What are y'all up to these days?

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I’m particularly annoyed at myself for not putting my foot down with one of the players who is chronically disengaged. On his phone all the time, or on his computer working for fuck’s sake
I consider this behavior to be disrespectful and unacceptable at the table. When players start questioning a GM's judgement it starts a death-spiral that is almost impossible to avert. To put it bluntly, you are in a classic "throwing pearls before swine" situation.

You might just be better off scrapping the whole thing and sitting things out until you find some players that are better matched. There's no shame in it. I've have gone without running a game for years because I didn't have the right players to appreciate my vision. I used that time to improve my craft, hang out on gaming boards, and tinker around with new settings until the right players came along.

I recommend that you try rolling everything on the GM side in the open with no fudging. I realize that it sounds counter-intuitive for the kind of game you are trying to run but I find that rolling in the open builds credibility and trust with the players. Perhaps even more importantly, it generates tension and drama. If you play your cards right, you will regularly have the entire table standing up, intensely focused on the result of your next roll.
 
Just to be clear, I’m unlikely to leave this group of folks - we’ve been gaming together for more than a decade, and we are all friends. Just some very annoying behavior. It’s fine for now, as we have a couple of other campaigns I’m not running coming along, and I’m fine with just sitting back snd being the best player I can.

the disengaged player, though, will require the talking to. Everyone is right that it is disrespectful, we all know that. We’re not spring chickens. I’m just tired of being a person who puts their foot down :smile:

besides, right now I just don’t have it in me to run one. I’ve been having good days at work, everything is moving great, but it’s HUGE and I end up exhausted. I just don’t have the energy for one. I’ll take what I got and focus on health
 
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Actually plotting a Masquerade game.

One that's meant to be the ultimate "Fuck you!" to V5 and all those who support it and instead shows there is a better way to play a vampire game.

Goths and Punks Fuck Off!
 
That is why you fail. :devil:

Seriously though, you’re not going to end meta-thinking in the Game Mechanics realm by trading it for meta-thinking in the Narrative realm. The only way to ditch meta-thinking is by internalized Roleplaying. Get people to be thinking as a real person in a real world, they won’t be meta-thinking.

I couldn't agree more, at least for me as a player. If I am Johnny Three-bet trying to survive in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I am not Bill in Florida in an unchanged modern world. When I decide what to do, I don't think game rules, I think about how many rounds in I have for my M4 and whether that elf would like some strange. Bennies or any kind of meta-currency would take me right up to Bill sitting at the table, playing a board game against the GM.

When I run, I run games that I would enjoy for players who enjoy the same kind of games. When I write game rules, I do the same.
 
I consider this behavior to be disrespectful and unacceptable at the table. When players start questioning a GM's judgement it starts a death-spiral that is almost impossible to avert. To put it bluntly, you are in a classic "throwing pearls before swine" situation.

You might just be better off scrapping the whole thing and sitting things out until you find some players that are better matched. There's no shame in it. I've have gone without running a game for years because I didn't have the right players to appreciate my vision. I used that time to improve my craft, hang out on gaming boards, and tinker around with new settings until the right players came along.

I recommend that you try rolling everything on the GM side in the open with no fudging. I realize that it sounds counter-intuitive for the kind of game you are trying to run but I find that rolling in the open builds credibility and trust with the players. Perhaps even more importantly, it generates tension and drama. If you play your cards right, you will regularly have the entire table standing up, intensely focused on the result of your next roll.
All of this, especially the last paragraph.
And yes, Raleel Raleel I know you're going to be a player now. But the bug is going to get to you eventually, you know that and we know you know...:devil:

I couldn't agree more, at least for me as a player. If I am Johnny Three-bet trying to survive in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I am not Bill in Florida in an unchanged modern world. When I decide what to do, I don't think game rules, I think about how many rounds in I have for my M4 and whether that elf would like some strange. Bennies or any kind of meta-currency would take me right up to Bill sitting at the table, playing a board game against the GM.

When I run, I run games that I would enjoy for players who enjoy the same kind of games. When I write game rules, I do the same.
Took me a while to get (back) to this same place, but yes, I agree:thumbsup:.
 
Goths and punks were never what Vampire was about, as much as they jumped in with both spikey boots. I always found that crowd pretty comical, no offense to anyone who's still hiding white face paint and black eyeliner in their tickle trunk.
 
Just to be clear, I’m unlikely to leave this group of folks - we’ve been gaming together for more than a decade, and we are all friends. Just some very annoying behavior. It’s fine for now, as we have a couple of other campaigns I’m not running coming along, and I’m fine with just sitting back snd being the best player I can.

the disengaged player, though, will require the talking to. Everyone is right that it is disrespectful, we all know that. We’re not spring chickens. I’m just tired of being a person who puts their foot down :smile:

besides, right now I just don’t have it in me to run one. I’ve been having good days at work, everything is moving great, but it’s HUGE and I end up exhausted. I just don’t have the energy for one. I’ll take what I got and focus on health
You‘ve known them for years, that’s weird. Why are they accusing you of cheating? Have they been accusing you of cheating for years? Has this one guy been on his phone and doing work on his laptop for years?
 
You‘ve known them for years, that’s weird. Why are they accusing you of cheating? Have they been accusing you of cheating for years? Has this one guy been on his phone and doing work on his laptop for years?
yes? friends are weird, man. largely we'd bury bodies for each other. maybe they are serious about accusing me, or what.
 
After a very protracted depressive episode I am rather suddenly feeling much better. And this has been going on for over two weeks now, so I'm pretty happy about it.

I have lined up a few friends to play a stand-alone adventure in my old SF setting Flat Black. Their characters are going to be a team of "effectives" working for the secretive College of Archivists, sent to a backward planet to investigate the disappearance of a Member of the College, and if necessary and possible to rescue her. I have just finished designing ForeSight characters for the players who did not wish to do that themselves. i think it's going to go well.

Unfortunately this adventure involves players in Australia (who will be playing after putting their kids to bed on Saturday night) and the UK and France (who will be playing in the late morning and noontide of Saturday). That is not going to be sustainable for an indefinite campaign, and scheduling even three sessions of it was a bit of a struggle. I'm going to have to scare up something else for a long-term supply. But for now things are looking good.
 
Way ahead of you!
  • The three sessions are scheduled for the 10th, 24th, and 31st of July.
  • One of the players already wants more following a James Bond 007 adventure I ran in April, another after a campaign of mine he played in 26 years ago.
  • And if my mojo is back the high note is going to shatter wine-glasses at fifty metres.
 
Animal Powered 10: Shark
Half shark, half man! .. They bite, they fight!

Jawesome!

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Continued our Masks of Nyarlathotep game Monday evening. We're still in the prologue chapter in Peru.
After arriving in Puno, they spent most of the session chatting with Nayra the wise woman, learning lots of local folklore, as well as some recent goings-on involving a pale and severe looking man drifting through the area and the young woman that went missing. They continued their journey to the ruins and had a couple close calls with the kharisiri, but in both incidents they were able to effectively scare them off without any real bloodshed. They met and helped some local ranchers and were given a safe place to rest up before the final leg. We ended the session with the party just cresting the ridge to look at the ancient pyramid in the highlands.
One more session ought to complete the chapter.
 
Finally heard from a couple of my customers on Drivethru. Months go by and some sales, no reviews, very few ratings. But I'm kinda late finishing the Rahat Khan adventures in my Silk Road setting. I guess "Rahat's Lance" should be out by now and two customers have messaged me to complain.

It's actually good to know that they played the first two adventures.
 
Animal Powered 10: Shark
Half shark, half man! .. They bite, they fight!

Jawesome!

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But who dares to jump the shark:grin:?

Finally heard from a couple of my customers on Drivethru. Months go by and some sales, no reviews, very few ratings. But I'm kinda late finishing the Rahat Khan adventures in my Silk Road setting. I guess "Rahat's Lance" should be out by now and two customers have messaged me to complain.

It's actually good to know that they played the first two adventures.
What did they complain about?
 
Played the next part of the Aliens demo adventure. When last we left out, a chest burster came out of someone and got away. Our pilot (who had stayed on the pc ship in the first part), decides to come onto the ship we're trying to rescue and search for drugs (as the character is a druggie). They end up finding a damaged freezer with some alien egg sacs that seemingly had died. However, there were some kind of mushrooms growing on them, and the idiot ate 2.

We rand into the slightly larger alien later, and got lucky and killed it. Our ship's engine goes critical somehow, we detach it, and it blows up. The corporate shill tries to escape into a secret escape pod after we discover he had info on the aliens before the colony the ship he was on was sent to rescue them. We tied him up for later. We left off from there, as we got a late start (the gm forgot it was game night, so was up late the night before, and was still asleep when I got there lol).
 
Currently running shadow of the demon lord. Having a lot of fun with it. It's a bit more combat focused than I normally enjoy, but it has been an interesting adjustment. The magic system is probably the best part of the system. I love how many different schools of magic there are and how distinct it makes characters of the same class. Really looking forward to his next game. Not really playing a dark fantasy game with it, but it still works well. Been house ruling out the things I don't like though.

Been making my own OSR game that I can pick up when I'm feeling that kind of game. It's going well :smile:

Not exactly sure what I have planned for my next game, but this campaign still has legs, so that's okay.
 
Ran my first Cryptworld session using the Pacesetter Action Table. It was interesting! I got lost a couple times (I think), and it was somewhat difficult for me to follow what the players were saying while looking things up on the table and clicking around on Roll20. Guess I'm just getting old. But I love how the table includes different contingencies for different types of action.

They call it "gritty," but that should be a good thing for a horror RPG, I think.
 
First day back in-person gaming, ran City of Mist at the LGS. It was great. I mean I enjoy gaming, but it's clear to me that something about gaming in person is much more of a gaming high for me. It's probably some combination of the peripheral social interaction and the heightened player interplay that you don't get in voice chat.
 
Just trying to survive the heat wave we are currently suffering through
Ditto. I have a heat pump but it just probably wasn't sized to handle this heat. It was 103 on the thermometers outside. I think the pump is sized to handle a 20 degree differential so 83 nominally inside but I have a 3 story house with most bedrooms on the top floor. So 93 upstairs or so. Doing everything I can to help my poor pump.
 
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Ditto. I have a heat pump but it just probably wasn't sized to handle this heat. It was 103 on the thermometers outside. I think the pump is sized to handle a 20 degree differential so 83 nominally inside but I have a 3 story house with most bedrooms on the top floor. So 93 upstairs or so. Doing everything I can to help my poor pump.
So far we're doing OK. Yesterday evening the AC was failing to keep up and the main floor crept up to 72 but amazingly the upstairs seems to be only a few degrees warmer than the main floor. We thought about bedding down on the main floor but with a fan blowing air in from our master bath, the bedroom wasn't bad at all. We'll see how things go today with the even warmer temperatures...
 
I'm staying off Twitter. Especially after the nuTSR thread:thumbsup:!

Oh, and we had rain and hail here yesterday. Just my luck to be outside with the kids at the time (though we were in a train during the hail).
But at least the time is more bearable now:shade:!
 
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Ditto. I have a heat pump but it just probably wasn't sized to handle this heat. It was 103 on the thermometers outside. I think the pump is sized to handle a 20 degree differential so 83 nominally inside but I have a 3 story house with most bedrooms on the top floor. So 93 upstairs or so. Doing everything I can to help my poor pump.

Only 103? It's 109 here in Portland right now, and was the same yesterday (and likely 110 tomorrow)

So far we're doing OK. Yesterday evening the AC was failing to keep up and the main floor crept up to 72 but amazingly the upstairs seems to be only a few degrees warmer than the main floor. We thought about bedding down on the main floor but with a fan blowing air in from our master bath, the bedroom wasn't bad at all. We'll see how things go
today with the even warmer temperatures...

My AC can't seem to keep the temp past 80 or so, even with a fan going in my room as well. Considering getting a second one, because I'm waking up in a sweat. We also had a power bump that knocked out power (and woke me up as my room was too hot), but thankfully everything turned back on. A blackout now would likely kill people
 
Only 103? It's 109 here in Portland right now, and was the same yesterday (and likely 110 tomorrow)



My AC can't seem to keep the temp past 80 or so, even with a fan going in my room as well. Considering getting a second one, because I'm waking up in a sweat. We also had a power bump that knocked out power (and woke me up as my room was too hot), but thankfully everything turned back on. A blackout now would likely kill people
You win. You're in hell and I'm just a few planes up from that.
 
In lieu of playing anything since our club hasn't really coalesced yet into any regular meeting, I have just published my first novel on Amazon, a sort of tongue-in-cheek space opera, Hot Halcon Nights. I basically had the germ of the idea as a role playing game, but of course the lockdown fell upon us and I started noodling it up as a story instead. I wrote it up because I was ready for a bit of comedy and I thought others might be as well.

Here's the blurb:
Genetically modified lemurs? What could possibly go wrong?

In the first part of the 81st Century, university professors still need to publish or perish.

Rutherford Payne-Dougald, Professor of Xeno-pology at the Stratford Hyperspace and Intraluminal Theoretical, Technical and Industrial State University, thought he had found the ideal solution when he received a grant from the school's athletic department to create model basketball players by genetically enhancing and ensapientizing lemurs.

Unfortunately, the plan went awry, leaving the professor out of a job and the lemurs, broke and unable to pay tuition, out of college and reduced to operating a seedy burlesque show in another star system of the Pan-Galactic Empire.

Now, several years later, Payne-Dougald has gone completely off the deep end and well and truly become a mad scientist, vowing revenge upon the lemurs and upon the society that rejected him. The only thing standing between him and utter mayhem is the inexperienced and ill-equipped crew of the Pan-Galactic patrol cruiser Ivens.

Can our heroes (such as they are) defend the innocent and enforce the law in the face of a corrupt, venal, and decaying society and bring the wicked to some sort of justice?
 
My Savage Worlds group is going to meet in-person (partially) this coming weekend for the first time since February 2020!!! I say partially because pandemic-related stuff drove one of my players out of Chicago & back to her original home of rural Pennsylvania, so she will still have to be remote. But the rest of us can hug & clink glasses and all that fun stuff!! I'm pretty excited, in case you can't tell :smile: .
 
Man, we had a brutal session of Carcosa yesterday. It opened with a desperate battle where they recklessly committed to taking a fortress. The party was victorious at the cost of three dead. They won the fortress but were too diminished to hold it and ended up abandoning it within 24 hours. It was fantasy fuckin' Vietnam. One of my wife's retainers* died and she took it really hard.

On the drive home after the game my wife was angry. Angry at the other players. Angry at at the senseless deaths of PCs and NPCs that she had grown attached to. Angry at the meaningless and uncaring world of Carcosa. Angry that her character's life was on a razor's edge and can be lost in an instant due to sheer bad luck. Angry that she had emotionally invested in her character and saying she had to disconnect.

I made a detour for dinner and drinks to discuss it more. The anger gave way to tears (!) over the many lives squandered** for no gain, the sheer depressing state of humanity and their hopeless condition on Carcosa. I explained that the other players recklessly gamble with lives including their own and that she needs to stand up and say she won't participate in their half-baked plans any more (IC of course). I also revealed one of my game's final secrets- that Man can eventually overcome their cosmic foes through tremendous sacrifice and developing their own potential. I also let her know there are fucking nukes out there in the wastes that can take out even an Old One.

I have to do some thinking about the game. My goal was to make Carcosa brutal and nihilistic but I am saddened that it upset Bunny so much to the point where she says she can't emotionally invest.

*Nora and Savah, Green Woman mercenaries in exile because their love was forbidden by tribal taboo.
** The death rate among NPCs is ridiculous. Signing up as a mercenary with the PCs is a death sentence. We have had one (1) session where a retainer didn't die!
 
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It's currently not too hot here, roughly 23-25 celsius max during the day. But unfortunately it's very humid. You get sticky easily at the slightest physical effort. There's also rain a couple of times a day. It smells and feels like the tropics at times. Very unpleasant to wear a rain suit on my bicycle atm.
 
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