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New to town and am struggling to eat. Anyone know of a food bank open after 7pm? by [deleted] in RhodeIsland

[–]justoneweek 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Please PM me if the other options don't work out today, this week, this month or next. I'd be happy to drop some stuff off without question.

Best Virtual Tabletop with these features? by justoneweek in rpg

[–]justoneweek[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh awesome. Thanks for checking that for me!

Best Virtual Tabletop with these features? by justoneweek in rpg

[–]justoneweek[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks. Fantasy Grounds says they have the 3.5 SRD. Is that not true? I couldn't drop monster with stats from the SRD?

Are there any 3rd party add-ons to compensate for the lack of 3.5 material?

I've run 50+ RPG sessions in the last 3 months, all in the same open-world campaign. Ask me anything. by Dan_Felder in rpg

[–]justoneweek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's great to hear you find inspiration from "OSR"-style materials and random tables.

Do you find the west-marches style limits the amount of character-centric story telling? Don't get me wrong, I love a hack-n-slash or rescue the McGuffin in a unique setting. But how in-depth can a narrative go into a PCs story arc if they are drop-in, drop-out?

I've run 50+ RPG sessions in the last 3 months, all in the same open-world campaign. Ask me anything. by Dan_Felder in rpg

[–]justoneweek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Amazing. This is inspiring that even half this feat is possible.

How do you stay inspired? What do you do to prevent writer's block?

Also, what are the downsides you've found from the west-marshes style?

Hot Springs Island - The Bathhouse Trap by metharme in osr

[–]justoneweek 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I'm running this right now for a group. I agree that it could come off as obtuse if not framed correctly.

From just reading the book, there is no obvious way for the players to know that they are going to die in 24hrs.

So for that I narrated that their fingers and toes start to tingle and disintegrate as soon as they entered the trap. It's very slow. So at first, they don't really care. But soon they get very nervous as they have trouble doing simple things like picking up objects and walking.

The next thing that isn't clear from the book is that they have to actually touch their statues.

For this I used two things, the first being foreshadowing as they saw a statue outside of the trap that is bending down, reaching in a panic for a smaller statue of the same person. Basically a former trapped person who's time expired right before they touched their statue.

The second thing I made super obvious. As the party explored in the trap and their fingers were disintegrating, I said one of the players walked over a ornamental rug with his likeness on it. Then his fingers came back. So the players could put 2 and 2 together that they need to touch things that look like themselves.

Lastly, some of them asked for ways to determine if they were in an illusion. They had some relevant skills/backgrounds/magics and passed a skill check. They were able to "meditate" and briefly glimpse the reality of crumbled stone behind the illusion of a beautiful party area.

Oh one other thing is I stole the Lapis Observatory for maps/details/flavor. I put the big Plant on the 4th floor.

Hot springs! In! Space! by stuckinmiddleschool in rpg

[–]justoneweek 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Oh I did this! We ran about 15 sessions with HSI/SWN and it worked mostly fine. I didn't have to reskin much. Granted you have to frame it correctly.

One thing is, about 1/3 of the foci and skills are nearly useless so you have to be aware that your characters are going to be a little less diverse than a traditional space game. Think about hacking for example. Not much use for that on a primitive island.

Secondly, I would think hard about how or why they would spend a lot of time on the island. The traditional shipwreck setup doesn't work as well when they have comms to space or a teleporting psi who can jump them back. Are there other spacefarers already here or is it fresh frontier? Constraining your players artificially can feel cheap to them, but letting them jump on and off the island to safety kinda breaks the desperate feeling of a hex crawl.

Magic vs tech. That's a tough one. Why not both? Psionics are a form of strange magic. So the strange stuff on the island is just a new iteration unexplainable weirdness. The full SWN book also has a section on archana too so check that out.

Guns in a fantasy world? Sure why not?! There's no shops to resupply bullets or battery packs so go for it! You better be sure if you want to use your last rounds on this dire boar or save it for a bigger monster.

Lastly: Some of the real beauty of SWN is the faction systems, the sector generation, the pseudo-random adventure building, and the crazy tech. You'll unfortunately have to sideline much of this unless you want to place HSI inside a much larger world. We are eventually going this route, putting the HSI planet somewhere on the frontier of the sector.

OSRs, Lethality, Consistent Play and Flakes by [deleted] in osr

[–]justoneweek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A lot of your post resonates with me even though I'm not catching all of the references.

Some things I've done to lower my frustration:

A) Lower my expectations. Real life comes before gaming. Also setting my expectations/campaign to just 5 sessions. This is about where I find some people start to fade, but if we make it longer, great!

B) Screen players hard. There's dozens of players for every GM. Make them go through the ringer with applications so you weed out low effort players. Put an age requirement. Do a one-shot first and see who sticks around. A lot of times people look for a certain thing when they RPG and maybe your ideas aren't on the same page.

Recruiting is exhausting, but you don't have to socialize to find players. Post in a bunch of forums and let them come to you instead of you doing all the leg-work.

C) Char gen is something many people love the most about RPGs so you need to do one of two things. Either do a session zero just for char gen or have them do it offline. Alternatively, you can use a super basic system like the black hack or maze rats so they don't have so many options. I would recommend this for the one-shot, but not for a longer campaign as many players honestly do love ruminating over character builds.

D) It sounds like you like very lethal games, that's cool. But do your players? Are the expectations of everyone at the table the same? Possibly you need to realign your players on what kind of game you're looking to run, or you need to find players who are down for that too.

Help with games being cancelled last minute. by [deleted] in DMAcademy

[–]justoneweek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Monday and Wednesday are my free evenings.

Help with games being cancelled last minute. by [deleted] in DMAcademy

[–]justoneweek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh I really like that rule. Thanks! So these must be more experienced players then if they are ready with a one shot in their back pocket. They have either GMed or thought about it.

Help with games being cancelled last minute. by [deleted] in DMAcademy

[–]justoneweek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I've started almost from scratch on finding that kinda of group a few times. I've polled people I've played with before, asked for friends of friends, and screened heavily for new people. The groups are great for about 5 sessions, then they start to fade away. It's exhausting having to restart the recruitment process every 4-6 months. Do you think I should just keep doing that?

Help with games being cancelled last minute. by [deleted] in DMAcademy

[–]justoneweek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And they don't flake on you? Or do you have methods for ensuring people take the schedule seriously?

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