What are y'all up to these days?

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Skarg said:
Yeah. I have Phoenix Command books. The problem for me isn't the amount of math, but the amount of tables. GURPS is very playable for me not just because the math is easy for me, but because the math makes sense to me, so I can memorize it. Large tables remove most/all of that (and also make it much less useful for taking the ideas to another system, i.e. GURPS). But also, the math that can be analyzed, didn't pass my sniff tests in some key places, such as experience increasing the ability to handle bullet wounds so much.

A few people have claimed to have mastered Phoenix Command well enough to make it playable. I'd gladly play if they were facilitating, but I'm not going to invest the skills to be able to do that myself.


FWIW, at least the more advanced math in GURPS Vehicles is about designing/building vehicles, not about using them in play.
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Exactly, and that is the difference between a well designed ttrpg like GURPS and the abominations that is Phoenix Command. I've never had trouble memorizing GURPS mechanics/tables, after Rolemaster it was a breeze. lol Phoenix Command is just a nightmare.

Its an abomination.JPG
 
Skarg said:
FWIW, at least the more advanced math in GURPS Vehicles is about designing/building vehicles, not about using them in play.
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Likewise in FF&S, and a lot of the maths is hidden in the original. FF&S2 is a different matter (more maths, some of it pretty fiddly), but it's main issues were to do with the publishers. FF&S/TNE actually had reasonably lightweight rules for vehicles (by my standards), aside from spaceships (but I submit that if you're using multi-million credit spaceships for more than plot facilitators, they deserve being treated with detail).
 
Skarg said:
Yeah. I have Phoenix Command books. The problem for me isn't the amount of math, but the amount of tables. GURPS is very playable for me not just because the math is easy for me, but because the math makes sense to me, so I can memorize it. Large tables remove most/all of that (and also make it much less useful for taking the ideas to another system, i.e. GURPS). But also, the math that can be analyzed, didn't pass my sniff tests in some key places, such as experience increasing the ability to handle bullet wounds so much.

A few people have claimed to have mastered Phoenix Command well enough to make it playable. I'd gladly play if they were facilitating, but I'm not going to invest the skills to be able to do that myself.
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They have the lighter version of Phoenix Command in some of their games, and it works really well - Aliens played well.
 
Acmegamer said:
I'm begging the mods step in and make the baaad baaad people stop talking about the horror that is Phoenix Command! Haven't we been tormented enough! Plus Sorrows mention of Fire and Fusion and GURPS vehicles! What have I stumbled into? A math BDSM dungeon? Where's my fucking safe word! Think of Abby will you!

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No more Phoenix command talk. Now talk about HERO but lift the restrictions against taking a disadvantage more than 3(4?) time and just keep halving the value. Starting heros will have 1200 points. You have 30 minutes to make your character. Must not use more than 1200. Must not use less than 1197.
 
Acmegamer said:
Exactly, and that is the difference between a well designed ttrpg like GURPS and the abominations that is Phoenix Command. I've never had trouble memorizing GURPS mechanics/tables, after Rolemaster it was a breeze. lol Phoenix Command is just a nightmare.

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Don't be shy, tell us how you really feel about Phoenix Command...:grin:
 
Should we switch to talk about Bram Stoker’s Dracula RPG or The Lawnmower Man: The Virtual Reality RPG?

There is of course also Living Steel but that is arguably a good RPG so probably not in the spirit of the current tangent…
 
I don't know either of these, I think*, except maybe Living Steel...:shade:

OTOH, if you people are looking for an RPG to discuss, can I gently** nudge you towards the Way of the Tiger RPG, which was going to by published by the now-seemingly-defunct Megara? It even had a rather extensive free demo document, which I am trying to locate, as it would simplify my current campaign a whole lot...but alas, I'm having no luck so far:crygoose:!



*I keep being amazed when I realize "hey, I've played that...fuck, it seems I ran that game, and then forgot its title::gooseshades:!"
**For some AsenRG-typical values of "gently":gooselove:!
 
I am again reminded that no matter how logical, reasonable, efficient, appropriate, or realistic it is you must NOT have an underground bunker thst has s room with an open area in the middle. The players are lazy bitchy doofs who end up spending an hour looking like
giphy-2821380683.gif
Therefore I am searching out luxury highrise penthouse floorplans so the next fight I csn have an exploding helicopter, a flying monkey daemon with a machine gun, and use those telekinesis powers to properly throw some dumb fuck player character off a 250 meter high balcony.
 
Telok said:
I am again reminded that no matter how logical, reasonable, efficient, appropriate, or realistic it is you must NOT have an underground bunker thst has s room with an open area in the middle. The players are lazy bitchy doofs who end up spending an hour looking like
View attachment 79312
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MV5BMmI1YTNlNjUtMjk4NS00YWZiLWI5NjktZjY5ZjRhZDJmMzQ2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjgxNTAwNjQ@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg

Telok said:
Therefore I am searching out luxury highrise penthouse floorplans so the next fight I csn have an exploding helicopter, a flying monkey daemon with a machine gun, and use those telekinesis powers to properly throw some dumb fuck player character off a 250 meter high balcony.
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oh-i-like-593897.jpg
 
Telok said:
Therefore I am searching out luxury highrise penthouse floorplans so the next fight I csn have an exploding helicopter, a flying monkey daemon with a machine gun, and use those telekinesis powers to properly throw some dumb fuck player character off a 250 meter high balcony.
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I think my best effort along those lines was the time I had a troll tackle a PC and then leap off the mile-high tower they were on. Trolls regenerate, PCs not so much.
 
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Raleel said:
I think I'm in burn out. I'm lying awake, and often I think about RPGs to go back to sleep and I'm just out of fresh ideas. Just completely out. I can't even think of any interesting character ideas, let alone settings or worlds.
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It must be pretty late or very early over there - you need to crash mate, and probably skip a day of work to regain your mojo
 
Mankcam said:
It must be pretty late or very early over there - you need to crash mate, and probably skip a day of work to regain your mojo
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3am. I was asleep for 4-5 hours. I'll probably get back to sleep but the burn out thing came to my mind. I also remembered I was a day off on my Copenhagen trip and it affects multiple other people so a little anxiety there. I've just never had burn out so I'm kinda confused
 
Raleel said:
I think I'm in burn out. I'm lying awake, and often I think about RPGs to go back to sleep and I'm just out of fresh ideas. Just completely out. I can't even think of any interesting character ideas, let alone settings or worlds.
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Mankcam said:
It must be pretty late or very early over there - you need to crash mate, and probably skip a day of work to regain your mojo
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Raleel said:
3am. I was asleep for 4-5 hours. I'll probably get back to sleep but the burn out thing came to my mind. I also remembered I was a day off on my Copenhagen trip and it affects multiple other people so a little anxiety there. I've just never had burn out so I'm kinda confused
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Yeah, it does sound like burn out. I've had that twice.

Since the last time, my usual advice to fellow lifers is: take a week off of RPGs (not necessarily from the forum). "Exercise, read, watch movies, whatever - then you can restart when an RPG book attracts your attention":thumbsup:!

Oh, and you can visit the forum, but try not to think about your campaigns, just discuss other people's...

It worked for me:gooseshades:!
 
Using the Settlement Generator in the Savage Rifts Game Master's Handbook to roll up some settlements for my game.

Currently the PCs are in post-apocalyptic downstate Illinois. You can hold your jokes of downstate Illinois already being post-apocalyptic, I've already thought of them.
 
Just finished our weekly session. D&D 3.5, and I'm playing (for a change). My psychic warrior just got eaten by a mutant whale, and the barbarian leapt upon it, using his great axe like one of those worm hooks from Dune as it swam off. That's where we ended the session, on a nice cliffhanger.

The party is hilariously inept. No true casters, nobody with any meaningful skills in magic use or knowledge. The Barbarian/Bard does have a range of survival and social skills, and the 3rd party member (some kind of Rogue/Fighter) has some skill in sneaking and perception, but for 5th level characters they feel pretty bad at just about everything aside from hitting things with blunt objects or poking them with pointy sticks.
 
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Sharrow said:
Just finished our weekly session. D&D 3.5, and I'm playing (for a change). My psychic warrior just got eaten by a mutant whale, and the barbarian leapt upon it, using his great axe like one of those worm hooks from Dune as it swam off. That's where we ended the session, on a nice cliffhanger.

The party is hilariously inept. No true casters, nobody with any meaningful skills in magic use or knowledge. The Barbarian/Bard does have a range of survival and social skills, and the 3rd party member (some kind of Rogue/Fighter has some skill in sneaking and perception), but for 5th level characters they feel pretty bad at just about everything aside from hitting things with blunt objects or poking them with pointy sticks.
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So they’re destined for success, then.
 
Today, I'm running the the adventure me and Moracai Moracai sent to the Pub - using Mythras Classic Fantasy of course. I skipped on a couple hours of sleep to make pre-gens, but once you've joined a group dance, you dance or die...:gooseshades:

However, I'm ALSO going to use this as a way for people that weren't in on the first adventure to join my Orb campaign-in-progress:tongue:.

So it's all going to happen in the same reality and timeline as the original adventure. How, you might ask:shock:?

Their (various) gods are going to send them a dream. In it, they shall see themselves facing the same peril. And at the end, they'd get a warning: you didn't really [censored to avoid spoilers], those guys did, think about joining forces with them:grin:!

Hey, it serves my OOC goals: playtesting, getting new people exposed to the system painlessly, and possibly getting them interested to join. I find that to be a rather good idea, even if I say so myself:gooselove:!


You might almost say the times when I was running narrative games - hard to imagine for many of you, I know - haven't passed without a trace...::honkhonk:
 
E-Rocker said:
Using the Settlement Generator in the Savage Rifts Game Master's Handbook to roll up some settlements for my game.

Currently the PCs are in post-apocalyptic downstate Illinois. You can hold your jokes of downstate Illinois already being post-apocalyptic, I've already thought of them.
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Lower Illinois puts them near the heart of the Coalition. Any adjustments for the proximity / how hosed is the party trying to talk to anyone in the region thanks to human supremacists?

We just wrapped up a Savage Rifts campaign, we ran With Spartacus, adding a few adjustments at the end. (We still reach the same climax, but we added some weight to player actions from past campaigns.
 
Martial Arts In Metahumans Rising Part 23: Combat Sam.B.O.

This Russian grappling style isn't here to force you into submission. It will... Break you. Also, I think there is a red vs blue joke in here somewhere.

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Martial Arts In Metahumans Rising Part 23: Combat Sam.B.O. - House Dok Productions

Developed over the course of roughly twenty five years starting in the early 1920s, SAMBO combinds boxing, Wrestling, Judo, & Karate.
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Looks like my existing group is probably broken up for good, at least as far as ongoing campaigns go. Nothing bad - just one of those natural progressions of people's schedules and lives changing over the years. Since one of them was providing the play space, I'm starting to look around my area to find a good ongoing space for a weekly or twice-monthly game, since there are far too many people living in my house (including kids) to do it here. My goal is to try to identify some possibilities over the next couple of months, then maybe start recruiting some sort of non-heroic-fantasy game sometime in the summer. I'm going to shoot for an ongoing Call of Cthulhu campaign, but if I can't get enough players for that I'll go with something else, as long as it isn't people swinging swords and casting fireballs at orcs.
 
Certified said:
Lower Illinois puts them near the heart of the Coalition. Any adjustments for the proximity / how hosed is the party trying to talk to anyone in the region thanks to human supremacists?

We just wrapped up a Savage Rifts campaign, we ran With Spartacus, adding a few adjustments at the end. (We still reach the same climax, but we added some weight to player actions from past campaigns.
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Your campaign sounds fun!

I didn't make any adjustments when rolling up the settlements. Just went with purely random rolls for the fun of it. Incidentally, in my version of Rifts, the Coalition is smaller and less influential than they are RAW.
 
E-Rocker said:
Your campaign sounds fun!

I didn't make any adjustments when rolling up the settlements. Just went with purely random rolls for the fun of it. Incidentally, in my version of Rifts, the Coalition is smaller and less influential than they are RAW.
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The Coalition make a great punch clock villains, and can bring a lot to bear when you need to up the ante. In our last two campaigns, the players have skirted the Coalition, dealing with them in only a few adventures, typically before the main storyline kicks in completely.

For With Spartacus, the plot point campaign starts strong, but as the name of the campaign itself implies, and the back quarter foreshadows, you know how it's going to end. (The With Spartacus plot point campaign is from Atlantis and the Demon Seas.) The PCs reach Atlantis about half way through the campaign, get a day in the city, and are then thrown into this slave revolt and resistance plotline. They introduce some great characters , but Spartacus himself seems underdeveloped.

As a GM, I found myself trying to bring in all the NPCs that were introduced and are effectively sidelined once Sparty is on the scene. More so, the final battle takes in no consideration of past actions from the players,, which was a surprising letdown following Souls of Darkness from Arcana and Mysticism which we had run previously which very much sets players up for success, or failure, based on their actions in the campaign. Instead, I found myself leveraging the "filler" stories between the plot point stories to create downstream momentum for the final conflict. This worked out surprisingly well as the PCs actions meant that a contingency of rogue Tattooed Warriors, a small detachment from a World War II airborne division that the PCs trained to use modern power armor, a mad Elemental Fusionist, and even a Demigod showed up to the last fight. There was even this heightened moment of tension when the players realized that no other reinforcements were coming. (I had these units arriving on subsequent turns, so that each of them had a moment to shine.) In the end, I gave them an option to escape with them, but the players decided to make it easier for their specialty units to escape over taking a slightly harder path to flee with them.
 
Certified said:
The Coalition make a great punch clock villains, and can bring a lot to bear when you need to up the ante. In our last two campaigns, the players have skirted the Coalition, dealing with them in only a few adventures, typically before the main storyline kicks in completely.

For With Spartacus, the plot point campaign starts strong, but as the name of the campaign itself implies, and the back quarter foreshadows, you know how it's going to end. (The With Spartacus plot point campaign is from Atlantis and the Demon Seas.) The PCs reach Atlantis about half way through the campaign, get a day in the city, and are then thrown into this slave revolt and resistance plotline. They introduce some great characters , but Spartacus himself seems underdeveloped.

As a GM, I found myself trying to bring in all the NPCs that were introduced and are effectively sidelined once Sparty is on the scene. More so, the final battle takes in no consideration of past actions from the players,, which was a surprising letdown following Souls of Darkness from Arcana and Mysticism which we had run previously which very much sets players up for success, or failure, based on their actions in the campaign. Instead, I found myself leveraging the "filler" stories between the plot point stories to create downstream momentum for the final conflict. This worked out surprisingly well as the PCs actions meant that a contingency of rogue Tattooed Warriors, a small detachment from a World War II airborne division that the PCs trained to use modern power armor, a mad Elemental Fusionist, and even a Demigod showed up to the last fight. There was even this heightened moment of tension when the players realized that no other reinforcements were coming. (I had these units arriving on subsequent turns, so that each of them had a moment to shine.) In the end, I gave them an option to escape with them, but the players decided to make it easier for their specialty units to escape over taking a slightly harder path to flee with them.
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Thanks for the detailed info! Interesting!

How long did it take your group to play through the campaign? I mean, in terms of hours of playtime. Just curious.
 
E-Rocker said:
Thanks for the detailed info! Interesting!

How long did it take your group to play through the campaign? I mean, in terms of hours of playtime. Just curious.
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From May 2023 though March 2024, factor in a few missed weekly sessions, call it 40 sessions, and I'd guess 120 hours of play time, with a roughly 50 / 50 split of written adventures and in house generated storylines. That's also roughly 60/40 off and on Atlantis itself. The first half of the campaign starting in North America and then cruising around the ocean on a ship named the Iron Maiden. Should add that the published adventures before reaching Atlantis had a wealth of musical references, so I compiled a playlist of every song I caught in the campaign.

 
Looking up the population density of luxury high rise penthouses in mid size cities to figure out how many deaths the PCs caused bybtriggering a 30-40 meter diameter death zone.

These aren't your usual murder hobo PCs. They're international terrorist mass murderers with the emotional maturity of 5 year old kids.
 
Telok said:
Looking up the population density of luxury high rise penthouses in mid size cities to figure out how many deaths the PCs caused bybtriggering a 30-40 meter diameter death zone.

These aren't your usual murder hobo PCs. They're international terrorist mass murderers with the emotional maturity of 5 year old kids.
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That sounds like your usual murderhobo PC to me.
 
Fenris-77 said:
That sounds like your usual murderhobo PC to me.
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They want to rob an orphanage to turn the kids into wh40k orks, have tied themselves to a Nurgle cult, are willing pawns of mind flayers, want to become major Athas style defilers because it hurts people, leave loose major daemons in their wake, and will nuke cities from orbit just because they don't like someone in that city.

They're good at outrunning the problems & enemies they create until there's nowhere to run to, then dying in a TPK.
 
Telok said:
Looking up the population density of luxury high rise penthouses in mid size cities to figure out how many deaths the PCs caused bybtriggering a 30-40 meter diameter death zone.

These aren't your usual murder hobo PCs. They're international terrorist mass murderers with the emotional maturity of 5 year old kids.
Click to expand...
Good times, I recall fondly campaigns like that. You knew it was going to end in a total train wreck but the ride was a blast. lol
 
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