Tabletop Game Thread

[Cloud3514]

Man, I miss when I could rely on Fantasy Flight to make a really good RPG... without the stupid custom dice.

[Askold]

I have really liked the Warhammer 40k games they made.

Meanwhile others are complaining about how each faction has a separate game and you need to buy them separately. (Though in my opinion that wasn't so bad as most of them would not hang around with each other or at least are in so different powerlevels that mixing the groups does not work well in a game.)

[Cloud3514]

The only 40k RPG where it would make sense to have different factions together is Rogue Trader, but even that would be MAYBE a Tau, Eldar or Freeboota Ork in an alliance of convenience with the crew. Otherwise, I can see someone bringing a Dark Heresy character to Rogue Trader or vice versa, a Deathwatch character to Black Crusade as a Chaos Marine or just a crossover session between any combination of the games (as they're all cross compatible for the most part), but 40k isn't a universe where you'd regularly see an Inquisitor's entourage hanging out with a Deathwatch kill team or a Rogue Trader crew regularly working with the Imperial Guard.

[Askold]

Rogue Trader already has rules for playing Ork Freebootas and other such xenos allies. Same for Inquisitors and Xenos allies.

And in theory you could have Imperial guard and Space marines work side by side but that difference in power level...

[Cloud3514]

Which is why such encounters should be limited to crossover sessions. Sure, it makes sense for Deathwatch characters to work with Only War or Dark Heresy characters, but the difference in power is such that it would only be interesting for an occasional session or story arc. I wouldn't want to play them together for an entire campaign.

[Cloud3514]

So Legend of the Five Rings has a new card game out. And it's good. Even if I keep losing due to only having one core set of cards to work with (you NEED two to make a tournament legal deck and three is recommended to be competitive. LCGs may have removed the random boosters, but they still get their money) and choosing a sub-optimal clan (Unicorn may be my second favorite clan in the lore and RPG, but their extreme military focus is their downfall in the LCG).

[Askold]

Because I do not learn from my mistakes I am now a GM of a Dark Heresy 2nd edition campaign. It's called "CSI: Necromunda." So far the team has shown a remarkable amount of subtlety while investigating a treasonous cult.

Meanwhile in Shadowrun (where I'm a player) the team is showing complete lack of knowing how to do stealth or any kind of subtlety. They were tracking a hostile person or group who had been using a biodrone (a human being filled with cybernetics that make it possible to control him like a drone) to hire teams that were known to work for a specific Johnson and then lead them into traps. The fact that the guilty "person" was just a drone was discovered by the player characters who shot his head off.

Now the team found the factory where he was building more clones and turning them into biodrones. One of them was caught (the street sam tackled it to the ground which knocked out the rigger) and the Decker hacked the drone. At this point it was discovered that the "rigger" was in fact an AI. What followed was the GM furiously looking through the rules how can AIs be killed or if that's even possible. It was. The short hacking battle ended with the Decker using his 7 Edge points to push the limit on an attack and which got it nearly 20DV. After AI takes damage overflow it gets' to resist the extra damage and any that goes through will reduce the Essence it has. Losing any Essence will take it down for a long time and weaken it, losing all of it will "kill" it.

What with having taken damage from the Sam "gently" taking it down the second attack killed the AI completely.

[SCarpelan]

Thanks to the Humble Bundle book sale a while ago our group has gotten into Warhammer Fantasy RP again. I GM'd a short scenario and now have my hands full with planning a game to continue that story and a friend is finally starting a campaign he has planned for a long time. The campaign in question is an old D&D campaign Doomstones that was hastily translated for the WFRP 1st edition system. The friend then modified it for 2nd edition rules and fluff and now we have a group that is willing to test how this unholy mess is going to work. The issue here is that the campaign consists mostly out of combat heavy dungeon crawling and WFRP rules are not really intended for that. Playing dungeon crawl campaign with a system that is designed for brutal, deadly and relatively short combat encounters might be an interesting experience. My guess is that the main challenge will be the lack of efficient healing magic which means any proper healing must be done outside of combat. To balance this out we have 2000 XP to use in the character creation which means we will be able to start with characters that are already about halfway through of their second professions.

I had a few characters designed but now when I've heard what kind of characters the others are planning to have it seems I'm down to one practical choice. Unfortunately it's the least interesting of the ones I had made: an outrider/scout, i.e. a D&D ranger with an archer build and it just feels a bit generic compared to the other options. I just think that going to this campaign with no character capable of stealthy scouting is begging for a TPK.

Edit: Hah. Thank you Career Compendium. Horned Hunter / Scout. A much more interesting build. A primitive nature god worshipping berserker zealot. That feels much more like a Warhammer character.

[Cloud3514]

So I just got done running a sample game of Fantasy Flight's Legend of the Five Rings. My god this is an obtuse system. This game is way overly complicated and it's not helped by the custom dice you're supposed to use. I really wish Fantasy Flight would stop with the custom dice bullshit.

[Askold]

The Dark Heresy campaign is going well.

...Suspiciously well.

Shadowrun has progressed to a point where it may be time to end the campaign and pick up something new.

The characters have so much street cred that they get recognized when they go to a different continent...

[SCarpelan]

So, I now have three WFRP (2nd edition) games I'm involved in. I'm GM'ing two of them - the same scenario for different groups - and am a player in the Doomstones one. We've had one session in each of these and things are going well for now.

Luckily all the players are aware about the lethality of the Doomstones campaign and are prepared to have their characters killed. This is specially important for me since from a combination of OOC and IC information I've understood that there is a good possibility that the others will do something that will force my character to turn against them. I discussed this with the GM and he confirmed that it is a possibility in the future. If that ever becomes the case, it won't be an unexpected backstab: it will be a simple statement from my character that if they pass this line he will resort to violence to stop them. If things go that far I'm planning to not use any of my Fortune or Fate points which should give enough of an edge to the rest of the group that I wouldn't be able to do too much damage unless the dice decide to royally fuck everyone else over. This would be a suitable end to the character's story so I'm not at all bothered about the possibility of it happening. There should also be enough in-game clues for the rest of the group that this wouldn't become as too big a surprise for anyone.

The two groups I'm GM'ing are also having a great time. From a GM's perspective I appreaciate how the groups have different approaches and have concentrated to different aspects of the scenario. The other group has gotten deep into the detective aspect and the other's decisions have brought the horror aspect more to the surface. Every failed perception check makes the players in the latter group gringe and at a one occasion the group was certain that a player was going to lose her character due to an in-character stupid decision despite the "danger" being a harmless red herring. This kind of tension is really rewarding for a GM.

[Cloud3514]

Shadowrun has progressed to a point where it may be time to end the campaign and pick up something new.

The characters have so much street cred that they get recognized when they go to a different continent...

Does your group like samurai or 17th/18th century Europe? Or more political games? If so, might I suggest Legend of the Five Rings (specifically NOT the Fantasy Flight edition) or 7th Sea? AEG had a great system with their Roll X, Keep Y system. I'm not sure how the current edition of 7th Sea is and the Fantasy Flight beta edition of L5R is hot garbage, but I've played both of their last AEG editions and they're both great games.

[Askold]

We've had talk about playing 7th sea before. Currently there are plans to play Only War (since we already have one campaign with the same ruleset so there's not so much new stuff to learn) or possibly Twilight 2013 or some other really rules heavy game.

[Cloud3514]

7th Sea is actually pretty cinematic feeling. It uses a d10 roll and keep system where you roll X number of dice based on your skills and keep Y best dice based on... something I can't even remember right now. It's a pretty streamlined system and the GM is supposed to reward bonus dice for acting dynamically.

[Cloud3514]

So what happens when you invite the eccentric artist you work with to play Legend of the Five Rings? You get him being impossible to get to take the game seriously... until you mention that the setting also has an equivalent to the Roman Empire. And then he decides that he wants to run around with a gladius. So, once this game gets going, because the rules for Legend of the Burning Sands were designed to be used as both a standalone game and an expansion to L5R, we're going to have a Roman legionnaire running around fantasy Japan with a bunch of samurai.

Is it bad that I'm actually really looking forward to seeing this because of the cultural implications of this character's mere presence in Rokugan?