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bluegargantuaHey,
So it's been a string of gaming this week for me. Let me hit the highlights:
So I'm in a regular D&D game that includes my wife and is run by my wife's boyfriend. The game has been running since September-ish and we're all 10th level now. I play a Lizardman Marshall/Warblade known as Sarge. (Side note -- Book of Nine swords means no one ever plays a Fighter ever again). The group is large (8 PCs, plus a couple NPCs and animals companions), but surprisingly more unified in purpose than my last large D&D group (All Hail the Bickering Eight!). It's an Eberron game and we all work for the Prince of Cyre doing his bidding and doing good deeds for other people. We're currently owed a few favors by just about every good-aligned high muckity-muck in Eberron.
For our latest mission, we've been sent off to find this ex-soldier of Cyre and inform him that his stop-loss clause has been activated and he needs to come back to Cyre. After a few "cunning" plans we just hire a guy and discover that he's been abducted by the local halfling mafia and is being held on a magical stone ship floating out in the harbor. Actually, the guy we hire sends us to the soldier's home where we find his Warforged Urban Druid friend torturing a couple hapless halfling goons for the info.
But the guy is on a boat. We spent most of the session planning. Either we planned real well or the GM just wanted to get to the big fight because we blasted in through the aft decks of the ship and just GM-fiated our way to the hold were our guy was waiting. We're facing off against an obnoxious monk, a deadly archer, an insane artificer, and a giant were-shark. None of them are halflings (except maybe the were shark in his "human" form), which I think is a bit of a gyp. The whole point of a halfling mafia is that it's mostly made up of halflings.
We had to end the session mid-fight, but we have recovered our boy -- bound in magical chains that will be difficult to undo in the middle of a fight -- and I mashed the monk (although there's apparently a Deathblow feat that clobbered me for 60 points of damage after putting him down -- nasty!). We also took out the artificer's power armor pretty quickly so that's no longer a concern. The were-shark fled to the water, but he'll certainly be back for more.
It's been a fun game. I don't think Sarge is very optimized (he was a lot better when we were incorrectly reading the Marshall rules), but the group is large enough that there's a lot of overlap so it's all good.
On Wednesday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jeregenest put together a one-shot of Esoterrorists. Actually, it's more of a test drive of the GUMSHOE system that powers Esoterrorist (and Trail of Cthulhu).
The GUMSHOE system is designed for Investigative games. Rather than enter a scene and roll dice to see if you find clues, the GM just says "You've got Archeology? Great, the ming vase on the pedestal is a forgery, but the Aztec sacrificial knife inside is genuine". If you spend some of your skill points you can find out some bonus information that makes you look cool and may help you skip past some intermediate scenes, but all the important clues that you need to move on to the next scene will be made available to you.
And that can happen in different ways. Some clues you just spot right off without doing anything, some clues you just have to say you're looking, some clues get triggered when other people find something that catches your eye. It's all very smooth. In the absence of mechanical rolls to find stuff, you just ham it up. It's a scene from CSI or criminal Minds or Quiny -- you just talk about how your guy is cool and looking for a certain type of clue and the GM says "yup, here's what you find" and then you decide if you want to push it for anything extra. You can just roleplay and not worry about the clues because everyone knows that you will find all the clues that you need.
The other important things to keep in mind is that while the clues will always be available and you'll always have at least one new scene to go into, the interpretation of the clues you get will remain in your hands. As the big picture is slowly revealed, you start drawing connections between the clues you've gathered from various sources and that's a lot of fun (and a great roleplaying scene where you hash stuff out).
GUMSHOE so good that I'm pretty sure that this is the way to play Call of Cthulhu (and Trail of Cthulhu comes with conversion notes so all your Chaosium stuff is still good).
As to the game itself, I'm Henry Spears, U.S. Custom's agent (in a nod to my old Delta Green guy). A former professor of mine (and dear friend) asked me and some other former students to help find her missing son, Brendon. So we go to his dorm and while one guy interviews the his roommate (with the dorm mom in attendance), we toss the son's room. So many clues in his room. From the drugs to the Mayan funerary jar filled with carrion beetles, to strange glyph encoding, and his nude photos...our Brendon was in a world of crazy.
After that we broke up into small groups and followed up different leads. Brendon's girlfriend got one of the most unusual interrogations ever.
"Tell me about Brendon."
"Nice guy."
"Liked Mayan artifacts?"
"Oh yeah."
"Can I see one of the rare books he was reading?"
"Um...ok."
"Would he be involved in art smuggling?"
"What?"
"Nevermind, spiritual guy, right?"
"Well, I..."
"Look, could I get a photostat of this other rare book? Thanks."
Meanwhile, me and another player went to visit his art/math/drug buddies. My compatriot got the friends completely stoned (and spontaneously chanting Coptic together), so there was no stopping me as I raided their dorm room. Got another Mayan funerary jar.
So far, we've determined that there's a sinister "charitable foundation" behind a lot of this and that all these college kids were flocking around a sinister Aleister Crowley figure. Also, Brendon apparently wants to turn himself into some sort of occult "lens" to illuminate dark matter and reverse entropy (or destroy the universe, it's hard to tell which).
I'm rather looking forward to the next session (when I'm sure our sanity will start to drop precipitously).
Enough of that roleplaying crap -- let's play Army Guys! I sat down for a game of AT-43 withinvader_haywire. I had fun with this game at Gen-Con last year and I've been putting an army together and hoping to do a tournament next week. I played Red Block (Russian guys) and he played UNA (oh guess who they're based on).
I kinda got my butt handed to me.
The problem is that Red Block is all about low-tech swarms that kill you close in and UNA is all about long distance pick-offs. I got one unit wiped off the map one the first turn in and it all went downhill from there. When I conceded the game, I still had two full units left, but my commanders were gone and I hadn't done enough serious damage to him.
The take-away points were:
I'll have to do some re-jiggering of my force list this weekend. AT-43 is still a pretty fun game though. Probably took about 2.5 hours to play out the game.
So that was my gaming this week. I've also been squeezing in a little GTA4 where I can. Play a mission, go on a date, it's a good pattern.
later
Tom
So it's been a string of gaming this week for me. Let me hit the highlights:
So I'm in a regular D&D game that includes my wife and is run by my wife's boyfriend. The game has been running since September-ish and we're all 10th level now. I play a Lizardman Marshall/Warblade known as Sarge. (Side note -- Book of Nine swords means no one ever plays a Fighter ever again). The group is large (8 PCs, plus a couple NPCs and animals companions), but surprisingly more unified in purpose than my last large D&D group (All Hail the Bickering Eight!). It's an Eberron game and we all work for the Prince of Cyre doing his bidding and doing good deeds for other people. We're currently owed a few favors by just about every good-aligned high muckity-muck in Eberron.
For our latest mission, we've been sent off to find this ex-soldier of Cyre and inform him that his stop-loss clause has been activated and he needs to come back to Cyre. After a few "cunning" plans we just hire a guy and discover that he's been abducted by the local halfling mafia and is being held on a magical stone ship floating out in the harbor. Actually, the guy we hire sends us to the soldier's home where we find his Warforged Urban Druid friend torturing a couple hapless halfling goons for the info.
But the guy is on a boat. We spent most of the session planning. Either we planned real well or the GM just wanted to get to the big fight because we blasted in through the aft decks of the ship and just GM-fiated our way to the hold were our guy was waiting. We're facing off against an obnoxious monk, a deadly archer, an insane artificer, and a giant were-shark. None of them are halflings (except maybe the were shark in his "human" form), which I think is a bit of a gyp. The whole point of a halfling mafia is that it's mostly made up of halflings.
We had to end the session mid-fight, but we have recovered our boy -- bound in magical chains that will be difficult to undo in the middle of a fight -- and I mashed the monk (although there's apparently a Deathblow feat that clobbered me for 60 points of damage after putting him down -- nasty!). We also took out the artificer's power armor pretty quickly so that's no longer a concern. The were-shark fled to the water, but he'll certainly be back for more.
It's been a fun game. I don't think Sarge is very optimized (he was a lot better when we were incorrectly reading the Marshall rules), but the group is large enough that there's a lot of overlap so it's all good.
On Wednesday
jeregenest put together a one-shot of Esoterrorists. Actually, it's more of a test drive of the GUMSHOE system that powers Esoterrorist (and Trail of Cthulhu).The GUMSHOE system is designed for Investigative games. Rather than enter a scene and roll dice to see if you find clues, the GM just says "You've got Archeology? Great, the ming vase on the pedestal is a forgery, but the Aztec sacrificial knife inside is genuine". If you spend some of your skill points you can find out some bonus information that makes you look cool and may help you skip past some intermediate scenes, but all the important clues that you need to move on to the next scene will be made available to you.
And that can happen in different ways. Some clues you just spot right off without doing anything, some clues you just have to say you're looking, some clues get triggered when other people find something that catches your eye. It's all very smooth. In the absence of mechanical rolls to find stuff, you just ham it up. It's a scene from CSI or criminal Minds or Quiny -- you just talk about how your guy is cool and looking for a certain type of clue and the GM says "yup, here's what you find" and then you decide if you want to push it for anything extra. You can just roleplay and not worry about the clues because everyone knows that you will find all the clues that you need.
The other important things to keep in mind is that while the clues will always be available and you'll always have at least one new scene to go into, the interpretation of the clues you get will remain in your hands. As the big picture is slowly revealed, you start drawing connections between the clues you've gathered from various sources and that's a lot of fun (and a great roleplaying scene where you hash stuff out).
GUMSHOE so good that I'm pretty sure that this is the way to play Call of Cthulhu (and Trail of Cthulhu comes with conversion notes so all your Chaosium stuff is still good).
As to the game itself, I'm Henry Spears, U.S. Custom's agent (in a nod to my old Delta Green guy). A former professor of mine (and dear friend) asked me and some other former students to help find her missing son, Brendon. So we go to his dorm and while one guy interviews the his roommate (with the dorm mom in attendance), we toss the son's room. So many clues in his room. From the drugs to the Mayan funerary jar filled with carrion beetles, to strange glyph encoding, and his nude photos...our Brendon was in a world of crazy.
After that we broke up into small groups and followed up different leads. Brendon's girlfriend got one of the most unusual interrogations ever.
"Tell me about Brendon."
"Nice guy."
"Liked Mayan artifacts?"
"Oh yeah."
"Can I see one of the rare books he was reading?"
"Um...ok."
"Would he be involved in art smuggling?"
"What?"
"Nevermind, spiritual guy, right?"
"Well, I..."
"Look, could I get a photostat of this other rare book? Thanks."
Meanwhile, me and another player went to visit his art/math/drug buddies. My compatriot got the friends completely stoned (and spontaneously chanting Coptic together), so there was no stopping me as I raided their dorm room. Got another Mayan funerary jar.
So far, we've determined that there's a sinister "charitable foundation" behind a lot of this and that all these college kids were flocking around a sinister Aleister Crowley figure. Also, Brendon apparently wants to turn himself into some sort of occult "lens" to illuminate dark matter and reverse entropy (or destroy the universe, it's hard to tell which).
I'm rather looking forward to the next session (when I'm sure our sanity will start to drop precipitously).
Enough of that roleplaying crap -- let's play Army Guys! I sat down for a game of AT-43 with
invader_haywire. I had fun with this game at Gen-Con last year and I've been putting an army together and hoping to do a tournament next week. I played Red Block (Russian guys) and he played UNA (oh guess who they're based on).I kinda got my butt handed to me.
The problem is that Red Block is all about low-tech swarms that kill you close in and UNA is all about long distance pick-offs. I got one unit wiped off the map one the first turn in and it all went downhill from there. When I conceded the game, I still had two full units left, but my commanders were gone and I hadn't done enough serious damage to him.
The take-away points were:
- The RPG Soldat suck. Replace with Karnsey Soldats.
- The disruptors aren't that great. Replace with a second medic.
- The commander is the only officer you need, all other units should just get Sgts
- My Commanders can repair 2 points on their vehicle, not just one.
- Get under cover faster, make them come to you if you can, you'll get clobbered in the open.
- Use more area-effect weapons to break up incoming infantry
I'll have to do some re-jiggering of my force list this weekend. AT-43 is still a pretty fun game though. Probably took about 2.5 hours to play out the game.
So that was my gaming this week. I've also been squeezing in a little GTA4 where I can. Play a mission, go on a date, it's a good pattern.
later
Tom
