That way they knew the villain and had a personal loathing for him, but for combat they mostly faced his more level-appropriate lieutenants.

(Including one lieutentant who was the villain's old friend and had died years ago. The villain kidnapped innocent men and gave them his friend's mind and face. The party faced and defeated Felix7, Felix8, and Felix10.)

(And anyone who's read The Eyre Affair knows exactly where I got that idea.)

@BESW nice

though, sadly, it reminds me of the time a GM thought it would be great if we fought all of our favorite old characters ...

:o)

@C.Ross Aw.

@Phil H...h... trying to resist the urge...

I'd probably laugh if I wasn't feeling so ill :o(

@waxeagle Soaking in Simple Green and then applying a Magic Eraser gets the dice surprisingly close to clean, but now they stink of Simple Green.

some air should hopefully cure that? if not, baking soda is good for taking out odors

And I just realised that the "cost-benefit" answer to that question assumed I'd had to go out and buy basic cleaning and medical supplies specifically to try them on my dice.

@BESW right, most households have that stuff around already

Heck, I made sure I had this stuff, or something very similar, in my college dorm.

yeah. We don't use SG in the house, but I bought some not long ago because it's apparently good at taking paint off of minis, sooner or later I'm going to strip my one mini and paint it again for practice...I expect I'll probably need the SG a good bit when the mini flood arrives this fall

SG can actually be diluted up to 1:30 depending on its application; the stuff is seriously powerful.

Hi @Zachiel, guess I missed the conversation earlier .. too many tabs open, lol

@Rafe [wave] What's up?

@BESW Just sitting around trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing tonight

With a little luck, you're supposed to be sitting and thinking.

[checks ticky box on list]

You guys ever have a PC who is just starting but desperately wants a baby dragon in her backstory as her animal companion?

You guys ever have a PC who is just starting but desperately wants a baby dragon in her backstory as her animal companion?

Something similar.

@Rafe I once used a pseudodragon for that.

I'd kick her to the curb normally but trouble is she's my daughter!

@Rafe 4e theme: fey beast tamer refluffed to dragon mistress. no problemo

Using pathfinder, but yeah, that's kind of what I did

And of course there are a lot of systems where that's no problem at all, either because the system is self-balancing or doesn't care about that kind of balance.

What systems are those @BESW? Seriously interested

Which, the self-balancing or the unconcerned-about-that-kind-of-balance?

The only way such things worked well with games I've played in the past is where the GM was REALLY flexible, so much so that most of the tmie if you could come up with a story that was interesting and logical enough they'd let you have practically anything.

The last game I played with that GM I ended up becoming the Lord of Orthanc and commander of the goblin hordes below it. Wild game.

While the D&D community and the community of games built on it, like most of the d20 System games, consider balance to be paramount, a great deal of the RPG experience outside the D&D bubble just doesn't care.

This question is posed by someone coming from a balance-first system trying to wrap his head around a balance-meh system.

Interesting post.

I'm not officially looking for a solution to anything though, just remembering old times and applying it to current days.

For a totally different way of looking at balance, try a system like Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

In that system, characters do two things: they help people, and they get in trouble.

(I'll second that recommendation, played with my group the other week and it's quite fun)

Your only major stats are two short phrases describing how you do each of those things.

lol, sounds like fun

So if having a baby dragon gets you in trouble or lets you help people, that's all that's important about it mechanically.

Come to think of it, that's how most of my Mage games turned out.

If it doesn't do either of those things, your baby dragon is mechanically unimportant but it's still totally cool to have.

So that system automatically balances anything you have or can do because it always fits into the "help people/get in trouble" framework.

There's nothing about a baby dragon that is mechanically better than, say, being able to sing nicely or having an imaginary friend living in your thumb.

Good point

D&D and its ilk belong to a subset of RPGs with the general philosophy that you should figure out what stats a thing has independent of its impact on the storytelling. This is intended to create "realism" and be "impartial" (your mileage may vary), but it also imposes stringent limits on what you can do without disrupting the "balance."

And it also leads to questions like this one.

I like how Pathfinder actually states in the GM manual that the characters can try to do anything. I try to impress that on my players. And usually even if it's outside the 'rules' I'll figure a way to make things happen for them. My main concern is personal, I am trying to impose a ruleset that I can lean on.

(In that question, someone is combining the "impartial realism" ethos with a "fiction first" ethos, which is fine--unless you care about balance.)

IE, he finds a scenario in which something is reasonable, then creates impartial rules for the thing, then discovers that the result-for-effort of the impartial rules are out of balance with the scenario.

And this is what happens when a player accustomed to the above melding of fiction-first with impartial realism joins a game that always assumes fiction rises from rulings, rather than fiction informing rules.

"he finds a scenario in which something is reasonable, then creates impartial rules for the thing, then discovers that the result-for-effort of the impartial rules are out of balance with the scenario." - Such a short sentence, yet so many gems

This has been your whistle-stop tour of the contact zone between mechanics-first and fiction-first environments, in which I exerted a great deal of self-control in not mentioning the Fate engine.

Fate? As in the Computer RPG?

Or is there another Fate of which I'm not aware?

No, the system-agnostic tabletop RPG published by Evil Hat which uses fudge dice.

Fate Core (free pdf download above, online system reference document here) is the most recent version of the engine, and the first truly system-agnostic one; previously it was used for settings like the Dresden Files and Spirit of the Century.

It's my RPG darling these days, because it's a crunch-variable fiction-first engine I can use with any number of players and any setting, with relatively quick and simple setting and character creation.

Is that site slow or is it my Internet tonight?

It's been described as "narrative gaming for recovering D&D gamers."

The SRD? Sometimes it's kinda sluggish.

For a quick discussion of its mechanics, try this:

@BESW do you mean system-agnostic or setting-agnostic?

@JonathanHobbs Derp, setting.

Although, sometimes...

Philosophy question: is there a system-agnostic RPG system?

Free-form, obv.

But yes: RPG Calvinball.

The only rule is that you can't use the same rule twice.

@BESW ... [applies star sticker]

@JonathanHobbs Many people's version of what a "good GM" does is basically make the rules system-agnostic.

Very true.

[cough, hack] There is such a thing as too much cinnamon in one's chocolate milk, and it is surprisingly easy to accomplish.

I've also toyed with the idea of having a game where every "level" uses a different system.

Probably a universe-hopping campaign using the same characters across the whole story.

A kitchen-sink fantasy universe that uses D&D 3.5, a gritty zombie-apocalypse universe that uses All Flesh Must Be Eaten, and so forth.

When your character enters a new universe, you build his stats in that universe's system.

@BESW gotta be careful with that cinnamon

I've recently discovered that a lot of cinnamon sold in stores is not actually "true" cinnamon.

It's cinnamon cassia, whereas the "true" cinnamon is cinnamon verum, also known as cinnamon zeylanicum.

the properties and flavouring for both are different, but cassia is far easier to obtain.

Apparently the only way you can be sure is if the ingredients specifically say "cinnamon verum"?

@BESW sounds nice! and the interesting thing might be your characters drifting from their original state as each new universe shapes them. Drift from D&D to AFMBE to Fate to [a bunch of other systems] to Dungeon World to D&D again and discover that in your conversion from DW to D&D you just created a whole different character to the original D&D one.

Yup!

It's definitely a "mature gaming group" concept, though.

Naturally!

("Mature" in the "we have experience with a lot of systems and the switching won't take too much time from the game" sense.)

Hah! I finally found the right font for the secondary text on this poster.

Hooray! \o/

Turns out [face/palm] the primary text font has a serif relative.

@BESW This site came up earlier here as a way to find fonts.

but the css for the site is broken for me at the moment for some reason...

Yeeeah, last I looked at it, TypeKit was more for online than print.

@BESW Okeydokey.

In related news I am very glad this question came out:

Only days ago one of my friends suggested I take up an episodic structure for Fate, since our attendance is so variable and unreliable.

Something like what someone here described doing: have a base, go out, do a mission, come home.

I'll work out how it might work and come to them with some proposals. My current thinking is something Dark Souls inspired: a place where the worlds converge and time is less meaningful, and they set out to do certain things through the worlds. All of them have a mark they can use to return home if they need to bail out.

I also suggest a stable of PCs.

Each player can have as many PCs at the hub as he wants, and picks which one goes on any given mission.

That helps keep things interesting and makes changing team compositions part of normal play, rather than something which only happens because someone can't make it.

@BESW Sure!!

That sounds good :)

And I guess they can work out for themselves whether they want to share their PCs.

Annoying analogy time (not mine): D&D3.x is like Windows and D&D4 is like OS X. Because OS X is more polished and stable but it's easier to write programs for Windows and it's more customizable. Except... those statements are not particularly true?

Mostly it's a great illustration of edition thinking by accident, though:

What does it mean to lump all the "Windows" together?

Also, "more customizable" is heavily based on "habitual users of product 1 expect to manipulate A, B, and C, and have no concept of X, Y, and Z."

@AlexP ...yeah. From GMing point of view, 4e gave me freedom to create monsters as I saw fit. I saved so much time, and achieved much better results than with 3.5. From player point of view, 3.5 nominally allows for more character concepts... eventually. Don't expect your knife thrower to be of any use until at least level 6 (personal experience). At which point they'll be sub-par. There's also more fiddly bits that can be misconstrued as concept-enabling.

Whereas by reflavoring 4e classes and powers, a lot of mechanically distinct and functional characters can be made.

A lot of 4e complaints strike me as a bit akin to someone saying "With Windows 98, I could hot-patch explorer.exe to make my start menu less ugly! How come you can't do that on OS X?"

Like, category errors.

@Magician I loathe D20's not-actually-customization customization. You can make 1000000000000 different characters who all do the same thing.

@AlexP ...ineptly.

@Magician Not if you do your research and make a 20-level build to make sure you combine all your classes and abilities just so.

@AlexP By level 20, yes :D

I've played too many character in too many 3.5 games, that had a concept and a dream build and a promise of being awesome one day. All of the 4e characters I've GMed for were awesome and did what their players wanted them to do from the start

(This is where someone is likely to tell me that you could just as easily make a 10-level build, and that I just don't get that optimization is the ability to waste hours poring over slapdash game books in order to accomplish any goal I could conceive of, not just making a character-building mini-game.)

Top Tip: If you fill out any ballot you care about, make sure your handwriting is neat and clear, and not a scrawl.

Also, don't put a phone number in the email field and leave the phone field empty.

If you're going to stick a custom label on the ballot, ensure that it has all the required information, or else fill out the ballot with any requested information the label doesn't catch.

You can't be an entrant if your form's unreadable, folks.

@Magician This, in a nutshell, is why I loved 4e--and why switching to 4e from 3.5 made it take two more years for me to figure out that I D&D just wasn't right for me. It slowed the burnout.

The latest from Tales of SF&F: "I need help finding a book, ive had head trama and i cant remember"

Morning.

Yo.

I've just learned something wonderful about a friend's experiences in D&D.

You might have heard about the section of the Pathfinder manuals that presents, as an example of a moral dilemma, the question of what the players would do if they were to run across goblin babies who, despite being goblins which are evil, might not be evil. Except that this game's own rules state that, yes, they are, and evil is objective, therefore they are evil and you should probably kill them.

I just described this to a friend of mine who had once come across this exact situation.

And then the lawful evil warlock in the party used a chain ray attack to kill all of them at once.

Incidentally, the warlock in question would also regularly use the very same chain ray attack on his own allies to get a better shot at an opponent.

She does not recall whether they actually got around to killing him, or whether the campaign just ended before they could.

@JonathanHobbs That's horrible.

@InbarRose Well, he was evil.

(and surprisingly long-lived, considering)

Anyhow, I think I've found two things I hate in 4e as a player. First, there are some concepts I need to avoid for the sake of balance, e.g. necromancer style minion commander; Second, I don't care if I'm competent from level one when no matter my level mechanichs doesn't allow me to gain a consistent To Hit advantage on monsters later on. (I like melee, I imagine it's even worse for caster wizards.)

All this while being true 3.5 is a big mass of "RAW, you can do that, but I as a DM won't let you ruin my game"-frustration, which turns into a "I could do a great character in any game where RAW works fine but I could do an uber character in 3.5e so why am I not playing 3.5e?"-frustration

That might also be why I'd like to face premade adventures. I just want to prove I'm better than those monsters, not going against anti-me NPCs.

[/moment-of-insight]

That is indeed a problem with role playing games....

interference from players.

XD

I mean, you could just write a novel, but where's the satisfaction? You're basically pre-shaping your world to let your character win, lose or whatever you want him to do...

It all depends on where you get your enjoyment from?

The world-building? The character building? Meeting the challenges?

Dealing with unexpected and mysterious situation?

I guess showing off how good my build is is a huge point, but maybe it gets old fast

I don't particularly like the huge effort of character creation, but I don't like people more talented than me to solve encounters alone because their character is better

You haven't said anything about story.

It seems you just like to beat the challenge in the best way possible.

I don't know how much role-playing you can actually do that way.

Image is unrelated:

haha, religion names :)

@Metool You also play Civ5 ?

Nah, just reading a Let's Play. And I thought it was a World Congress.

What the hell is with all the strange phrases put in there?

I don't know how you do it or when it was introduced, but apparently you can rename the World Congress.

@Zachiel Actually, 4e has about a 1-point-per-tier drop-off on attacks for some caster classes, which is "fixed" with a feat tax. Aside from that, caster/melee to-hit discrepancies don't really exist.

They all use the same mechanics, but physical-attack classes tend to get weapon proficiency bonuses which are offset by the fact that the defenses they target are usually slightly higher than the defenses casters usually target.

But yes, there is no real escalation of relative numbers between PCs and NPCs, except in hit points and damage (NPCs deal punier amounts of damage relative to the PCs' health totals as levels advance). Instead there's escalation of the kinds of the riders attached to the numbers.

You don't hit more often at higher levels, but your attacks do more awesome stuff.

@Metool Why does that man appear to be an Incan Lord Farquaad?

Good question!

I was expecting a bit more... rpg.stackexchange.com/a/36054/3387

;)

I'm not even going to get into the bizarrely dimwitted research which led to Inti being a smiley face, or the freaking halberd Lord Farquaad is holding.

@BESW Okay, starting to see it.

@BESW heh

Have any of you guys played with only one player before?

@Murch [raises hand] That's my status quo for about a year now.

Prior to that I did single-player side sessions as needed on a semi-regular basis.

@BESW Well, then I guess I want to pick your brain about it.

But I'm using my brain! Here, try this one.

@BESW lawl

Um.

Any non-obvious differences to playing with 3+ players?

Well, a lot depends on system. Tell me about that while I go dig up some links on twosies.

I mean, it is fairly obvious that you can take more time exploring the strengths of the player's char.

We are going to play Shadowrun4, definitely a non-magic character, probably not a hacker.

Probably more of a gadgeteer

Do you know the player well, have you played together before?

We have been gaming together for almost a decade. :)

That's probably good.

Okay, I have two things people have said in chat before, and a blog link.

So, my player is a frequent gm. He has a good sense of creating his own purposes and makes deep characters with their own motivations

Why Two-Player?

Marvelous. :D

I don't know much about SR; if it doesn't provide mechanics for players to participate in creating setting elements, you may want to make an effort in that direction. You don't need rules to support it if you can work together well, but rules don't hurt.

By the way, I have found that the last point in that blog post --"It's okay to be uncomfortable"-- is not okay for my particular player.

I was quoted, yay! :)

I have been playing a very fun twosie with a friend of mine where we switch off the role of Gm and player between each story.

@BESW I usually tend to go with anything my players suggest that makes sense to me, i.e. "I grab a chair from in a bar". We have also been playing player empowered settings for most of that time and I think that this will not be an issue.

Cool.

@InbarRose Oh very nice, I'd also be interested in any more tips you have.

I've also found that we don't have a lot of momentum.

I think that one can probably explore plothooks such as friends and connectios of the character much deeper.

One thing I like about roleplaying games in general - which also connects with a twosie is the following: All the players are participating in the same story, the GM is in control of most of the content, but some (or one) of the characters. The characters are controlled by players who are also telling the same story. So where does the conflict come in? Well - it is sometimes each person wants to go in a different direction - which can be fun. But even if everyone wants the same direction -

When you've got a half-dozen people in a game, and one person isn't totally feeling it, that's okay, there are others to pick up the slack and keep it moving.

@BESW Yeah, that is something that I am worried about.

But when one person not really feeling it is half the group...

In my group, when one player gets stuck or trails off, another usually picks up or changes the direction.

The dice roll - the random chance of failure vs success drives the story, and the reaction of the world and character to those successes and failures is grand. In a two-player game, this can be wonderful, since it's so intimate.

My solution is thus: use a setting-agnostic system that's quick for building settings and characters, and never plan for a game to last more than two sessions.

@BESW [cough] Fate [cough]

Yes, at the moment.

This keeps things light and quick, so we can keep interest up by hitting an idea hard and then moving on.

Also, we often just watch Netflix.

@BESW ?

We meet every Saturday, but RPGs are just one thing we might choose to do.

@BESW Yeah, I was considering that, but I really want to play Shadowrun. I also have about 40 characters ready to go already, so I think it'll be fine. ;)

@BESW Oh, nice.

We marathoned the Blade TV shows for a month or so.

@Murch Ask yourself - why do you want to play Shadowrun?

The mechanics or the story?

In a two player game - you will be dealing with mechanics - stopping the game to reference things in the books, and often times you will hear yourself say things like "never mind just roll X instead" or whatever, because the mechanics or rules don't make perfect sense to the narrative.

@InbarRose I like the setting and it satisfies a certain butt-kicking urge that we sometimes feel. ;)

But really, it's down to clear and open communication between the two of you. Never assume you just understand what the other wants because you've been playing together for ten years.

@Murch So play the same world as Shadowrun but use Fate. (or something else)

@InbarRose Oh, that is not the problem, I know most of the rules by heart. :)

Because in a two player game you don't want to get stuck on rules or mechanics.

@InbarRose mh. Okay

A two player game is a lot more of a story

Yeah. Find mechanics that let you dialogue.

Since there is no time pressure on characters.

In multiple player games, there is a problem where you can't indulge one player too much - since the others are just sitting there... but in two players - you can spend as much time as you want with a single player.

So, my group usually already rolls pretty little, but you guys would suggest that I should pretty much forego it altogether?

It changes a lot.

Personally I am against games that are bogged down in mechanics.

Although Lady Blackbird is a bit stringent and some find it sterile, the concept behind the mechanics is sound: the GM asks the player hard questions about what happens, and the player answers them.

@InbarRose Yeah, that rings true easily.

@BESW Yeah, I've played and enjoyed that.

That level of collaboration and dialogue is much easier and potentially more powerful in twosies.

In a two player game - the mechanics - rolling for success or failure in the game - becomes interesting either way. But there is no "ultimate failure" because that would be the end of the game.

That was not very clear...

Okay, let me sum up my thoughts on that: We have been playing very rule-light systems for the better portion of a decade, with an occasional SR or Vampire sprinkled in. I am very knowledgeable about the rules in Shadowrun, and while the rules are somewhat extensive, I think it will be easy for me to make quick rulings without looking anything up.

Imagine if you are inventing a story on the spot - and you are sitting with a friend, and you are starting with something like "this dude jumps at teh dragon and hits it with his spear" and then your friend might say "well - why not stab him from behind?" so you change your story "so the dude stabs teh dragon from behind" - in a twosie, the player and the GM are telling a story together, and any conflict is resolved mechanically in dice - to interest if fail or succeed. And the choices are made

By the player for the character - and by the GM for the rest of the world.

We have tried playing futuristic systems with rule-light systems before and found that it is hard for us to make our usual rules fit the world, as skills scale so differently for augmented humans.

That's another mechanical bog-down.

@InbarRose Yeah, I am aware of that? o.0

Oh, another thing you can do with a twosie group: jump systems!

mechanics getting in the way of playing the game.

@BESW yes!

Try Pilgrims of the Flying Temple one week, then give Fate a shot with Aeon Wave, then play Great Ork Gods.

@Murch Notice in this example I said nothing of mechanics.

Round out your month with a tragically silly GMless game of Roll for Shoes.

Mh. I get the feeling that we are kinda talking past eachother. ;)

Because there is only 1 player and 1 character that isn't the whole rest of the world controlled by the GM - everyone can keep in their heads who and what the character is.... so you don't need to remember exactly how much climb or money he has - because if it fits the story - you just do it anyway

@Murch Perhaps I am just excited.

I have trouble explaining myself when I am excited.

I start thinking a few steps ahead and then what I am trying to say makes no sense.

Okay, but what do you do, when the gm and the player have different opinions as to whether it will be a problem for the character to succeed?

Okay - I will give you a story example.

I am not talking about rolling dice for everyday things or things that have no influence on the story. To put it succinctly. He says "I pull my gun and try to shoot X in the head." Would you roll?

Or just rule what happens?

@Murch Okay, here's the thing--that scenario doesn't include any of the reasons I'd use to choose whether or not to ask for a roll.

@InbarRose You're right. In my roleplay I like to know characters and awe in marvel at how good people are at building a world or at playing an NPC. I might as well look someone playing, but then I would ask why I'm not in there, since I can.

I'll ask for a roll when both success and failure would be interesting and serve the story/drama.

Okay, X = main villain, climax.

If either a success or a failure would be boring, or make the story fizzle, then the non-boring one should just happen.

I was the GM. The situation was that the player was pretending to be a priest to lead a blessing on a boat for the sailors so that an ally of his could sneak onto the ship and poison their water supply. So the player was being the decoy. Now - if he manages to decoy them - his ally will poison their water - if not, his ally wont - and he might get caught.. so fail or succeed - both make for an interesting story...

@BESW That is a nice idea. :D

So if both the GM and the player have cool ideas, rolling to see which happens is great!

@InbarRose Yes, sure. So that would be an example for when you make a roll?

@Murch Yes.

@BESW I was trying to convey that, from 3.5e to 4e, casters losed more. I agree with you that now they're even. Before, they were better. If I feel a warrior has been depowered (at least one the DpS side), a caster has been even more.

@BESW Exactly!

Okay, that pretty much matches my intent. :)

Also, as a GM I generally default to saying the PCs succeed at things within their competence set.

From Lady Blackbird:

> By default, characters can accomplish anything covered by their traits. They’re competent and effective people, in other words. It’s no fun to ask for a roll when there’s no cool obstacle in the way.

However, there are some kinds of games where the opposite should be true.

@Murch Now - in most RPG's normally the character should roll when say.. he falls off a tower to try to grab onto a rope. if the roll fails - the character would probably die, and the player would make a new character. In a twosie game.. that isn't always fun... As I and BESW are saying... if a failure on the roll ends the game... why? the whole point of the story is for both of you to enjoy yourselves.

In most Cthulhu games, for example, the whole ethos is rooted in the notion that humans are frail, incompetent beings who should consider simply surviving a success, and retaining their sanity is a triumph.

@InbarRose Yes, I got that. :)

Good.

In a Cthulhu game we would be playing to see whether the character survived and/or retained his sanity, and we'd consider failure on one or both of those to be pretty cool too--so rolls with story-stopping potential would be more appropriate.

@BESW Yeah, but then there should be a cool obstacle. Failing at stuff like cutting the last few seconds of a video being an FBI agent in the headquarters and having all night to do it, imho doesn't call for a roll. (Talking from experience.) ;)

@Murch Indeed, don't make them roll to tie their shoes.

In that case I was playing the FBI agent and that was a hardcore break in the suspense of disbelief for me. :p

But that's another thing which short campaigns allows for: changing the frame of what is and isn't going to make a story fizzle.

When @Trogdor (my player) had his PC decide to give an AI godlike powers without knowing for sure whether it would save or destroy humanity, he didn't have to worry about whether it meant he'd still be able to play that character next session, because he knew it was the last session of the game anyway.

So he could make the choice fully based on his character and his sense of drama, with no niggling meta-game worry about its impact on the world he'd be playing in later.

Alright, let me sum up here: •Twosies allow to explore any direction the story takes. •It's sensible, to let the player take charge of some world-building aspects. •Try to limit the number of rolls, i.e. only roll if either failure or success would be interesting, otherwise just go with what follows or the interesting choice.

I still have to read the link that @BESW provided before, haven't gotten to it yet, due to our engaging discussion. :)

Good summary.

@Murch Also, you're more free to jump campaigns, characters, and settings because there's less peer inertia.

But I would add one more: Don't get bogged down in mechanics OR break the rules if they don't fit the narrative.

But equally, lowered peer inertia can lead to playing bridge some evenings instead.

I have "Geek Night" every Saturday with Trogdor. It's often RPGs, but not always, and although he's the only one who shows up most nights I have a dozen other friends who know they can always drop by.

Lately we've been watching Ultimate Spider-Man.

I'm trying to think back to my D&D 3.5 twosies.

'cause I ran several of them. Some with Trogdor, more earlier with college friends; either side-quests for players in the main campaign, or friends who couldn't join the main campaign but wanted to play D&D anyway.

I must go hang laundry.

I will ruminate, and come back with a few things about running twosies in games that expect much larger groups.

Running twosies using big-group rules requires greater understanding of the rules and greater willingness to explore their edges, and ignore them sometimes.

But it also makes exploring those edges easier.

A half-dragon minotaur barbarian would have been ridiculous and unplayable in my main campaign; he was too niche, had too few hit points and far too much Strength. He was min/maxed in a really stupid way.

But he didn't come up with a half-dragon minotaur barbarian because it would give him a +20 to whatever Strength score he rolled; he didn't even know.

He had an awesome character concept and because there wasn't anyone else whose needs we had to take into account we were able to make it happen without changing a thing.

I gave him low-damage enemies with insane amounts of hit points, and hordes of low-hit-point enemies, and put a lot of solve-it-with-muscle obstacles in his path.

If we'd had a wizard in the party, the hordes would never have reached his Whirlwind Attack.

herro all

Yawp.

Sorry, my Mom called. ;)

No worries, we know most people have Lives Outside the Internet.

@InbarRose Both good points. I was just thinking that I might have a small intermezzo where my player can take over one of his allies to do stuff, if he is interested in that.

I, for one, do not expect anyone to respond quickly or consistently.

Oh well, "half-dragon minotaur barbarian" - always a favorite :P

@Murch I've experimented with that kind of thing a couple times.

I remember you were discussing the using Fate's aspects as NPC's or something?

@BESW Hehe, I love all the stuffs you have tried already.

In my 4e campaign, one level out of every five or ten was spent playing the enemy, setting up things for the main party to knock over later.

Good Morning

I once explored this "play as the bad guys" thing in a game.

@InbarRose Yes, haven't tried it yet though.

@InbarRose it needs to be handled... delicately.

Like how in movies the scene jumps back and forth between what the good guys are doing and what the bad guys are doing...

So I decided that the adventure was getting stale - So I had them create new characters (evil) and hatch an evil plan. And after that session we returned to their normal characters who now had to deal with this plan.

In my case, I kept it as a very secondary element by making it rare and short, and I made sure the bad guys they played were of the "expendable henchmen given an important assignment by the boss" variety.

@InbarRose That's pretty clever.

Sadly we never got to conclude that game, but it was a great fun the next following sessions after they knew what they were getting into.

I did something like that, but I gave them the evil plans for them to enact.

So, for example, they'd be assigned to infiltrate the heroes' capital and start an evil cult that would sabotage things.

Then a few levels later the heroes would discover an evil cult sabotaging things in their capital city!

I also once ran an all-evil-henchmen campaign, where Trodgor and his brother played the lackeys of a classic evil D&D villain cackling in his tower, who sent them out to disrupt the adventures of a group of four unlikely heroes.

@waxeagle Yay, it's happening!

When I was just starting out with D&D we used to pretty much just play freeform with character sheets because we didn't really know what we were doing... and I was playing in a game where there were 2 groups, one good one evil, the same GM would meet them on different days - and they would be affecting each other. I thought it was great fun. But I doubt I could get enough players together for something like that now that everyone I know has so much responsibility :)

@JonathanHobbs yeah, I'm excited for a stackwide meta that's free of SO entanglements

yes.

@waxeagle nice!

@InbarRose I feel like boardgames can sorta pack in that kind of experience into a single day, during a few hours of play.

@JoshuaAslanSmith I have been playing a lot of 7 wonders! which is one of the best boardames ever!

But I think more to the point - I also play the Game of Thrones board game. Which is excellent.

@InbarRose what's the core mechanic of that? (wife and I are big Martin/GoT fans)

Updated with links.

To really play the game of thrones board game you need 6 players. (1 for each major house) else it's just not as fun.

ah, that's not too big of a problem, though if we manage to get the whole gang together we do try to play D&D because..well we managed to get all of us in one room

@waxeagle Well.. the AGOT board game is about an hour long per player playing +1 (so 3 players is about 4 hours - 6 players about 7 hours) And I am not kidding.

@InbarRose oof, that will require quite the investment. We have a tentative marathon OotS session on the schedule that keeps getting moved

@waxeagle oots session? (I know you mean order of the stick - what do you mean by session?)

Call for adventure: Leave house, survive day, return safely. TTYL, thanks for all the good ideas and input. ;)

@InbarRose he put out a board game a while back

@Murch ttfn

ookoodook.com/store/OOTSAdvGameDeluxe.shtml

the base rules take several hours to play through, though the expansion apparently has a shorter version that I need to read up on

Is a potion of cure critical wounds 4d8 + CL the most healing potion possible?

I meant Serious wounds 3d8

man, reading this article about someone playing a protocol droid jedi in an unfinished (but released) mod for Mount & Blade on PC. THEY DUEL TARKIN. Seriously need to get me some star wars rpg going.

yeah, that's why I never had any interest in the Star Wars game one of my players ran in college: all the excitement seemed based on having the opportunity to interact with canon lore that I didn't know or care about.

no but this is sorta completely doing a disservice the lore wherein lies the joke. The giant wheel of fate that represents my relationship to starwars may finally be moving up from the bottom again what with stand alone boba fett movie and fantasy flight's RPG looking pretty well made (if not overly pricey)

In general I think your approach with that sg-12 campaign where you exist in the same timeline but youre off doing other things tangentially related makes the most sense