/tg/Station 13

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It's hard as balls to run a game in which your players are literally super powerful

It means they can likely solve most things you throw at them within a few seconds of trying. Which then leads to either a half-assed plot or a frustrated GM, and players who end up either bored or having to put in way more agency than a normal tabletop. It's not a mindset most players are ready for, and most GMs aren't either

i have pdf files acquired through legitimate purchases online because there's no stores here. i have a lot of pathfinder books and mutents and masterminds books...some world of darkness books but i heard they're out of date cuz they destroyed the world of darkness and made it Chronicle of Darkness....some all flesh must be eaten books and some definately out of date Dark Hershey books...

Running my first session of Only War tomorrow. Goal is to cause at least a few points of critical damage, and give a few players PTSD. Will report on how it goes

I just read that up.

Insert Full Metal Jacket quote here.

Started playing Monte Cook's World of Darkness again. Currently it's just a one on one session, but other people said they would join.

>Be the draconic blood sorcerer merchant again in the bi-weekly game
>We're literally just about to enter the big second dungeon
>Moment before the ranger takes his opening shot at some orcs guarding the entrance my internet drops
>It's down for an hour and a half and I miss the entire second half of the game

WAKE ME UP, WAKE ME UP INSIDE

That's what you get for playing ligger.

CAN'T WAKE UP

>I've been playing a closet ligger

Embrace your newfound identity, and all will be well.

Just realized i never followed up on this on the off chance that anyone gives a fuck.

Party got dropped outside of a fortified base with a trenchline a stubber turrets and a hundred meters of mud between their squad and the enemies, sparse cover. They used smoke grenades and suppressive fire, and overall played it very tactically. Of course with the exception of the party Commissar who just kinda strode forward bolt-pistoling people in the face. After they took the trench and blew a hole in the fortifications they stopped the Dominate forces from detonating thier fuel reserves, but were unable to capture the base lieutenant before he shot himself in the face. Everyone got pretty banged up, but no one took critical damage other than the Commissar getting her rib broken from a lucky crit. Gonna have to turn up the heat a bit this weekend. I am thinking of making them set up fortifications and then just throwing wave after wave of soldiers at them until shit goes south. Maybe pull the ol' reinforcements at the last second bit.

What enemy are they fighting?

Send a bunch of mooks at them, weakish ones, don't want to bang them up too much, then send a big guy at them. If they're fighting heretics send in a Raptor to jump on them or some Tacticals or two depending on how powerful they are. Maybe even a Khorne Berserker if you can find stats for that. May want to warn them to bring lots of ammo and whatever else they might need beforehand, gotta give the guys a challenge.

They are just fighting the Severan Dominate right now, it is very Band of Brothers war movie style. Probably going to add in some dark Eldar to raise the stakes. Either that or have some of the local seperatists turn to the fell powers to help push the imperium back

Bought a new 3m long table, running a 6-player game of Twilight Imperium with plenty of room to spare

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/e7o ... 8%20PM.jpg

Feels good

Recently started a new Pathfinder and GURPS campagain, Pathfinder is a grinder dungeon at the moment. GURPS is a sci-fi.

>Using GURPS

You poor thing. I hope your GM had the good sense to not use the full breadth of rules crunch in that system. GURPS can become a snails-pace rules intense simulation of real life if you use all the optional rules to make everything realistic as possible.

Might I ask why you play pathfinder instead of DnD5e? I know it has a pretty big following and i am sort of curious why that is still the case. I know it was needed during the 4th edition dark times, but 5th is a really nice streamlined system and i actually like it a lot more than 3rd.


Our princes of the apocalypse campaign is really starting to pick up. I ended up smiting Lady Aeirsie's head from her shoulders, and we just discovered that all the elemental cults work together to serve the prime evil even though they hate eachother. My plan is to challenge the prime evil to 1v1 me via the compelled duel spell

Wyzack wrote: Might I ask why you play pathfinder instead of DnD5e? I know it has a pretty big following and i am sort of curious why that is still the case. I know it was needed during the 4th edition dark times, but 5th is a really nice streamlined system and i actually like it a lot more than 3rd.

I can explain that one

Fuck up once and you fuck up your reputation. When 4th came out and sucked people just moved to Pathfinder and they didn't leave it anymore.
They know 5th exists. But they see no reason to bother with it as it's made by the same people who made 4th. And they'd have to relearn things for it too

True enough. I have just been hearing reports from longtime pathfinder players that as of late the system has become just as much of a bloated wreck as 3rd edition was. This is a shame because pathfinder was supposed to fix all those problems. Did not particularly care for the system the one time that i tried it but it is good that people are still enjoying it. I also heard that Piazo is releasing a pseudo new game with similar compatible mechanics but sci-fi themed, which will probably be pretty cool. I will certainly check it out.

I also urge anyone who is wary of DnD after the horrid abortion that was 4th edition to try the latest edition. It has easily become my favorite DnD since ADnd 2nd ed.

I play both. Pathfinder is great for reliving my younger days of 3.5 (my first system) and it allows for some really absurd shit if your GM lets you get away with it. It definitely puts the fantasy in power fantasy.

5e is simpler, more clean-cut, more refined, but it doesn't have the number-crunching system mastery potential of 3.X. For some that's a good thing, for some it's bad, for me it's completely neutral. I don't really think one can be said to be a replacement for the other--they work better for different kinds of games and players.

EDIT: I also liked 4E for what it was. As one of my grognard friends pointed out, if it had been marketed as anything BUT D&D it probably would've been a huge success.

Wyzack wrote:>Using GURPS

You absolute madman. I played GURPS in the past and it was an absolute nightmare. I got hit a few times in the first dungeon and was like "Uh how can I heal" and the GM said "Wait a few weeks or drink a healing potion."

It was awful.

In other news my Cleric has a resurrection spell now and it's already been used three times to save various NPCs. The first/second time I used it to save two pseudo-villains who were colluding against the king for their own profit, and I brought them back to life to give details on what they knew about an attack that was going to happen.

The GM didn't account for this at all and had to improv, they spilled all the juicy details in exchange for a little gold to escape the country and their lives. Extremely worth it.

Third time it was used fighting a little girl who was possessed by a demon and our heavily drunk fighter broke her neck to get the demon out of her. It worked, and then promptly jumped into our sorcerer because he had the bright idea of holding the demon's talisman thingy. He managed to fight it off and victory was our at the cost of reviving the dead little girl.

You in 5th ed shadow? I just got the revivify spell for my paladin, lets you resurrect people within one minute of their death for about 300gp worth of diamonds. Really cool, except that out of our party I am probably the most likely to die due to my code putting me in compromising positions/being less tanky than our impossible to kill barbarian

Yeah. Revifify is great because it's such a great panic button, "IN THE EVENT SOMEONE DIES, CAST REVIVIFY"

It also helps that I'm running a virtually immortal build. Plate mail for 19 AC, a +1 shield for 21 AC, a displacer cloak for disadvantage of anybody trying to attack me, tons of heals because I'm a life cleric, and life cleric traits that let me get residual healing on myself whenever I heal anyone else.

Any enemy even trying to hit me would have to roll twice above 21 or they're shit out of luck, it's great.

If you can you should get shield of faith too. Not sure if it is available to clerics but it is a flat +2 AC as long as you maintain concentration. I use it to compensate for my lack of a shield using a two handed greatsword

My concentration is already taken on spamming Spirit Guardians and destroying everything

My hidden desires to play Eclipse Phase have gotten so bad I created a setting and my own characters to play in it and I'm just like, hosting sessions in my head.

Either I'm really good at GM'ing or I've actually gone insane

An0n3 wrote:My hidden desires to play Eclipse Phase have gotten so bad I created a setting and my own characters to play in it and I'm just like, hosting sessions in my head.

Either I'm really good at GM'ing or I've actually gone insane

I've been madly creating a DnD 5E campaign that I'm bound to actually run at some point and it's going to be fucking great.

I would

It's just

Y'know

Dead inside

I like to pride myself as one of the only guys who has more or less entirely stuck with every online /tg/ campaign we have done until the rest of the group decided to quit. Anon3 if you would run it or find someone to run it i would be there 200%

My copies of Eclipse Phase and Transhuman are duuuuuusty. But I'll never forget the pleasure pods and octo morphs.

Hey, those are the exact EP books I own. My maaaaaan

Yeeeaaaaaah boi! I like Transhuman's random character generator, can come up with some pretty out there concepts.

Yeah, I liked how it was sort of reminiscent of Traveller's character creation. It was a pretty decent read, as well. I love Eclipse Phase's lore, as insane as it is.

I'm scheduled to run a space horror campaign soonish and I need some ideas as far as creepy happenings, especially when the crew is on their ship. The theme is psychological space time fuckery, and I've already accumulated a good list of things that could happen, but I don't have much perspective from other people since I don't want to spoil anything for the players. What do you guys think?

I don't want to run another online game again, I don't think. They all meet with abrupt failiure.

To fuck with PC's, establish patterns and then break them. This can be kinda risky, as they might latch onto things that are just supposed to be red herrings or spooks and try to find the causes or take that as signs of some kind of progress or other.

Eg. Have a character knock a coffee cup over and smash it on the floor accidentally. Later when returning through the same area they do it again. And again. And again. Then on another trip through the same area they see the cup is already smashed on the floor. Playing with their expectations for things like that creates a sense of unease. Having your different PC's interact with the environment differently can help too. I had a group of Shadowrunners go through a haunted house that was a spirit's domain and the different doorways and hallways lead to different places for each PC. Scared the shit out of them when they walked through a door on the second floor and into a room another PC was in on the first floor.

Anything that can make them doubt what they're seeing or begin to distrust themselves/eachother is good without you having to step in and create fake interactions between them. In the second situation I didn't need to create an NPC hallucination version of the other PC and mess with them, the sudden encounter created that space for doubt and the two of them immediately accused eachother of being fakes.

I plan on doing a lot of surrealist things to make the players doubt reality. Stuff like describing things that aren't there and then immediately feigning ignorance when they ask me to elaborate, a lot of impossible geometry (sans the LOL 5 SIDED 6 SIDED DIE TAKE IMMEDIATE 200 SAN DAMAGE) and general space spookiness

I really like the idea of throwing in recurring elements simply to catch them off guard by breaking them. It would be really subtle. A really important feeling I want to encourage is the feeling of loneliness and detachment, especially since they're starting in a star system that's incredibly far away from any meaningful civilization.

An0n3 wrote:To fuck with PC's, establish patterns and then break them. This can be kinda risky, as they might latch onto things that are just supposed to be red herrings or spooks and try to find the causes or take that as signs of some kind of progress or other.

Totally had plans for doing this.

Example: A recurring encounter with the party meeting a tag team of a depressed thief and a mute alchemist. In the first encounter the thief acts smug and brags about how great he is before starting a fight with the party. As the encounters repeat, he grows more and more irritated that the party keeps following him. After several encounters, the thief finally gives up and offers to help the party out/join them.

That's not really spooky though.

The danger of SPOOKS, especially in sci-fi games, is that people will try to come up with the weirdest theories about what's happening and bizarre solutions to get out of the SPOOK ZONE.

Pro-tip: make the cause of all of this shit something that's relatively grounded in reality, something that shouldn't be too hard to find if the PC's know what to look for. When they tug on the right thread, it should unravel the whole thing.

Don't make the cause of all the craziness the ghost of a certain crewman who needs to be appeased by having his favorite toothbrush put back in his bunk. Avoid the LucasArts/Sierra Adventure Games way of combining a bunch of random objects in the environment with some storytelling to reach a conclusion...because PC's are totally unpredictable and will stomp right over your clues and hints to do that stuff and end up staring at the broken coffee cup on the ground thinking "Oh if I just could catch it everything will be solved" or "I bet it's an allegory for our fractured perspective, if I just glue it back together we'll get out of this mess!"

Don't make the solutions to your stuff that minute. If you train a group of players to solve puzzles in games that way they're going to develop this weird logic that helps them get through your adventures but causes nothing but frustration and agony for everyone involved at every other play space.

No, the reason we keep snapping back and forth in reality is because the liquid helium reaction that put us in this pocket of hellspace wasn't calculated correctly, so we're snapping back and forth in time. Just getting the navigator or the ship's computer to go over the jump calcs again will show everyone that. If we recalculate the jump and fuck with the engine we could probably make some kind of emergency exit from work, then repair shit, jump again, and be on our way without incident. Meanwhile everyone sit tight and try not to lose all your SAN when you look down the ship's main hallway and see yourself from five minutes ago staring back at you.

I had a haunted paper airplane fly after my party.

Occasionally on going on a quest there would be a spontaneous bolt of lightning and I'd have all of them roll (easy) spot checks. For everyone who passed they'd see a paper airplane floating through the breeze. Every time they walked a block, another spot check. Every time they purchased an item, spot check. Every time they looked down at their map, spot check. Eventually they started to get genuinely afraid whenever they would be asked to make a spot check. This continued for real life days, with them seeing the paper airplane almost every time. Eventually they hired up every priest and magic-user in the land that they could find and had them do a billion rites all over this big medieval castle they'd cleared of bandits a long time ago and locked themselves into an inner sanctum to finally get some sleep and respite from the paper airplane. Spot check.

The mage decided to shoot a fireball at the source of the spot check and had a critical success. They walked over to the burning remains and saw the skeletonized remnants of a dog that was on fire. It crumbled to dust as they watched, though they didn't care much, since the reign of paper airplane-induced terror was over. All but the rogue left the room as he tried to see if there was anything on the dog. He came behind my DM board and I told him to make a spot check. Crit fail. He looked through the ashes of the dog for a while before leaving with his party.

However, on their way out, the party confusedly heard loud, barking laughter coming from the castle. They later bought a bunch of dynamite and blew the room that the dog died in to dust. The paper airplane was never to be seen again.

An0n3 wrote: Pro-tip: make the cause of all of this shit something that's relatively grounded in reality, something that shouldn't be too hard to find if the PC's know what to look for. When they tug on the right thread, it should unravel the whole thing.

This is what I'm trying to aim for. The general gist of the first few sessions will revolve around criminals aboard a prison shuttle crash landing on a planet, hopefully stumbling upon a strange independent research facility that by all means should not be in the middle of Sector Bumfuck Nowhere, meeting up with the majority of the science-tech players who are incredibly suspicious all things considered. One of the head honcho players that works on the science team discovered some sort of ancient escape pod with strange properties in an ice cap, and just cannot sleep easily until he figures out exactly where the fuck it came from.

If all goes well and they trace the pod back to the respective old mining colony, certain circumstances will result in them being temporarily marooned, leaving them to figure out how to get life support in the mining colony back up and running, and how to repair their ship. In the meantime, they'll start to pick apart pieces of the colony's story, which involves heavy misuse of teleporter technology, resulting in some space-time fuckery. Along with that, the planet's wildlife is increasingly hostile and unforgiving.

I just dunno how cliche the plot is, this is mostly just for fun and I want my players to have a good time, but I also really adore the genre of horror. I'm afraid of messing it up because of all the stuff I've heard about how hard it is to DM horror-oriented campaigns

A good horror story is, at its core, a good mystery story too.

"What is happening, and why?" is the central crux of the plot. Unlike a mystery, the investigators are directly involved with what is happening and threatened by it. It's kind of like a hybrid between Mystery and Action stories.

So, like a good mystery, it has to make sense. If you have a murder mystery story and in the final chapter you reveal THE KILLER WAS THIS NEW CHARACTER YOU NEVER MET AND THERE WERE NO CLUES TO LET YOU KNOW THAT then guess what it's shit fuck you. On the flipside if there's a fine line you have to walk of not making it the butler everytime. There's also the added challenge of making there some kind of imperative, some kind of threat or urgent need that gets the blood running and making it scary. Simple hallucinations and a skeleton that goes boo aren't going to do it. BLOOD MURDER RAPE BEAST FROM PLANET UNKILLABLE THAT CANT BE OUTRUN, AVOIDED, OR KILLED doesn't work either because now all the PC's are dead in the first encounter GG no re.

Basically to do horror right you have to be able to do everything except comedy and romance all at once.
But hey the only way to get good at it is by trying so just go for it. Borrow ideas and consider how balanced everything. Make sure it's solvable without being obvious. Make sure your scare is a threat without being completely insurmountable.

Some pretty solid advice there, thank you kindly. I chose horror as the theme of the campaign because I think it's a really, really good method of delivering a great atmosphere and emotion in a way that is unique to the genre. That element of horror is a great way of taking the players out of their element and keeping them heavily invested in their environment.

After lengthy delays and breaks, I got to play as my closet scalie merchant again. I finally fulfilled my purpose as "literally being built to talk to dragons" and managed to talk the green dragon the ranger had infuriated earlier into a mutual agreement, and now we have a green dragon guarding the camp from anyone coming out of the dungeon.

I'm a fucking god.

Looking to run Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition and actually getting it off the ground this time. The game looks fucking amazing, with massive random tables for character gen and a shitload of different careers. Not to mention it is nice and deadly. Should be fun. I could literally just sit here and make characters all day

Shadow is doing me proud.

Had a critglitch in SR yesterday

Cat-adept shot a giant seagull(Lesser Roc) out of the sky and it landed in the water. They then tried to retrieve it with a grappling gun, which they had no skill in whatsoever
So they shot it anyway, must have the bird. Critglitch. Just before I finalised the description of what happened they changed their mind and spend an edge to make it a regular glitch

Said critglitch would have pulled them 50m into the water as the seagull's surprising strength is too much.
I know, it's just 50m
But I had the shark stats loaded up in chummer already

Attempting any check in Shadowrun that you have only one or two dice to roll on is suicide. Pre-Edge that shit if you can.

Three or four dice is still really fucking bad. Five and six is when things start to normalize a bit more and the chances of you spontaneously exploding because you goofed too hard diminish.

It's pretty hard to find checks that you will have so few dice on. Untrained skillcheck linked to an attribute that is only average or below-average. Doing something you're not very good at when under a lot of penalties. These are those moments when you're getting really close to experiencing the lethality Shadowrun has to offer. These are those times when you should rethink what you're doing and come up with another strategy or just not do what you're thinking of doing.

On the flipside though this is also one of the ways Shadowrun encourages a diversity of skillset and punishes you somewhat for being a twinky bitch. You may have 14 dice to punch people but congratulations you made all these otherwise menial tasks now potentially lethal. Your character's career of being the coolest deadliest martial artist will be immortalized when you fatally electrocute yourself while trying to hotwire a car during an escape.

Turns out my party really wants the authentic rags to riches random chucklefucks experience for the WFRP game and want to do career selection completely randomly. Wonder how many beggars, ratcatchers and other scum we will end up with in the party

Has anyone tried the Degensis: Rebirth game? The production quality for art and such seems really high, and it has some really interesting concepts for characters and worldgen that are grimdark but aren't WamHam.

I managed to get my hands on a complete set of PDF's (because fuck you I'm not paying $112 + shipping to find out if I like your game holy shit what is wrong with you) that I'd be up for sharing with others if people want to shit around and try to come up with something.

As a side note: I think piracy actually helps a lot of these traditional games out. If you aren't D&D you're dying out. I've watched it happen with Shadowrun and a couple other systems. Everyone is releasing overpriced hardcover color editions of their games now instead of just sticking with the cheaper paperback black and white print runs of yore. Increased costs means people buy less books. People buying less books mean we have fewer people to play these games with, which means the books are worth less to us, which means we buy less books, etc. etc. etc.

I'm sure it's somewhat circular as well in that pirates cause less sales, which means smaller print runs, which means increased costs per book.

Piracy at least gives me some chance of finding other people to play the damn game with before the industry buckles under its own stupidity.
They need to work out some kind of licensing system or some shit, so that purchasing a copy of a book gives you the print copy but also the ability to loan out a bunch of digital editions of it so your players or whoever else can also read them and make characters so you have some hope of ever actually sitting down to play. As an adult, trying to convince other adults to part with a chunk of money and a sizeable portion of their free time to study this grimoire of spreadsheets so we can pretend to be elves together is a really tough sell, and the spiraling expenses of books is only making this harder by the day.

Fuck it ill take a look, always looking to increase my vault of games. In general i pirate PDFs first just because my gaming group generally has the attention span of a goldfish (myself included) and we switch games so often. However if we end up liking a game we generally all pitch on on buying a couple books just because it is generally more convenient. I have a pretty decent collection of books now but if we bought every book we ever used we would all be bankrupt

I pirate stuff to see if I like it, if the actual game mechanics are good and it's something that I'll get to play consistently. I've got thousands of dollars worth of old books stashed away in boxes. Some of that money is in complete sets for games I loved and my friends loved and we played the shit out of. Some of that money is in core books for a hundred different games I never got beyond reading and saying "This system is trash" or we never got further than a single session of.

If it passes that test then I'm a lifer. I'll be buying up every single product they release. Because the experience of a good tabletop RPG with friends is fucking priceless.

Unfortunately it's been a long time since something released that got that purchase from me. I think the last game I bought into that way was 4th Ed.
A lot of games these days are just very slight improvements over their predecessors (see 5th Ed Shadowrun) or complete rehashes (5th Ed D&D is 3.5 with a coat of paint)
The few games that aren't it just seems like nobody else is interested in or wants to commit to playing together.

Hands down worst part of getting older is that all your friends have less time for fun shit. We still make it work but it is certainly getting harder. At least no one is having kids yet