Tabletop Game Thread

[Askold]

GM of the longest campaign I've been playing has been living in Lapland for a few years now, due to his job. Usually we just play when he is visiting south but this time we got 5 of the players to do a road trip to Lapland and play there for a week. (It's a big campaign, there are 3 more players but not everyone could afford the trip or get enough vacation days for it.)

I also got more inspiration for the DH2 campaign and the players want to keep going so that's a thing as well still.

[Cloud3514]

So, methinks I've become a bit obsessed with Sentinels of the Multiverse lately. Local game shop had a blue moon sale (as in, they always have a sale when there's going to be a blue moon), so I got the core set for about 25% off. And since then, I've bought all of the boxed expansions (two "Mega Expansions" and four regular expansions in two "Double Expansion" boxes), save the one coming out this summer, as well as a handful of "mini-expansions" (read: clamshells with a single Hero, Villain or Environment). So, I've got 25 heroes, 22 regular villains, 15 villains balanced to be teamed together and 19 environments to fight the villains in.

The core set comes with 10 heroes, 4 villains and 4 environments.

[Eiki-mun]

In one of my chat groups on Discord, a guy is hosting an "at-will" D&D campaign. People are allowed to have multiple characters, even simultaneously, but they can't use more than one per session. We're all having a lot of fun with it, even if it plays little like any D&D campaign I've played before. Here's a sample screenshot of the DM's organization sheet (the one he lets us see, at any rate.)



Anyway the point is it's a lot of fun and I'm exploring 5E much farther than I ever have before.

[Askold]

Dark Heresy went on a hiatus for the summer, so did the Only war and I've finished the Deathwatch campaign so for a while I'm not roleplaying 40k... Weird.

I am in a new 7th Sea campaign which is not only different setting but also has wildly different rules so this should be fun.

...And a DnD 5e campaign because I guess I should try that game as well at some point.

[Cloud3514]

1st or 2nd edition 7th Sea? I haven't played 2nd edition, but I did enjoy 1st edition.

[Askold]

2nd Edition. Seems fun so far. So far the we haven't really dared to fail on purpose (you get a Hero Point if, instead of rolling to see if you succeed in a task, choose not to try at all and describe how the character fails.)

It really is a way different system from the ones I've used so far but I like it.

[Cloud3514]

So it explicitly gives you the option fail intentionally. Interesting. 1st edition used the same roll and keep system as Legend of the Five Rings, which meant that it gave the option to fail intentionally as a side effect by giving the option to throw out high dice. This makes more sense with samurai, but is an interesting option no matter the setting.

[Askold]

Failing intentionally is the ONLY way to fail. BY default if a character attempts something they will succeed BUT there is an amount of bad things that will also occur and you need to use raises to avoid those. For example: "My character jumps off the roof onto the roof of the next building to escape the Villain's lackeys." *dice are rolled* "Your character is about to injure himself with the jump, your sword slips from your hand and slides down the roof and falls to the street. ...And the goon squad jumps to the same street and still chase you. You will need one Raise (dice or die which when counted together are 10 or more) to counter each of these."

If there aren't enough Raises then the player will have to decide which of these are most important and only choose those. If there are even more Raises then the GM may invent additional Opportunities, like one of the goons shouting to another and mentioning the name of their boss which the players hadn't known before. Or perhaps one of them drops his pistol while making the jump and another PC who is fighting on ground level sees it drop near him and can on his turn use a Raise to pickup the pistol and use it.

[Askold]

Back in Shadowrun. The team was guarding a private (magical) art collection from some fancy (magical) elf who owned a mansion in Seattle.

Most of the session was spent on describing guard routines and the team mage freaking out when she assessed each of the individual guests that were allowed into the art gallery. (Magic rating 20 was not uncommon. Also, one of the guests was the president of UCAS.)

Then just few minutes before the end of the job someone blew a man sized hole through the several meters thick wall and another Runner team charged in trying to steal one of the (magical) art pieces.

Gunshots! Teknomancer bullshittery! Magical fuckery all over the place from two fighting mages! Sword duel between a (magical) katana wielding enemy Adept and the (magical) viking-sword wielding adept in our team! A fire spirit basically ate someone! GM constantly frustrated by my Tekno/Face and the mage getting bullshit 5-7 hits on Dodge tests reliably with less than 10 dice 4 times in a row and doing Matrix dodges all over the room while getting hosed down with AK fire! GM frustrated when my Tekno/Face saw through a very powerful invisibility spell (and then did absolutely nothing to that enemy because his revolver isn't very powerful and he's using regular ammo.) but nonetheless being an annoyance by spoiling very clever tricks by enemies!

After exciting 10 seconds or so of battle the surviving enemies decide to give up just in time to avoid the (magical) wrath of the very angry Elven Lord who had hired the team.

Lots of money and Karma for everyone. (My character immediately used all of the money. 50% into getting a better fake-SIN and the rest into buying more Karma.)

[Askold]

You know what's fun? Undead enemies in Praedor. You gotta destroy their head or chest location to re-kill them. Because there are several hit locations unless you aim for the head (which makes it harder to hit the target) there's a chance you hit some other location. And unless you do enough damage in one hit they ignore all of that damage, it's destruction or nothing.

You know what makes the undead even more fun? Put some armour on them so that it becomes exponentially more difficult to get that one hit that kills it.

And did I mention that if they scratch or bite a living being that living being will have a magically spreading rot eat away their flesh unless all of the rot is cut off? Yay.

Anyway, picking a fight with an undead knight guarding the tomb of some ancient wizard wasn't as smart as our characters assumed.

By the time we had managed to chop off one of its arms it swung a zweihander and chopped one of the PCs in half. WITH ONE SWING. *Chop* *splat* "Aieee!" *failed resist fear rolls* My character was the only one that didn't run off because he has a bit of an hero syndrome.

And I was optimistic when I managed to take out the other arm from the creature. Like, what was it going to do now? Bite my character?

It tried to bite my character. Being the ever optimist I offered an alternative meal in the form of a metal shield.

Turned out that it didn't mind eating the shield as an appetizer. *chomp chomp chomp*

It also bit right through my characters leg. So that was fun because now the others had to cut off pieces of his leg until the magical-gangrene stopped spreading. And if someone is curious as to why didn't we just hit it in the head after it had been "disarmed" I'd like to point out that we did. Repeatedly. We just weren't able to roll enough damage to kill the damn thing despite using bows morning stars and swords.

And after a brief pause of first aid and realizing that the thing won't follow us out of the room we went back for a second round and started by affirming that arrows still did nothing to it and neither did our other weapons.

Eventually deciding "fuck this shit" my character grappled it. Managing to wrestle it to the ground (which wasn't as easy as it might sound because it was pretty damn strong and could still bite) we decided on a plan of having two characters (after an archer fired one more arrow into it's head, while it was being wrestled with, and saw that it did nothing they decided to join the wrassling as that was marginally more helpful) basically just keep it down while a third one repeatedly hit it in the head until he managed to chop it off.

And the most valuable treasures had powerful curses so the only reason that fight was worth the trouble was that we were down one tomb-raider so there was more loot for the others...

FUN!

[ironbite]

OH Warhammer.

[Cloud3514]

So I procured a copy of the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. I can't believe Wizards never put out books based on Magic planes before now. This was such a great idea.

[Askold]

Praedor is still going on and is tons of fun. My character (the one I wrote about previously) was also eaten by a random monster in the post-magical-apocalyptic-hellscape but with new characters the "brave heroes" are still looting tombs and looking for treasures.

Meanwhile I'm back to a Shadowrun campaign and have lost a few characters there as well. Current highlight: Benedict Cumberbatch. I mean, the Frumious Bandersnatch was eating people and spreading HMMVV-2 virus. The team didn't originally know who is it that is killing people and turning some of them but were hired to make a stop to it by a gang that didn't want Knight Errant to "handle" the situation in the Barrens the way they usually would handle an outbreak like that. After a fight with a Fomorian (a troll infected by the virus) and a werewolf the team finally heard that a Sasquatch is looking for help because it is being chased by an "invisible monster." The team put 2 and 2 together and promised to protect the Sasquatch.

You see, the Sasquatch was being hunted by the Clapperhead Utterbunk, which is what happens to a Sasquatch that has been infected by HMMVV-2. The Bendystraw Crumpetsnack is also a creature that can turn invisible which makes it extra dangerous. And another curious thing about the Sherlock Holmes is that the only thing it can eat is Sasquatches which explained all those attacks. After being infected the creature had been trying to find something that it could eat and digest and after 2 weeks without food it was extremely desperate.

The team set up an ambush for the Wimbledon Tennismatch by hiding in an abandoned building with the Sasquatch (who was a manager at EVO but didn't think that his corp could help him because they might be too interested in infecting him with the virus as well, FOR SCIENCE!) and rigging it with traps. Traps of Gas grenades with Neurostun.

When the Britishname Cannotspell finally showed up it hit two of the grenades, weakening it considerable and after taking concentrated semi-blind fire from several Shadowrunners and two Drones it tried to run away but was finally knocked unconscious by a Flash-Bang thrown by my character. ...Then the third combat drone of the team crawled up to it (the Troll on the team was doing suppressive fire in the estimated area of the creature with a MMG that had EX ammo so no one was walking in that area) and chopped the thing to death with sword arms.

Another job well done and the team could add "killed the creature who played Doctor Strangelove" on their resume.

Also another AAA corp that some of the team got tangled with (by accident) paid a decent sum for the corpse and used it to design new and improved invisibility cloaks for the armies of the world.

[Kanzenkankaku]

I've been meaning to get into tabletop. I've been entrusted with some first edition d&d books for the time being and was also bought a current edition starter set this past easter.

Haven't gotten time to play it yet though.