In which we share our gaming related insanities but receive comfort that these things are totally normal

[spittingimage]

Which Pubber did that? That’s definitely the right insanity.

Wasn't one of us. It was a marine scientist who has a genuine reason for knowing facts like those

 

[Baulderstone]

I spent months researching a 80-page document for a RPG set in the Rhine Valley in the second half of the thirteenth century. Just play Warhammer!

That won't help. I run Warhammer, which provides me with more than enough setting material to run a game, but that isn't stopping me from currently reading a 1000-page history of the Thirty Years War and raiding Matthäus Merian's Topographia Germaniae for details and illustrations of communities of the time period.

Topographia Germanie is one of the great proto-RPG supplements. Merian even gave a lot of them numbered keys. Along with the invention of Kriegspiel, this book deserves a place in the Museum of German Contributions to Gaming.

 

[AsenRG]

You all sound pretty normal to me...

 

[bleys21]

You all sound pretty normal to me...

 

[spittingimage]

You all sound pretty normal to me...

I am. I'm only doing this because the dog-vampire that lives in my hair says it's necessary to protect the world from the CIA galaxy-devourer.

 

[Midas]

PCs go to planets on space-liners and do Mission-Impossible shit. They care about the planets' societies. None of the astronomy matters a damn. But it is as @thebigh said: if any of the astronomy or planetary science were wrong someone would be complaining that the moon Odysseus ought to be tide-locked to Polyphemus and have a longer day, or that Navabharata is so hot that, given its size and gravity all its water ought to have evaporated to space by Jeans escape.

I solved that problem very simply.
"Hey! You're right! According to observations and the resultant math, all the moons inside Regina's orbit should have been destroyed by gravity. Yet there they are. Do you want me to design a scenario where you investigate how this is possible?"

"Uh, no."
"Good! So '...as you maneuver into port you observe all the other moons of the gas giant in their proper places' ".

 

[Midas]

Strine is a dialect of English in which the mouth is half-closed and the lips barely move.

Never noticed that but yeah "Strine" does sound like Australian. My example is mine, what I call "Nevada Salt Flat." Think Clint Eastwood or Kirk Douglas. Hungarian is the opposite, with subtle lip movement defining the entire sentence. When I studied Magyar, we all had "horrible American accents" and nobody could tell the difference between me, Da Yooper, the Good Ol' Boy, and the four guys with generic American accents.

But it was really hard for me. My normal accent required moving my lips about as much as a Grey Alien. ;)

 

[Kobayashi]

I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time translating and redoing a lot of character sheets for too many rpgs I didn't even run or play.

I also wrote a game just to get ideas out of my head that were interfering with the writing of another game...

 

[David Johansen]

I put massive amounts of time into writing games even I will never play. I guess that 's crazy.

 

[Toadmaster]

That won't help. I run Warhammer, which provides me with more than enough setting material to run a game, but that isn't stopping me from currently reading a 1000-page history of the Thirty Years War and raiding Matthäus Merian's Topographia Germaniae for details and illustrations of communities of the time period.

Topographia Germanie is one of the great proto-RPG supplements. Merian even gave a lot of them numbered keys. Along with the invention of Kriegspiel, this book deserves a place in the Museum of German Contributions to Gaming.

This is my major distraction as well.

"I just want to get a little more detail so I'll get a general history book for the period", end up ordering 16 books of increasingly finer detail... Why yes, I do need a book on the history of home and street lighting.

True story

Disenchanted Light

 

[Sharrow]

So, I am off and on, ever so slowly, converting/using as inspiration the spaceships from Space Opera to GURPS. Well, when I'm not deciding to convert to TNE instead. Or some other system, as I cast around for the perfect system and ship design system (and of course there's no such thing).

This is normal, right?

 

[AsenRG]

So, I am off and on, ever so slowly, converting/using as inspiration the spaceships from Space Opera to GURPS. Well, when I'm not deciding to convert to TNE instead. Or some other system, as I cast around for the perfect system and ship design system (and of course there's no such thing).

This is normal, right?

Sounds exactly like my search for the Perfect Wuxia System (That I Can Actually Run Without Burning Out Due To The Weight Of Mechanics, Or I Would Have Just Used LotW)! So yeah, pretty normal for the site you're on!

 

[AsenRG]

I put massive amounts of time into writing games even I will never play. I guess that 's crazy.

Who on this site doesn't do that?!?

 

[Gringnr]

I buy every set of "Fantasy Trip" dice that Steve Jackson Games puts out. Even though they're just plain, ordinary six-siders in different sizes amd colors (except for the few polyhedrals they've put out).

 

[Marktplatz]

That won't help. I run Warhammer, which provides me with more than enough setting material to run a game, but that isn't stopping me from currently reading a 1000-page history of the Thirty Years War and raiding Matthäus Merian's Topographia Germaniae for details and illustrations of communities of the time period.

Topographia Germanie is one of the great proto-RPG supplements. Merian even gave a lot of them numbered keys. Along with the invention of Kriegspiel, this book deserves a place in the Museum of German Contributions to Gaming.

Being obsessed with good handouts for my game, these are great.

Here's a massive repository with I think every page of it scanned in fairly high resolution.

 

[TheSaint]

I buy every set of "Fantasy Trip" dice that Steve Jackson Games puts out. Even though they're just plain, ordinary six-siders in different sizes amd colors (except for the few polyhedrals they've put out).

I still use the same set of six Traveller dice (black with red pips) that I hand-painted when I was a teenager. They're probably about forty years old at this point.

 

[Baulderstone]

Being obsessed with good handouts for my game, these are great.

Here's a massive repository with I think every page of it scanned in fairly high resolution.
View attachment 58963

Thank you very much! I've been working from whatever I can randomly find online.

 

[spittingimage]

I still use the same set of six Traveller dice (black with red pips) that I hand-painted when I was a teenager. They're probably about forty years old at this point.

That seems like a long time for one coat of paint to last. What sort did you use? And have you had to retouch them at all?

 

[TheSaint]

That seems like a long time for one coat of paint to last. What sort did you use? And have you had to retouch them at all?

I didn't paint the whole die. What I did was buy black dice with white pips (because back in those days, you had two choices when it came to 6-sided dice: white with black pips or black with white pips) and then took the Testors gloss red enamel I had lying around in my scale modeling stuff and painted in the pips. I was the coolest kid on the block.

I am actually surprised that they have lasted as long as they have. They did spend a couple decades just sitting in a box when I went on hiatus from gaming.

 

[SmallbutVicious]

So, yesterday, partly inspired by something I saw mentioned on the pub, I sat down and roughly traced a tourist map of South Bohemia on Inkarnate, then put castles and ruins and stuff at all the marked places of tourist interest. Bronze and Iron Age archaeological sites are ruins off ancient long-lost civilisations. Giving places loose (sometimes inaccurate) translations has left me with a geologically plausible campaign setting filled with evocatively-named adventure sites like the Eagle's Nest, the Red House and the Castle of Beasts.

 

[TheSaint]

When I ran the Drawing of the Dark campaign, what, almost 25 years ago now, I did something very similar to that. I went down to Borders and bought a tourist map of Vienna, traced the streets onto hex paper at a reasonable scale, defined the city walls based on the Ringstrasse, and filled in the relevant locations from the story based on the descriptions in the novel. I'm positive it wasn't historically accurate, but it was close enough to fool a bunch of gamers who had never been to Vienna. Amusingly, when I got down to placing the tavern that is the heart of the book, my best guess for its location on the tourist map was a site that was simply described as "Roman Ruins". Worked for me.

 

[Telok]

Yeah, doing up a supers game I identified a rough geographical area I wanted a not-real mid size city. Used online maps to find a place within there to place it (bit of a curve where two rivers met & had a tiny town). Then used a RL city map (trimmed) to lay down big streets & such. Finally I went and found a tourist map of another RL city to do points of interest.

 

[Triumvir]

I feel seen.

I coded an Excel workbook to implement the entire GURPS Space 4th edition star system and planet generation sequence, including both the basic sequence (which starts with and lets you design a planet) and the advanced sequence (which starts with and lets you specify a star), and worked all the way through to the rotation rates and tides of all the planets and moons in every system — without using macros. Then I found a catalogue that combined the Hipparcos (positional) data about stars with all known data about them in speciality catalogues (age and metallicity, for instance), sorted them by distance, kept the 101,301 nearest to Earth, filled in the age and metallicity figures for the stars that lacked data, and built a version of the workbook that would draw names and corresponding data from that list to feed into the starsystem generator. Then I used data tables to build a version of that that would generate a system around every star within 175 light-years of Earth. Then I built a cut-down version of that that only does the 50 light-years nearest to Earth and used a data table to run that over and over (in batches of fifty universes) until a universe popped out that is suitable for the early history of my SF setting (nearest habitable planet at Tau Ceti, etc.). And then I generated the whole setting out to 175 light-years corresponding to that.

PCs go to planets on space-liners and do Mission-Impossible shit. They care about the planets' societies. None of the astronomy matters a damn. But it is as @thebigh said: if any of the astronomy or planetary science were wrong someone would be complaining that the moon Odysseus ought to be tide-locked to Polyphemus and have a longer day, or that Navabharata is so hot that, given its size and gravity all its water ought to have evaporated to space by Jeans escape.

I just came across this thread having spent appreciable time in the past couple of weeks 1) plotting out the Solomani Rim from Traveller and 2) re-doing the 2300AD setting using a real star list. augmented with artificially-generated dim stars further away from Earth where the catalogue stellar density was too low. Despite not having a Traveller or 2300 group right now, or realistically likely to for some time to come.

What's normal anyway??

 

[Silverlion]

I just came across this thread having spent appreciable time in the past couple of weeks 1) plotting out the Solomani Rim from Traveller and 2) re-doing the 2300AD setting using a real star list. augmented with artificially-generated dim stars further away from Earth where the catalogue stellar density was too low. Despite not having a Traveller or 2300 group right now, or realistically likely to for some time to come.

What's normal anyway??

Darn, I so want to play the latter and the former might be fun..

 

[E-Rocker]

I don't do anything as involved as most of the activities in this thread, but I do keep buying minis that I think would be cool to use in my game even though I don't use minis in my game.

 

[Telok]

I just wrote "anthro cowboy spiders [800 million, tech level 2, civ level 2]" about a planet in a setting document.

 

[MoonHunter]

I just wrote "anthro cowboy spiders [800 million, tech level 2, civ level 2]" about a planet in a setting document.

Not the oddest thing I have seen in a setting document. Besides I GM'ed Fringeworthy for a decade (and worked for Tri-Tac). My tolerance for worlds (and further reaches for newness) is pretty wide.

 

[Telok]

Not the oddest thing I have seen in a setting document. Besides I GM'ed Fringeworthy for a decade (and worked for Tri-Tac). My tolerance for worlds (and further reaches for newness) is pretty wide.

If the celestial being holding up the stars is 600 million km tall then its bacteria are about 200 km long.

I'm not sure what I'm doing with that little factiod yet. But now that its stuck in my brain I'll have to do something with it.

 

[Fenris-77]

I write an SRD for most new systems that really catch my eye. They don't all get completely finished, but they get written. I find it helps me grok the system, especially ones with a base system I already know but with important tweaks.

 

[Pampero]

I refuse to play (or run) games where the system is d6 only.

I turn seasons around in fantastic calendars so the seasons match with mine (the last month/December analog is the beginning of summer and winter comes in June).

 

[CRKrueger]

I think that depends a lot on what the local parrots are like. Ours like to disassemble things, including cars.

New Zealanders need to start catching these by the thousands and airdrop them all over Europe.

 

[spittingimage]

New Zealanders need to start catching these by the thousands and airdrop them all over Europe.

We have no quarrel with Europe. We airdropped them on Australia, and that's why there's nothing there but desert now.

 

[Silverlion]

I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time translating and redoing a lot of character sheets for too many rpgs I didn't even run or play.

I also wrote a game just to get ideas out of my head that were interfering with the writing of another game...

Oh, I feel you!

 

[MoonHunter]

Can I interest you in an under finished copies of Convergence Point, the setting of Blackbird or The Neo Frontiers (Core and the OVA) plus Night Hunters (Supernatural hunters), Fists of Justice (Martial arts), Waunderer's Way (expanded books for the core setting of Convergence Point), Comic Style Play, Ryders against the Storm, The Shadowed Edge, Buki Tournament of the Key, The Argon/ The Aegean, And about 20 others (with 1018 backups).

Oh want to see some sample characters: Here. (Those are all from settings I have done a lot of work on.) Here. Here.

I am stuck on a section of Convergence Point. Once I solve that, I will do a full re-edit and Continuum 2.0/ Convergence Point will be ready to go. Every time I get stuck on my game, as it has to be perfect, I write setting material or things adaptable to my game. Sometimes I just have setting ideas that I must get out of my head. And getting them out of my head is sometimes a lengthy process.

I am trying to make everything random I write for the game in one way or another. That way I can scoop up all this misc work and use it. And the characters I have been doing recently are all Example Characters for the NF books (and are part of the introduction so you get a feel for things).

I have been stuck mostly because of lack of focus due to blood pressure. Still I can work in spurts. I am now up to 1080 with about 60 total in the 16 - 128 pages of work range.

 

[Baulderstone]

I write an SRD for most new systems that really catch my eye. They don't all get completely finished, but they get written. I find it helps me grok the system, especially ones with a base system I already know but with important tweaks.

I love doing stuff like this.

I turn seasons around in fantastic calendars so the seasons match with mine (the last month/December analog is the beginning of summer and winter comes in June).

As an Australian, I approve.

 

[MoonHunter]

As an Australian, I approve.

I confused my players a lot because going North made things Hotter and Wetter, while South made things Colder. They did not grok that the Thirdland on Arth was simply in a "southern hemisphere" pattern. They were very North American I supposed.

 

[Gabriel]

I buy more RPGs than I will ever likely run or play. I often sell some without having done much more than skimmed them.

I might be one of the poster children for this one.

The cleaning/reorganizing bug bit me last week. I think I've discovered I'm more of a hoarder than I realized.

I continue to write setting material (and game material) for settings that not only I will not be able to play, but I am not sure anyone will ever get the chance to play.

I do this. I tend to start writing campaigns or at least have them stored in my head. If the ideas rot for too long without being used, they start to become things I'd want to play in rather than run, and therefore start becoming NPC theater extravaganzas, and therefore ensure they won't ever see the light of day.

I am not a fan of the online gaming myself. Even when my current online GM is pretty solid and the players are too. It’s just.. exhausting for some reason. The camera actually helps with the talking over, but it’s still multiple hours staring at a screen and is very fatiguing. I do it at work too and frankly I’m a bit tired of it.

The last I did online gaming was in text chat via IRC. It just wasn't for me. It inherently lacked so many of the intangibles that make TTRPGs worthwhile to me. There were also pacing issues with the inherent slowness of typing things out and the fact that the other participants were likely mucking around doing other things most of the time. It just wasn't what I wanted.

I haven't tried gaming with video chat. Honestly, I can't imagine I'd ever want to do such of thing over just playing an online video game. It's just that to me, not doing any TTRPGing at all is preferable to doing it with telecommunications.

There’s an organic synergy in face-to-face interactions that you just don’t get from a Zoom meeting.

Yes. It's the presence. It's the clatter of real dice. It's the tactile feel of miniatures. It's that feel of flipping through a real book. So many things that are difficult to articulate.

I buy every set of "Fantasy Trip" dice that Steve Jackson Games puts out. Even though they're just plain, ordinary six-siders in different sizes amd colors (except for the few polyhedrals they've put out).

I understand this completely. I was strong recently and resisted the lure of Monsters! Monsters! dice. I kept on telling myself that they were just d6s, but it was difficult regardless.

---

My thing is that whenever I would be enamored with a new game system, I'd start homebrewing it into something for my peculiar Robotech/Macross hybrid game. Torg? Convert Robotech to it! BESM? Start making Robotech for it! Tunnels and Trolls? Make a Robotech variant!

The idea has been cropping up again in my head recently with the GI Joe/Transformers RPGs. You know... I could use this to run Robotech! But I've managed to resist my very peculiar obsessive compulsive trait in this instance.

Please tell me that I'm not alone and other people do this type of thing where they have something they like and when they find a system they're enamored with they immediately start trying to slap the two together.

 

[AsenRG]

I might be one of the poster children for this one.

The cleaning/reorganizing bug bit me last week. I think I've discovered I'm more of a hoarder than I realized.

...you discovered more duplicates?

I have been stuck mostly because of lack of focus due to blood pressure. Still I can work in spurts. I am now up to 1080 with about 60 total in the 16 - 128 pages of work range.

That's nothing short of impressive!

 

[Agemegos]

First step, calculate the density of a turtle...

They swim at depth, and neither sink to the bottom nor bob to the surface. So they can probably vary it a little bit, but the density of a turtle is very close to the density of water.

 

[MoonHunter]

That's nothing short of impressive!

Thank, you. I am trying. (and 1080 +60 mostly worthy setting over a decade plus of noodling, still is good just not as impressive).