What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

Thanks for the advise and encouragement. The kids really enjoyed coming up with their characters but I wish I had kept some classes from them. I have a 5 year wrestling with Druidcraft and an 8 year old wizard who has difficulty focusing (sounds like a fun PC). It also didn't help that the little druid was befriending giant spiders and cave bears while my son's wizard kept failing at his Frost Bolt. I can't fudge his natural 4.

I already have PDFs of Knave and OSE so I will give them a look over. I was holding back for fear of rules overload. Thanks again.

dysjunct wrote: said this about D&D 5e: Plus, if your kids turn out to really like RPGs then it'd be nice if they could join another group and have experience with the most popular system, and not limited to some obscure nerd game beloved by middle-aged internet nerds, but unknown to 99% of anyone they're likely to meet.

That is a really dumb consideration. My daughter's RPG experience was all OSR and she transitioned just fine into a 5e game at college. You don't need to teach your kids specific games. You just need to teach them how to play an RPG.

If Bendgar’s kids were grown adults like your daughter, instead of 5 and 8, I’d agree. I think younger kids have more challenges with soft skills and abstract thinking, and it makes it harder for them to slip between rulesets while focusing on some big-picture idea of what a game is really about.

I can see both sides having value and I do wish that I had kept it simpler. I tried the "role a random character" thing with them one night and both expressed that they would rather make the character that they had in mind. Something that 5e does in spades.

The thing that I am up against now is that they have all been through several encounters (and effectively leveled up) and I don't understand loot or magic items well yet.

I love the post about unidentified magic items. Stealing that one in the near future.

PDF of the first part of Stonehell Dungeon is free on Lulu right now.

www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/michael-curtis/s...roduct-1nq5eywz.html

Awesome! And it’s easy to print off just the area you are playing as a one sheet- you don’t really need to print the whole book.

I had to break my groups of the notion of playing the character they have set up in their minds and instead let the character emerge through play. They’ve fully embraced starting out as a level 0 or level 1 nobody and developing into a fleshed out character. This results in surprising, unexpected, and original characters instead of the usual stupid tropes. And it’s more fun for everybody. They still pick classes but stats are what they are. I’ve got a Wizard in one of my DCC games that just -sucks- but that’s his character, and that’s part of the story. He’s not whining because he’s underpowered or isn’t the best build, whatever. He leans into his incompetence.

I am firmly against playing idealized characters at least in OSR games. It completely flies in the face of the concepts, and it puts the onus on the referee to keep these perfect dream egos with huge backstories alive. That’s not fun, and it makes the stakes of any encounter or threat zero because you’re not going to kill a character that means the world to a player.

I’m all for the party of deadbeats, ne’er-do-wells, losers, and miscreants that grow into capable adventurers. My kids kind of had a hard time with this at first, “why would I want to play as a cobbler”/“how am I going to survive with only 2HP”, but they get it now. They’ve learned that limitations and failures are often where the most fun (and comedy) lie.

Never ever tell them what a magic item is. You should never say “in the chest you find a +1 sword” or “he’s wearing gauntlets of ogre power”. The potion or powder is always unknown. Make them suspicious, make them work to identify items and figure out what they do.

dysjunct wrote: If Bendgar’s kids were grown adults like your daughter, instead of 5 and 8, I’d agree. I think younger kids have more challenges with soft skills and abstract thinking, and it makes it harder for them to slip between rulesets while focusing on some big-picture idea of what a game is really about.

All kids are different but my daughter didn't have any problems at ages 5 or 8.

Second session of Monsterhearts 2 last night. It was lower energy than the first go around, probably due to being at the end of a weekend. The Witch was also not present as she begged out and she was shaping up to be a storm of chaos and drama. It ended on high energy as the Selkie and the Queen had a physical confrontation resulting in the Queen stabbing the Selkie with a broken shard from the Ming vase in her home's entryway. This was just as the Ghost discovered that the Queen had one of the lost Romanov descendants held hostage. Two dark SUVs pulled up the front of the house as the session ended. They are of course linked to a failed business deal where the Queen's father defrauded the father of the girl being held hostage. It's a perfect setup for an explosive beginning next time.

Third session of Monsterhearts 2 last night. The Ghost was absent, but the PC's came up with that the room that The Queen had locked the heiress in was likely warded so she was trapped for the session. The Queen and The Selkie escaped by boat hidden in tunnels below the wine cellar, at the same time their mutual love interest ran off and was captured. They eventually land on the coast at a bonfire expecting a party, but turns out it was just the Witch doing a fire ritual. She got them all to participate, but not telling the Selkie that the goddess was fire-oriented. Later The Witch tries to show up the local coven leader, but bombs again. Cut to the next day with two missing students and rumors starting to spread.

We won't be able to play this coming weekend as The Witch and The Queen will be out camping, so my wife and I are going to try Night's Black Agents: Solo Ops.

Ran a game of Project Galileo on Saturday night for six friends. This is a sci-fi game using the Trophy Dark system which I did an overview of here .

Trophy is really optimal for GM+3, so having twice the number of players was a bit challenging, especially VOIP where the chance of crosstalk goes up exponentially with every person on the line. The adventures are structured into five "rings," which are thematic or narrative moments in an adventure. The rings ramp up in danger until Ring 5, in which everything goes to hell. As a pacing and spotlight mechanism, each PC is supposed to get one roll per ring (roughly). But this was not really feasible with that many players, so I did about three per ring and tracked it so they were spread out as fairly as possible, within what made sense in the fiction. For the players who hadn't had a roll in a while, I asked them for narrative contributions. The system is very collaborative and the GM is supposed to throw a lot of questions back on the players. E.g. "I roll to find out why the electrical panel is malfunctioning." (Rolls and succeeds.) "Okay, you open it up and figure it out. Why is it malfunctioning?" Based on the answer, maybe the panel was sabotaged, or maybe it has some weird alien fungal infection, whatever.

Some people really hate that, because they don't want to think about anything other than what their character would know and decide. But, I like it, and it certainly makes GMing a lot easier.

The particular scenario revolves around a team of scientists on Mars finding the first evidence of life, and investigating. Doesn't end well. Due to the players' suggestions, the just-released-out-of-stasis Martian was a humanoid fungus with seven eyes and prehensile teeth. There were no survivors.

Edit: Project Galileo is available on DTRPG. $6 for the PDF, has all rules needed to play.

We had finished the F.O.R.C.E. module last week in our V&V campaign and decided to do a soft reboot and try the new 3.0 version, Mighty Protectors. Some people converted their old characters and some started fresh. My new character is Jackhammer, a construction worker with vibratory powers. Devil's Three Way (duplication), Univac (android), The Symbol (martial artist), The Caustic Kid (chemical powers), The Mythos (Greek god), and Viper (disintegration) comprised the rest of the team. We started Death Duel with the Destroyers. Everyone seems to think the new system is an improvement over the old.

I vaguely remember running the F.O.R.C.E. module for my old Indy gaming group back in the early '80s. Death Duel with the Destroyers (and the sequel, The Island of Dr. Apocalypse) are my two all-time favorite superhero rpg adventures. Bill Willingham (writer of the Fables comic) wrote both modules, and then subsequently used the Destroyers again in his Elementals comic series. Due to copyright issues, he was forced to re-name his evil, female version of Iron Man, changing her from Iron Maiden to Chrysalis for the Elementals comics.

My plate is pretty full at the moment, it's almost exhausting. Currently a PC in a 5e conversion of a pathfinder campaign, participating in a 5 week 'roleplaying competition' 5e adventure for Aracanacon, DMing a weekly game of D&D 1e and prepping for my debut run at DMing Mork Borg (the prospect of which is delicious). On top of that i have both DCC and Best Left Buried physical books in the mail as we speak. I'm also looking into Lamentation of the Flame Princess so it's getting pretty crowded. To remedy this i'm working on my own OSR style ruleset that combines all the best bits from these disparate rulesets so i can actually see them played rather than just linger in my brain proffering inspiration that sits idle. I'm hoping it'll also help to lure my groups away from the lost mines of vanilla and its ilk in favour of more gonzo shit.

Session #2 of INTRIGUE AT THE COURTS OF CHAOS. The scenario is a total hose-job, with the PCs abducted by the Chaos Gods and basically forced to raid the Plane of Law for a chaos artifact accidentally left over from the dawn of time.

Like all DCC jams though, it freaking rocks. High weirdness, random betrayals, and bizarre situations. And -- this all happens in a module made for level 1 PCs! In most other D&D-like games, L1s are hacking at kobolds and goblins and shit. In DCC, they are players in the eternal cosmic war and the rest of the campaign will be completely changed as a result of what they decide.

As a random note, one of the players got a mystical ability "Speak With Potato" that will last 3d6 weeks. I really hope he attempts to use it. I have no idea what's going to happen.