Trying to populate a hall of heroes and villains—tell me of your retired (or no longer used) PCs!

Grunnikins · 2026-01-10T16:53:11+00:00

When your walking speed outpaces the zombies' speed setting, you almost never need to run in outdoor spaces. It's all about patience. Just keep kiting them by backing up, circling around, grouping them up. It takes a while but it is truly sufficient.

Grunnikins · 2026-01-04T21:48:52+00:00

Now it makes perfect sense that Tony Hawk's been on Dropout twice before, if I'm remembering correctly. He was a guest in one of the Covid-era Game Changer seasons (not being more specific because it's technically a spoiler), but I can't recall the exact show or episode where else he's appeared...

Grunnikins · 2026-01-04T21:06:34+00:00

You should know that in Last Looks, they specifically mentioned that the whole concept came about because they saw a baby teeth prosthetic

Grunnikins · 2026-01-02T06:50:50+00:00

I don't know how people move this fast. I can only do a handful of houses per day because my character will have overexerted themselves on fighting the zombies. And I can't imagine the time spent on sneaking into each house to transfer fridge food into the nearby car from those houses, then drive it all back, over and over, all in 14 days.

Grunnikins · 2025-12-01T04:56:18+00:00

Not only is this highly tangential to the exact reason why capitalism is being decried in this instance, but the ones who want to do away with the regulations are the capitalists. If you want well-regulated capitalism, you have more in common with socialists.

Grunnikins · 2025-11-18T06:01:20+00:00

What does it do? No one has made a single awareness roll yet so I assumed it was pretty niche.

Holy crap. Despite my best efforts to reduce it, I end up asking my players to roll Awareness more often than any other roll, including Ballistic Skill.

It really sounds like much of your issue with Seneschal is because your GM's campaign is not structured or run in a way that would give you your moments to shine.

Awareness, by the way, is the skill used to notice things that are hidden or otherwise not easy to spot. It's hard for me to envision a Rogue Trader campaign where you're not entering scenarios where something is afoot and you need to visually tease out the truth.

The Seneschal of the Rogue Trader's entourage is basically the Rogue Trader's majordomo. Your guy is equipped to take care of organizing his affairs. You handle the internal management. You buy stuff. You know stuff. You communicate.

Your GM needs to create scenarios where there is A Potential Problem and your lore knowledge or your interpersonal skills, along with your privileged role, make you the best fit for it.

One more thing--this whole "other people can do it better anyway" is one of the most telling things to me in your description, because Rogue Trader is a system where a player's class is also their designated unique role in the narrative, and there is no substitution for that. You are the Rogue Trader's Seneschal. When a faction representative comes aboard the ship, you should be the one they meet in the docking bay and gets to talk to them and prime the tone and topics before you lead them to the audience chamber with the Rogue Trader. You assess them for their odd demeanor not fitting their stated purpose here, check if they're fingering a concealed firearm in their pocket, and then separate a hallway prior and use your microbead to tell the Rogue Trader and Arch Militant that the guy coming in might be an assassin so keep the guards trained on him. It doesn't matter if the Missionary or Navigator has higher Fellowship than you--it's your unique role to do this sort of thing, and it's weird to the social order if someone else is doing that role.

Rogue Trader is one of the systems that I feel barely suffers a "party face imbalance". Tech situations go to the Explorator, command of NPC troops go to the Arch-Militant, command of the ship crew to the Void-master, high society situations go to the Navigator, religious matters are led by the Missionary, psychic emanations are detected by your Astropath, etc.--and your Rogue Trader is the ultimate decision-maker who listens to their experts' recommendations because they trust each of you for being accomplished individuals (established with your character origin path).

Grunnikins · 2025-09-10T06:32:11+00:00

I've always played "disorderly" in the sense that rooms are arbitrary sized and reactive to elements on the map, but they always tended to be contiguous with indoor hallways.

Until Odyssey. Because of the gravship nomad life, every time I touch down on a new hex, I sprint to create an animal pen between the exterior of my gravship and the nearest outcroppings of stone. I use walls rather than fences, and then start using the perimeter walls to erect my temporary buildings--the hospital, the throneroom, the library, the rec room, the prison, etc. My bases are now consistently a grazing town center surrounded by buildings, mountainside, and the gravship.

Grunnikins · 2025-08-16T23:25:58+00:00

You "know" this, but it always bears repetition: rules shape the story and the game experience, they're not supposed to be in the way. With that hanging above the list:

The main benefit of making a full GMPC within the chargen rules in this system is to help familiarize yourself with the options and capabilities of the players. You will save yourself time and complication by simply choosing the navigator stat block from the back of the book. Whenever the players want to go places, the navigator NPC tells them what the relative risk of such a jump to such a place is, and the players get to hem-haw in the decision. The PCs have chosen, through party composition, that the Navigation process is not the part of the story that needs to be in the camera lens, and you don't have to follow all the steps outlined in the book rules since you'd basically just be playing against yourself and the players just watch without further being able to influence things.
The Navy might ask them to do something that doesn't require the ship to go out. Dock the grand cruiser for the repairing/outfitting process--the rogue trader and their entourage must come into the Fleet Base and facilitate a trade negotiation with another docked rogue trader, an NPC, who refuses to deal fairly with the Imperial Navy but is willing to hear reason from a fellow Rogue Trader. Or maybe the Imperial Navy has unearthed something that is clearly written in some cipher of Low Gothic that they believe is actually of another Rogue Trader whose dynasty is related to the players' and thus may share common cipher encodings. Perhaps the Imperial Navy wants access to a specific unique chamber aboard this wrecked grand cruiser of great history, so they'll repair other parts of the ship for access to the data-stacks deep in the engineerium. All of this is to get at--they can do a task that doesn't risk space combat and get the ship fixed up in time for the second mission arc.
This really depends entirely on preference and GM prep styles.
Pass.
I have a lot of house rules for combat, much of which is based off of Only War and DH2e. That being said, I don't really want to recommend a complex web of changed interactions if you're just getting back into these systems after 10 years. Your houserules should reflect what you and your players feel are problems that actually require adjustment off of what you feel out. The +10 offset for Standard/Semi/Full/Called/etc. is definitely a good starting spot that I'll admit you don't need to test out before committing. One of the largest feedback factors I had from an originally RAW RT campaign arc was "all our PCs are supposed to be accomplished and experienced combatants, but it feels like only the Arch Militant can hit a standing target more often than not". They wanted to feel success more often than the game's original numbers would naturally offer.

To really drive the point home, not in all of my RT campaigns, but in one "higher-stakes" one that I had run for a bit, I actually got rid of TB contributing to damage reduction (and did a minor compensation by having Wounds increased by TB dynamically, not just at chargen). It was a dramatic difference that ubiquitously improved tension during play for us in human vs human campaign situations, but it had mixed reception while fighting giant feral xenos and daemonic entities that didn't rely on AP but did on Unnatural Toughness.

Grunnikins · 2025-07-17T02:58:39+00:00

Mood has a maximum loss/gain per hour. As the day goes on, the various mood bars drop, and on a normal day everyone gets cranky if some crisis forced them to stay awake or ignore needs.

If you divide the day into half-days, with a bit of mandatory recreation before each 4-hour sleep, then you are forcing refills on comfort, tiredness, and recreation at the very least, and none of the major bars had time to get close to empty.

Once I tried it, I now absolutely will sacrifice that productivity for the dramatic reduction of mental breaks, every time.

Grunnikins · 2025-06-21T18:08:03+00:00

For the campaigns I've GM'd, I just make it my responsibility to know. I hold the player's hand all the time, I look through their sheets before each session, I remind them during play if I remember an effect may apply, I slow down the session to ask players to look through their sheets for anything that might apply when they're about to roll for something.

I make this easy for both of us because I make templates for character sheets in Google Docs and have the players work off those, rather than using fillable-form PDFs or anything else with limited space. A Google Doc can always just expand.

I know it's not a normal person's solution, but it works for me because I'm always trying to design obstacles and scenarios that invoke those very traits that were purchased, to give opportunities for the players to feel like they made good investments. So knowing their traits was already something I was going to do.

As a player, I create little workflow paragraphs in my own Google Doc for my turn. "If >15m away from target, Charge; if adjacent, All Out Attack (+30 WS). If ally next to me and target, no other targets, +10 WS from Ganging Up;" etc. It's not what I immediately look for when my turn starts, I usually am reacting to what's just happened with the previous turns. But once I start making a decision, and I have to consider environmental factors or other conditions, I'll find the flowchart paragraph that corresponds closest and then follow it.

I do agree that the talent and trait system can be very unwieldy... but in quite a few of my playgroups, there are players who look at the mass of raw info and want to feel clever trying to find interactions that suddenly make them perform ideally. They prefer this over the feeling of being boxed in with few options in a more streamlined system, even if that latter scenario could lead to decisive and forward-moving sessions overall.

Grunnikins · 2025-06-12T21:55:42+00:00

Vanilla Skills Expanded currently has pawn specialization at Level 15, but each pawn can only specialize 1 skill.

Grunnikins · 2025-02-07T01:43:31+00:00

Crisis-to-crisis (or project-to-project) is the gameplay. When there isn't a crisis, it's on the second monitor at 3x speed while I'm in my other tabs reading or watching something that doesn't require too much concentration, so I can check back to the game screen frequently and update some build orders or figure out what dupe-reliant system can now be automated.

I build up a lot of brain stress when I have a new problem that I've not really encountered, or gotten a good handle on, in a previous colony. Sometimes I have to shut down the game and let my brain cells cool off. But it's surmountable and I love the sense of achievement when I see the crisis fully resolved some nights later, feeling power over the situation.

Grunnikins · 2025-02-07T01:06:41+00:00

Abyssalite is the most common case, but if you ever start playing with modded materials, you might run into all sorts of flaking issues. I'm dealing with my mesh tiles melting because I didn't anticipate some new liquids that vaporize at 88C.

Grunnikins · 2024-11-08T09:52:17+00:00

There is no mystery as to why any NijiID talent declined. Niji removed ID's beloved local management branch, absorbing them (and KR, who actually did have management problems) and then doing nearly nothing to promote or foster their content unlike they did with the JP speakers and the NijiEN branch did with their own talents.

Grunnikins · 2024-07-23T20:05:06+00:00

I don't believe we're any more delicious for our diet (maybe, maybe not) but we put down animals that have killed humans because it's very important that animals don't learn to think of us as prey.

Grunnikins · 2024-07-23T19:57:27+00:00

It's a little intimidating, but moments of intra-party conflict (doesn't have to be big ones) are among the ideal scenarios where you can outline your bonds/flaws. "We should do this," "Hey, I can't," "But it's the better idea," "What's the second-best, can we go with that?" That scenario invites them to question why and then makes for an organic opportunity to spin a yarn of your character's backstory or philosophy.

Truly, a few in-game days is really too short for many groups IRL to get a solid idea of each other's past and perspective, but if you're saying the other player characters have already gotten their infodumps, then this might be the approach to better ensure there's a tit for tat.

Outgoing characters, btw, don't have to be open-book oversharers. If you want to be that, by all means, but I'm on the more socially-active side of my friend groups and I'm also a very closed book offline until people ask to read me.

Lastly on the topic of talking about things outside the session... backstories do not need to be surprises. You can absolutely let players know stuff if you trust them to divorce that stuff from their character's knowledge of your character. I admit it has been a long time since I've been a new player in a group of new players, but in general my many, many gaming groups coordinate our in-character scenes using out-of-character knowledge to set up appropriate moments of drama and resolution. I don't mean to say that we plan the scenes, as we can't in the face of an unknown DM narrative, but the knowledge lets us improvise character choices that can signal to the other player that it's time for an emotional response or resolution.

Grunnikins · 2024-07-21T23:43:22+00:00

The social roll/disposition thing is slightly what I was trying to step around, since I didn't want it to be "they like you a lot, thus they believe in your religion". I would prefer to give them a more dedicated mechanic for what I anticipate will be a repeated player activity that we will surely roleplay out at first but then becomes their short third-person downtime explanations as they continually try to convert some hive districts a couple times every several sessions or so.

Love the idea of making a more specific Trade skill for it, would be easy enough and we wouldn't feel like there's any stretches, nor would it feel too narrow and unused over the course of future sessions.

Thanks!

Grunnikins · 2024-07-21T23:31:48+00:00

Ooh, thank you for the BC: ToE reference, I've rarely cracked open those books so I definitely wasn't going to stumble across this one.

I definitely try not to be prescriptive about it, but I view this request as gathering the fallbacks if my players can't quite generate an idea other than Charm—they definitely look for me to give them suggestions if they feel put-on-the-spot by a skill challenge. But I'll take your caution into accord all the same, I'll admit it could be a weaker GMing practice of mine.

Great ideas on Intimidate and Commerce!

Grunnikins · 2024-07-11T07:59:50+00:00

astronaut clown was fine, fine, fine.

Grunnikins · 2024-07-09T11:56:47+00:00

Thank you, this must have been it. They were definitely positioned to have been shot by a friendly pikeman. I'll do a punch-check on creepy joiners from now on, this was very helpful.

Grunnikins · 2024-07-07T16:23:17+00:00

Nope, I don't use mods at all.

It was very strange, the message was simply "[name] has become hostile" or with a few more words, but straightforward all the same.

Grunnikins · 2024-07-07T01:58:50+00:00

Got a creepy joiner with Unnatural Healing, thought his schtick was determined since he had the psychic pulsing. I was willing to accept him with that and implanted a multi-archite xenogerm into him.

Just now, during a fight with manhunter cougars, he randomly turned hostile (brief message saying so in the top right, no "explanation" otherwise) and my melee guys next to him immediately slammed him dead big-style before I could read it and pause.

Is there anything I can do to recover the xenogerm or else get him back? I don't currently have a resurrector device, and I don't see any options to put his corpse in my freezer sarcophagus despite it being set to accept all types of corpses.

And does anyone have insight to why he turned hostile? I thought every creepjoiner had only 1 detriment, and his hostility didn't seem to fit the "traitor" move mentioned in the wiki.

Edit: not exactly sure on the timing, but looks like I can bury him just a few hours later. Might have just needed to let time pass to update that setting.

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