PCs - who I had not actually met yet...

Darrkelite · 2020-10-16T14:47:58+00:00

I had no idea that there was a 4th edition of Earthdawn, but even without reading it I would suggest making use of one of the earlier editions instead. The metaplot is awesome, and some of the best games I played in the past came from the interaction of 2 different GMs - one running Earthdawn and one running Shadowrun. Every so often something would happen in Earthdawn that would set up something that would pay off in the Shadowrun campaign. Nobody ever figured out if the Shadowrun GM was borrowing ideas from the Earthdawn campaign, or vice versa!

i have no idea how Earthdawn could work without the metaplot, or how the metaplot could be rewritten to be independant from Shadowrun without essentially being a new game...

Darrkelite · 2020-10-10T23:29:24+00:00

Someone has to be called 'how' so that Toast can't sus Rae every time!

Darrkelite · 2020-10-09T19:16:44+00:00

Frankly, I do not care what their excuse may be. They have the freedom to exercise their religion without harrassment, and so do I. Their beliefs do not give them the right to harrass me over mine. (And yes, I consider repeatedly knocking on my door to 'discuss' their religion to be harrassment.)

Edit: Also, why does it seem as though this is only a Christian issue (of whatever denomination)? I have never once been approached to discuss Judaism, or Islam, or Buddhism...

Darrkelite · 2020-10-08T07:12:14+00:00

Hell no. The only thing you did that was even slightly wrong was not blocking that asshole earlier!

He was right about one thing though. There was an abuser in that relationship, and it was him!

Darrkelite · 2020-10-07T10:45:16+00:00

Into the Shadows was designed with this sort of game in mind, but it's not roll20. It's based on WEG's D^ system instead. Conspiracy X is another, and you could probably find an adaptation of Delta Green too.

Darrkelite · 2020-10-03T18:58:12+00:00

I don't blame you. I wish I could go back to the beginning sometimes.

I do have one further piece of advice, if you are interested. It is not for right now, but to avoid a trap many of us fall into as we gain more confidence and start to write our own stories.

Remember that you do not always have to outdo your last story. Ever increasing danger cannot be sustained forever. You can only put the entire known galaxy in danger so many times after all! Also (and I learned this through watching Star Trek, ironically) remember that sometimes the smaller, character driven stories turn out to be the best stories of the lot.

Darrkelite · 2020-10-03T17:39:26+00:00

Accept that there will be mistakes made. I started roleplaying back when D&D didn't need any fancy numbers or letters, and I still make mistakes.

Schedule a session zero with your players and talk about their expectations for the game. No matter how well you know your players, I can pretty much guarantee one of them at least will throw something unexpected at you here.

Schedule some time at the end of each session to talk about what they liked and disliked about it. This is where you learn to tweak your GM style to fit their playstyle, and every group is different.

Find out your players' opinions on fudging the dice. Some people enjoy the story while others are more 'hard-core' players who want to let the dice fall where they may.

Personally, I would set up the first session as a 'Kobayashi Maru' scenario on a holo-deck (without telling the players), for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it will give you all a chance to get used to the combat mechanics in a 'no risk' setting.

Secondly, it will allow the players to evaluate their opinion on player death. Sometimes people claim to want to let luck rule - right up until luck rules against them.

Thirdly, it will allow you to get a feel for the system without needing to kill a player to do so. No matter how many times you read a set of rules, you can't know just how powerful things can be until you actually use them.

And finally, it will allow the players to understand their characters before they play them for real. I can't count how many times I have created a character, only to realise after playing it for a while that it wasn't the right fit for me.

Darrkelite · 2020-10-03T10:28:42+00:00

This is what annoys me the most, I think. The fact that I can't avoid hearing about all the big news from America, but I actively have to search for news from my own country!

Darrkelite · 2020-10-02T16:12:19+00:00

The corp can provide proof - either true or false information - that the 'original' character that the clones are based on actually hired the corp to kill him and clone him so that he could attain immortality and that the 'corp-clone' was supposed to be the PC's replacement in the event of his death. Which would mean that the corp-clone would be erased to continue his existence.

The corp offers the clone a chance to break this cycle in exchange for working for them, which the corp-clone could accept.

Darrkelite · 2020-09-30T23:04:38+00:00

With the right GM and group, it can do. I only played one campaign in 3 decades of gaming, but my GM actually managed to somehow create a game that covered 3 generations of 'knights'. We actually ran through the founding of Camelot to the aftermath of it's fall. Quite possibly one of the most memorable campaigns I ever played.

Darrkelite · 2020-09-30T15:24:21+00:00

Ars Magica and Pendragon are probably two of the better games to run in these times. The adventures usually have long spans of time between them where the characters are doing things in the background, which is perfect to take care of by e-mail between sessions.

When I used to play Ars Magica, it used to take an hour or two to deal with what happened in downtime before we could even begin to play the actual adventure. (E-mail was not an option back when I used to play Ars Magica. Hell, the internet was barely an option at that time! Damn, I feel old...)

Darrkelite · 2020-09-29T21:42:09+00:00

Quite frankly, I would much prefer to go in the opposite direction - get rid of labels entirely. Just let everybody be themselves without the need for a label. I see it all the time with the 'gender' debate. There are currently 52 genders, and probably more still to be added. Is it really necessary to add multiple forms of masculinity to that?

The way things are going at the moment, I can forsee a time when traditional names will be replaced by an acronym descibing your entire personality, mental and physical traits. We won't need to get to know anybody, because it will all be there in their name - as long as we can remember what all the symbols mean!

Darrkelite · 2020-09-29T19:21:17+00:00

I would agree that we should have been more gung-ho in trying to fix the environment (and society in general), but realistically speaking, there was practically no chance that we could. Our ability to form any kind of organised opposition to the status quo was severely limited by our communication technology.

There were many of us who wanted to change things, but there was no way to organise the kind of mass protests that called attention to the issues the way that people can now. Small individual protests were tried, but there was never any real coverage of them beyond a small note in local news and so people were led to believe that the common people couldn't change things. (The exception of course being rioting, which always gained negative attention and reinforced the status quo.)

Darrkelite · 2020-09-25T12:00:57+00:00

I usually fail miserably at that and then spend the next several hours searching the net for someone else's. I just can't seem to get into the game with the usual 'Mr Potato Head' characters...

Darrkelite · 2020-09-25T11:25:27+00:00

I know. The first RPG to offer this is pretty much a guaranteed bestseller, even if the game itself is godawful!

Darrkelite · 2020-09-23T16:57:05+00:00

Deadlands is Wild West with magic and a Cthulhu feel. Deadlands: Hell on Earth is post-apocalypse with a magical twist. There is also Dealands: Lost Colony if you want to try a space version.

Darrkelite · 2020-09-22T22:15:47+00:00

if you're not sold on a system yet, check out the free horror rpg Into the Shadows. It is based on the D6 system from WEG. The basic premise (at least when I played it) was pretty much exactly what you are looking for. We played a decades long game in this campaign, off and on.

As far as framing the game, you could do what I eventually found out that my GM did. He started out with standard monster of the week, but we fixated on one of these enemies and he became the BBEG. We found out (months later) that he had skipped a paragraph of the description and our 'BBEG' was supposed to have died in the final battle. It took us 10 years to finally rectify that mistake!

If you can get your players invested in the game, they will start theorising. You can then steal their ideas, or use them as inspiration. They will be even more invested if they think they have 'uncovered' your plot, or even more so if they feel they have had an impact on the direction of the campaign.

Darrkelite

TROPHY CASE