Get To Know Me: TTRPG Edition

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Ok. Fair enough. I’ve to often seen wording like you used with antique to be in disdain. So yea from this perspective I like my antiques. Sometimes antiques are better made than modern things…. :-)
It makes me roll my eyes a little as a publishing strategy, but as I said I have an intermittent urge to play it, so certainly not disdain for it as a game. (And maybe moreso than if RQG has been a RQ6/Mythras fork instead. Might be a better-oiled machine for all I know, but definitely a less familiar one.)

There's definitely a Mean Time Between Failures curve effect at work. If something has life in it after 45 years, seems it had at least some redeeming features. Whereas if something is bleeding-edge-up-to-the-minute, it might be a groundbreaking innovation the bobby's been waiting for all this time... or it might be deservedly forgotten in a week. Second's statistically far more likely.
 
Day 10: Have I ever played a journaling game?

Nope, and only vaguely familiar with the concept. Seems a little odd as a 'pure' journal, but makes sense if you're the type of weirdo that hangs around on online fora -- not that we know any of those freakazoids, right?! -- the "live" version of that (as it were) is clearly a viable sort of way. "Read-along-with" and in particular "chargen along with" threads can be a lot of fun -- same basic thing.

Arguably... isn't this thread a type of journaling metagame?


Day 11: Have I ever played a Hexcrawl?

Don't think I have, strictly speaking! Definitely "multiple dungeon crawls connected by a hex map", but never that I recall "and it's all uncharted wilderness" or, like the old Murphy's Rules, "you're too stuck-up to ask the local peasants for directions in this manicured pastoral countryside".


Day 12: Have I ever designed a dungeon?

Nope. I'm a half-hearted occasional consumer of that type of Content, never had the need or desire to become the Producer.


Day 13: Have I played a LARP?

Yes, several times, almost always at overseas gaming cons, but not for a while. Fun, but they increasingly seemed like a big investment of time, energy, prep effort and con-time opportunity. Probably a bit less manic at more local cons. Have even run a couple! But only hand-me-downs, have never had the nerve to try writing my own.
 
Before or after you married? So was it like practice for the wedding:tongue:?
After :smile:. The local con was running it and we decided to give it a go expecting fairly minor parts. Our friends on the con committee had different ideas and made us the central characters, possibly because we were actually married and therefore it avoided having to put two strangers who didn’t know each other into the roles of a recently married couple.

TBH I’m not sure what was more exhausting, our real wedding or the Larp! At least at the real wedding reception we got fed!
 
Day 14: Favourite object one of my character's has owned?

A pair of curtains. In one college sci-fi game the GM started us waking up in a locked room and only vague memories. The room was bare except for a pair of curtains. We took them and over a series of climbs, scrapes and fights we used them for climbing equipment, to disarm foes, to tie foes up, to muffle our shoes, etc, etc..
It was a very rewarding exercise in ingenuity and I think totally unexpected by the GM!
 
OK, playing catch-up. Been trying to Effort-Post these answers, but the last three honestly haven't given me a lot to work with, plus I've been doing game prep for a new campaign starting next weekend. Anyhoo...

#12 Have You Designed a Dungeon?
Yeah. So many. I remember I used to pickup graph paper notebooks from Office Max, and would spend hours drawing elaborate dungeons, the majority of which never saw play. I worked on this huge multi-notebook "dungeonized" version of Hell, drawing from Dante's Inferno, Hellraiser comics, and Gustav Davidson's Dictionary. I did starship and alien planet-based dungeons for Star Frontiers, worked on a "living dungeon" that was entirely in the carcass of a dragon, and an "Arcade-style" (as in the X-men villain) funhouse/circus dungeon inspired by the arcade game Carnevil. Sadly lost all those notebooks in a move years ago.

#13 Have You Played LARP?

Not exactly. Done like Murder Mystery parties where we dressed up, done SCA recreation events. Played games like Killer and ongoing Laser Tag in university. But nothing exactly like one would think of as a "LARP" as such.

#XIV Favourite Object One of your Characters has Owned

Fuck, I dunno. I had a Bard character in a Planescape game that had a flute that could summon and control rats...that was pretty cool, I guess. Always liked the Pied Piper legend.
 
Days Ten through Twelve: No.

Day Thirteen: Once, at a con. It was Mage: the A... (can't remember which one). Spent some time building a character. Ended up having no opportunity to use any of what I built in the session. The whole thing didn't click at all for me. I liked all the other players, so it wasn't even a problem of personality clash. I just don't get the format at all. Cosplaying with some spontaneous improv makes more sense to me.
 
Day 14: I don't really have a favorite object owned by a character, per se. I and so many folks I gamed with over the years who are my age (or thereabouts) all have fond memories of playing through White Plume Mountain and keeping Blackrazor at the end of that adventure.

The first time I played through it, I had no idea who Elric was, and had never heard of Stormbringer, the Eternal Champion nor Moorcock.

white_plume_mountain.jpg
Totally Not Elric, Wielding Totally Not Stormbringer from White Plume Mountain
 
Day 12.
Have you designed a dungeon ?

I don't really remember ; I may have designed 2 or 3 of them at the very beginning of my RPG years, in 1983.

I figured I didn't really need them, because the Caves of Chaos were already drawn and dressed up for me. Then, as GM and a player, I escaped the cramped confines of those subterranean quarters, and was all over wilderness adventures - which consisted mainly of wandering the countryside and slaughtering monsters.

And then, I became really interested in designing mansions, castles, towers - houses, one could say - with intelligent denizens in them, with their daily routines, habits, etc. Writing that, I realized that it much more sense to me than subterranean claustrophobic expeditions : the fantasy adventures I read when I was young were much more about the above ground adventures of knights, paladins and magicians...

What would the RPG landscape look like right now if Dave Arneson's players hadn't became obsessed with Blackmoor's literal foundations ?

Oddly, I'm more interested in dungeons now than I ever was in my youth :ooh: ; but I'm still not interested in drawing them. There are so many out there that can I steal and repurpose as I see fit.
 
Day 14
Beats me, the dwarf monk I’m currently playing in a Pathfinder 1E Wrath of the Righteous campaign has boots of spider climb or some such that allows him to walk on walls and ceilings, that’s pretty cool in a game with attacks of opportunity :hehe:
 
Day 14: The Precious?

Fuck if I know. I'm sure my DM gave a character a magic item that I thought was amaze-balls when I was 12-13, but I really don't care about this kind of thing as a player (and I frequently forget about it as a GM, to the chagrin of some of the people I play with probably).
 
Day 13.
Have you played LARP ?

Twice.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, BUT...
the costume ruined it for me. As in

- I'm incapable of sewing anything
- I have not the patience to design and assemble an handerkchief, much less a 15th century Renaissance costume
- I'm so vain I wouldn't wear anything than a perfect costume
- I'm frequently overweight and don't enjoy huffing and puffing through the godamn woods, and hills, and water holes, and through brambles... You get it. And I wouldn't like one bit dirtying my perfect costume when ambushed by irrespectfull athletic young ones brandishing foam swords (the audacity !).

Now, if I could play the NPC inkeeper at the Tavern in the Woods, dressed like a monk and attended by bossomfull wenches serving tankards of ale a-plenty, ... maybe I'd reconsider this whole LARP thing :eat::grin: !
 
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Day 13.
Favorite object one of your characters has owned.

That's not an object, but nothing could beat the dragon mount of one of my first serious characters, Clane the Dragon Scourge (I was 14 years old).
 
10) Have you played a journaling game?

I have. Or should I say I tried. I backed Wait for Me on Kickstarter during the height of the pandemic and figured it might make for a nice diversion. Ultimately, I wasn't enjoying the process and after bailing out on multiple questions, I decided it wasn't for me.

11) Have you played a hex crawl?

I ran Isle of Dread for multiple different editions of D&D. The D&D Expert set was my entry point to the hobby and it informed my early perception of the game, though I still never ran my game in a true "sandbox" manner and I primarily used motivations of NPCs and NPC groups as a driver to most games, though sites and locations were important to the game.

I never had the Wilderlands in its original print run, but picked up the boxed set when they put it out for D20. I had aspirations to run it then, but I decided that it would be much easier to reference in PDF, but at the time the publishers were very recalcitrant about releasing it electronically, first at all, then for a reasonable price. The cost/"chance I am going to actually run" ratio never worked out to the point that I lived the pipe dream.

When our own robertsconley robertsconley put out his Points of Light products, I picked them all up in the hopes to find a window to use one, but that went by the wayside like many RPG product. But it's rules-neutral enough I still could.

Finally there is Pathfinder Kingmaker. Players in my PF group were playing it in a second campaign that I didn't have to time to join; in hindsight, a lot of they told me about that campaign sounded like accounting stuff I wouldn't really get the most enjoyment out of and I was satisfied not to participate.
 
Day 14 A PC possession of which I'm fond

I think the item I was the most pleased to find was probably the first set of Plate +1 that I discovered in Keep on the Borderlands. At the time it was an upgrade over normal chain and I'll tell you, I felt invulnerable. It was marvelous.
 
D13: Nah, though they have a boffer larp in the park here I sometimes watch. Once in school we went into the steam tunnels to replicate a dungeon, I mean, yeah, no swinging stuff or bows really, that would not work. Serious jabbing w/a pike over a shield wall would work.

D14: A simple gauss rifle. lol maybe I read too much stainless steel rat, though beyond that probably an intelligent silver or vorpal sword.
 
Day14 favorite object. I don’t play a lot, and when I do, the systems tend to be ones with less memorable items. But I suppose I might go with one of the items on my duck character back in the early 90s. Either the heavy crossbow he could not miss with (sheer luck) or a wand of wonder (proving how bad my luck was). Probably the crossbow. I rolled crits every single game with that thing. It was nuts.
 
Day 14, favorite PC possession.

Not really an object, but a bunch of objects. 28 of them, 1 for each finger joint. Aforementioned Elendril Faladilson (in question #6) became a templar of Solkan later in life, and would carry as many iron rings on his hands as he could. Each of those was a required ingredient for a powerful defensive spell, but I forget which one.
 
14: Favorite item was a half deck of many things, I sat down in the middle of town and tried to trick passersby into pulling one. Our parties Ranger decided that that was a terrible idea and started pulling cards instead to keep people away. First card destroyed his entire collection of enchanted equipment leaving him naked in the middle of town and unarmed, then I pulled a card and got a keep filled with monsters. He pulled and lost a level, I pulled and got one chance to rewind time (That I did not spend on getting the Ranger's equipment back, despite his pleas). Good fun to be had unintentionally screwing over your friends.
 
Day 14: favorite object owned by a PC...

Hmm, since I was a forever GM for so long until recently, and my recent games have not been that heavy on "stuff", I'm not really sure... Even if I look to my GMPCs from those days, nothing much comes to mind.

Thinking about the PCs in my current or recent campaigns, I guess a favorite item is the carriage the centaur PC from my RuneQuest Thieves Guild campaign pulled (the carriage was technically owned by his family not him - he was a member of one of the centaur taxi services of The Free City of Haven).
 
14. This is tough. I remember using an Immovable Rod in a lot of interesting ways in one campaign.

But based on sheer joy, I remember being maybe 8 or so and my brother let me have a double crossbow like Rutger Haur had in Ladyhawke. For some reason, I friggin loved that thing.
 
13. Larp. Nope. They're extremely rare here, I've heard about two in thirty years.

14. Fave dingus... I have some from when I GMed, whether or not the players picked them up. But on my characters? None. Tend to end up with dull +shart numbers junk or generic utility stuff that nice but not especially memorable. Most GMs seem to love making custom magic swords and... not much else, but I almost never play a sworder. Axes, magic, ectoplasmic swiss army knives, halberds, little stabbers, more magic... but no swords.
 
Day 14: I had a Kensei that had a +6 ring of defense from an adventure, and he was a badass after that. Then we moved to Rolemaster. +30 DB is a lot different than +6 defense in AD&D, I found out.
 
Paul Hardcastle's 14-F-F-F-F-14: I haven't played much since the 90s, and remember characters but not gear. However I did play an evil bard/assassin for a 5e campaign and he got a Staff of Wizardry (i think that's what it was called) and from then on called himself a wizard and told everyone he was a wizard and used the staff like 80% of the time to get shit done. So I think that probably counts.
 
Great googly-moogly. You're that guy.
There are some campaigns where the other players say that - strictly for the greater good and the saving of many future princesses - I must once again take up the ruthless, amoral mantle of Edmund Blackadder the character I play when they need plausible deniability. This was one of those campaigns.

Also, he had a few levels in Warlock.
 
Day 14: Favorite object owned by a Character. Really None. I am never about the equipment, but the character. (I am against generic adventure fantasy games where you seem to differentiate characters not by mechanics but by their gear.) I think this also trends because I tend to play superheroes (in comic styled games), so gear (if there is any) is part of the character and their expression. So while there might be neat stuff, nothing stands out as "the cool object".

13) Yes. Larping was big around here a many years ago. Vampire and other WoD things - during its heydays. You see, for some reason, the peninsula was the "Home of the Gothic". More goths per square mile than anywhere else. They adored the VtM (and other WoD). So there was a LARP in Mountain View. It was huge. Anywhere with 35-50 people. Sure eventually I moved into a moderator roll, but we were still characters. This went on for like three years before I left.

There was a LARP that had a play area that overlapped ours at the same time. They treated us as a LARP inside their real monsters game. There were some great moments in that game

Did some little larps at cons too.

12) Have I designed a dungeon? I want to go on record saying I hate dungeons. They way they are set up, it makes no sense socially, ecologically, temporally? I am also not a fan of generic adventure fantasy in faux European para medieval societies. (Yes, I am not fond of the worlds most famous RPG. I have not been since 1977.) The "dungeons" in EPT made some sense being buried cities. Certain places, like a forgotten temple or wizards' keep, which seemed like those places only broken, were at least tolerable. And all my friends who were Famous RPG fans spent hours upon hours drawing up graph paper mazes.

But the answer is yes, I have. Death Test for TFT was my inspiration. (The Fantasy Trip was my fantasy game of choice for running and playing.) My dungeon was a flow chart. It had 16 rooms per level and five levels. It was maintained and stocked by a wizard who was guarding a sword of Air and wanted to test those coming for it - to find a worthy. (Thus lots of summoned and undead monsters and a couple of traps.). My dungeon friends were very impressed by it. They were also annoyed that I hadn't mapped it (and when they did they were amazed).

Day 11 - Hex Crawl NO. Hexcrawling dates back to oD&D from one of the magazines. Moving and exploring spaces, running into encounters and sometimes you might actually encounter something the GM prepped. While I have seen it in play, I have never done it.

Day 10 - Journal Game - No. However, I have done Bluebooking a great deal in a number of games. Blue Booking comes from Arron Allston's Strike Force, where you would write/ play out "off screen events" - personal events, single investigations, "red light scenes", and so on so they could "happen" yet not take up any precious table time in the group setting (and avoid embarrassing scenes).

Day 9 - Story - Castle Falkenstein -

Many games have stories in them. Some are awfully bad. Some are so convoluted that there is no way a beginning or character made with the rules as written could do some of the acts. These have all given in-game fiction a bad name.


The first half of the book of Castle Falkenstein is a novella (or serious excerpts of one). Yes, there are pages of game material interspersed in the novella (which makes looking some of the info up... difficult.. a complaint about the game). However, the story flows. It sets up the setting. It gives you feel for the game. It provides you info you need.

And you don't even need fries to get all the info.

Second place would go to Buffy, the game written in the style of the series. Third place would go to Serenity (and limited to its second - Firefly).

Day 8 - Art - Castle Falkenstein - The game is a treat for the eyes.

From the earliest day of inexpensive color printing, Castle Falkenstein had the most color plates possible and still be a reasonable price. All the art was "artistic", well rendered, and in a pleasing style. Most were obviously painted. Even the illustrations are composed well. The images all make sense in the context of the rules/novella. The game is a treat for the eyes.

Day 7 DC Adventures by Green Ronin. I have the entire line. I bought all of them. I have never gotten to play M&M and that goes double for DCA, where my gamers went "oh hell no" (between the system and being Marvel (movie) fans).

Though I make it a point to read and learn everything I buy (and acquire)... sometimes many times.

Day 6 Fields Solo in CP2013 and CP2020 character.

Think - If John Grimjack Gaunt had been in CP2013 and fought drug lords instead of demons. So he is an military attitude character. He mostly did the right thing, well as right as any really cyberpunk could get.

Fields has become something of a legend. He is a survivor. There is an unofficial list ranking the city's solos that circulates among the right people. He has almost always been in the top 20, usually in the number 14 spot.

All of that is window dressing really. His life did not begin until he met Shiela.
Note: Shiela was a PC. The player really enjoyed the "strong silent type" and liked to play Fields like a fiddle.

Day 5 - If I shouldn't count Continuum or Convergence Point playtests and runs.... If I say Hero system, it would be a slam dunk. If I say, just Champions, it is the winner. 10 years, 1.5 times a week. Stalking the Night Fantastic, is in second which is 16 years with 2-4 sessions a convention weekend (fewer hours).

Day 4 - I missed Champions by a few feet, as George and Steve were standing right there, but I was checked out by someone's girlfriend (Mark Williams (ed 1 artist) was right there and they were both a little punk so probably his). I got to know them all better over the years and gamed with them briefly. So that means Fringeworthy. I had been talking to Richard Tucholka for a while about Alt Histories and the Paratime series after hearing the spiel about Fringeworthy. I hung out with their group for a while at that con and actually ran Fringeworthy for them soon after. (Thus starting my lopsided relationship with Tri-Tac.)

Day 3 - Normally I despise book NPCs. They are generally useless except as examples of how to build things. So, the only NCP that made an impression is Champion's Doctor Destroyer. Just Dang. Powerful. Well Built. Actually had a good excuse for everything. I mean sure, he is a Doctor Doom pastiche, but he is solid campaign defining antagonist.

Day 2 - If I shouldn't count Continuum or Convergence Point, then I would say Champions. Not just Hero system, which I adore every edition below 6, but Champions. I am a superhero fan and I have a hard copy of almost every superhero game in existence (and a PDF for many I do not have). I was constantly on the look out for a good super hero game in the early years. Of every TTRPG, I have played and run this game the most. While I love Fringeworthy and Stalking the Night, Champions Hands Down.

I need to amend day 2. I do not use the book Champions-verse. I play supers worlds I made up. So if it had to be a published world, it would be Fringeworthy.

Day 1 - Game Table in Campbell, CA. Alas, all the Game Tables are closed (as there used to be three). Melee, Wizard, Ogre, Bushido. (I bought some dice at a local model store... which I do not count). I had been playing for a while, just never gone to a "real store" (nor one this far away from home on my own (okay with friends)).
 
but... there's no role-playing in them...
But there is little to no roleplaying in combat in most D&D chronicles (and other generic adventure fantasy games.... or a lot of other games.. (except super heroes) )
 
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