Tabletop games thread

[chitoryu12]

Chain fire is a risk with all blackpowder revolvers and that is why you are supposed to put wax on the chamber to seal it.

Besides, the revolver shotgun is faster to fire than a double barreled shotgun and reloading a single shot takes the same time with either gun. That is why you should carry spare guns or habve buddies who keep you covered while you reload, that is an issue with all cap and ball guns. (Which is still a bit faster than loading a flintlock for example.)

It only takes the same time to reload a cap and ball revolver as a shotgun if that shotgun is a caplock. The game takes place in 1875, when many shotguns are 12 gauge cartridge guns. In GURPS it takes about 10 to 30 seconds to load a single chamber in a caplock gun (depending on whether you've got paper cartridges for revolvers and breech loaders or if you're just using loose powder and ball) and about 3 seconds to reload one barrel in a cartridge shotgun. It's literally the only repeating shotgun available in 1875, which is the appeal, but it has a ton of issues that make it less than ideal (it's also less reliable; in GURPS terms, meaning it takes a lower roll than usual to cause a misfire).

And while chain fire is always a problem with cap and ball guns, most of them simply break the gun and scare the crap out of you. With a revolver rifle or shotgun like the Colt 1855, your supporting hand is right in front of the cylinder where all the projectiles are going to come out. So not only does the gun blow apart, but your left hand is a mangled mess.

[Yla]

I was playing Shadowrun on Saturday. It was nice.

My character was a sniper, who was in a sort of indentured servitude to a corp and was assigned to the rest of the group by the Johnson.
The run's stated objective was to find some missing students from the University. The bus went off the grid somewhere on the highway.
We used our contacts to get satellite images up to where the bus left the road, then followed the trails through the desert. Most of the students had hidded in a warehouse somewhere and we defused the developing situation with a gang boss who wanted to do business in that warehouse. We ended up fighting some guardian spirits the students had summoned for self-defense, but got everyone out alive and happy (especially the gang boss).
The last missing student was in a nearby bar, but when we entered the building, we ended up in a fight between a shaman with three Fire Spirits and a group of bikers. We tried to fight nonlethally at first until we would figure out what was going on, but the spirits were wiping the floor with us. We had to shoot the shaman so the spirits would release.
Turns out the last student had orchestrated the whole thing at the suggestion of the shaman in order to bring him some data she had stolen (with her classmates left in the desert as collateral damage). But she got cold feet and when the shaman became angry, the bikers tried to defend her.
We got all the students home safely, and since our Johnson hadn't told us about the data, we managed to get a bonus out of him before we destroyed the disc.
My character was supposed to ensure that last point anyway (on account of her background), but I hadn't twigged to that, so the GM held back one Karma point.

Funny trivia: despite being a weapons specialist, my char came home without having fired a single shot. All I ended up actually doing in a fight was throwing two bottles of water at the fire spirits.

[Vypernight]

Ran through my third adventure in All Things Zombie, losing all three of my teams in the process (with only my main character surviving).  All of the rest were eaten by zombies, well except for 3:  One got trampled by frantic people trying to escape a building, one got bitten and I had to kill him, and one simply disappeared (random event). 

Also, we encountered a second group in one house and started to work together when the leader of the group, an old man, started arguing with a teen in the group.  I decided, "**** this!" and we left, though when we got far enough away, we noticed the yelling had attacted zombies.  Before we could get close enough, the curious zombies entered the house, the yells turned to screams, and we decided the scenic route was a much better idea.

[Askold]

Things that happened in yesterday's game:

Our clan was finishing up the looting and raiding of a small village and my character came across a random old man with a sword. Most of the defenders had already been slain and we had split up to check the village.  My character was guiding a few of our mercenaries just to make sure that they don't accidentally harm the local shamans (VERY bad idea) or anyone that we weren't at war with. And at this time we are not harming women and children. (We're stealing their foor and more mouths to feed just makes the situation worse for the clan that we are fighting against.)

First I offer the old man the chance to run away but he refuses to do so. Arrow to the face it is then. Except that I shoot poorly so a scratch only make him angry and he charges at us. Five experienced mercenaries and a 16 year old youth. So naturally I tell the others to stand back and charge at him with my axe. And the fight even starts well as I chop off one of his legs.

Then I fumble and have my axe get stuck in the ground. And the old guy loses his sword. So I decide to go to work with my knife. Which he knocks off my hand. And then we wrestle. My character is fighting an ancient one legged guy and LOSING...

In the system which we are using fighting is pretty dangerous but the only weapon that my character is actually good at is his bow while the old man, though frail, is exterely skilled. Except that his injuries and bloodloss mean that he often fails and as his wounds slowly get worse so does his ability to fight. But he did get another good blow that made my main hand nearly useless so I'm not doing much better than him...

The mercenaries and the rest of the players laugh as the fight keeps on going and going. At one point (after I found my knife again) he was completely defenseless but my char just managed to slightly cut his left hand. "He's just lying on his back completely exhausted but when you try to strike he blocks with his hand perfectly."

I did win eventually and got a sword for myself (Swords are really rare and a sign of position and power.) which I unfortunately don't know how to use.

And then we looted a few buildings. Well, naturally we took everything that wasn't nailed down inside the buildings but we also took apart few of them and dragged them with our boats to our home. (Our clan's original dwellings were burnt down by a rival clan and we are playing as the survivors that are trying to get revenge and rebuild the clan.)

[chitoryu12]

Update on the guy who wants all the unusual guns. He tried to get himself a literal hand cannon. As in a portable artillery piece that fires 1'' or 3'' shells. When I pointed out the ridiculous implausibility of that kind of gun, he started trying to get an 8 bore elephant gun.

He's got this obsession with uniqueness and a sort of spaghetti view of a realistic game world. I mean, he can force the issue all he wants and I could easily approve the crazy crap. But it would all be treated under the same realism rules as the rest of the party and he just wouldn't have fun with it. He said he doesn't want a "cookie-cutter" character, but he's overcompensating and going too far to the other side.

I do need as many players as possible to keep a game going online, where commitment issues can spring up from anyone just if they get bored and leave, but I'm afraid that his duo isn't going to last long unless he shapes up.

[Zygarde]

So this Wednesday my group of friends (four of us) played some D&D with me as the GM and gods was it funny nothing is never as satisfying as seeing my friends dick of a paladin get eaten by a pack of dire wolves.

[chitoryu12]

I'm currently running a GURPS old west treasure hunting campaign on the official SJGames forum with an eclectic group of characters: a pair of Italian brothers (one is an obese and greedy merchant/explosives expert and the other is a giant of a gunslinger with Marfan Syndrome), a frontiersman tracker, an Irish doctor, and a female ranch hand. Right now they're in the middle of an attempt on their lives at a hotel in Independence, Missouri.

The fat brother was given mild arsenic poisoning while eating (still hasn't figured it out and just thinks he's got food poisoning or something), and during his trip to the bathroom he's now being shot at by an assassin. So we've got a fat guy with super diarrhea ducking down into a lavatory stall with his pants around his ankles ducking bullets being shot through the stall partition, while the frontiersman and giant brother watch through the doorway before responding.

I don't think any of them know about the bomb the guy has yet.

[Random Gal]

I've run a campaign twice with different groups of players; the first in D&D 3.5 and the second in Pathfinder. There have been some good moments.

Especially noteworthy was this one guy in the first group who was an extreme risk-taker adrenaline junkie type in real life. He carried this trait over to the game world, and as a result, four of the six deaths in the campaign happened to characters played by him. My personal favorite of these was when the rest of the party had gone into a dungeon ahead of his fighter. He decided to walk down a corridor full of muddy water without checking for hazards carefully enough. There was a ten-foot pit (underwater) in the middle of the corridor and he was wearing full plate armor.

He's also brought a lot of grief on the party by instantly grabbing the shiny things without looking first.

As a DM, I've also had a lot of fun knowing that a pool of water and a pool of concentrated hydrochloric acid are really difficult to distinguish from one another. Both parties managed to avoid getting hurt, but I did have to remind the second party's cleric that summoning a celestial dog and sending it into the pool just to see if it died would be considered an evil act.

Also, stringing several different traps together into one massive conga line of pain can be amusing.

[chitoryu12]

I'm having loads of fun fucking with my party in the ongoing GURPS old west game. None of them really know what kind of danger they're in by participating in the treasure hunt (i.e. none of them prepared for assassins attacking them from day 1), so they didn't really prepare for a fight and they're not thinking clearly. They don't seem to expect the bad guys to be smart, and they act like there's not information being hidden from them.

As expected, none of them knew about the bomb. Even worse, when the guy dug his hand into his coat pocket and threatened to "blow us all to hell", the big strong Italian giant decided to yank his arm out of his coat.

His hand came out holding the end of a friction igniter.

Currently the Italians are bolting out the door, while the frontiersman is crawling for the opposite end of the bathroom to avoid the explosion. Not only does this make him terrifically vulnerable (he's unarmed due to local laws), but he's still in the room with the bomb!

And no, they haven't predicted that it's an incendiary grenade, rather than just a simple iron sphere full of black powder.

Current plan is for the assassin to bolt out after the Italians, drop the bomb in the T-intersection just outside the door to block both the lobby and the bathroom with an explosion and flames, and run out the back. Both parties will need to work together to rescue the guy in the bathroom from the fire, and the assassin likely escapes to attack them again.