TableTop RPGs

[Soyvoyage]

Because some of us play them, and i'm interested in the details. Soon I will post about my adventures in GURPS but for now, here is something about Heroic Cthullu (a heavily modified form of Call of Cthullu). Logan (the GM) records all the games as Mp3s They are very entertaining to listen to.

http://heroiccthulhu.mypodcast.com/

[Kaatridge]

I a really eagr to try Tabletop RPG's, I have Marvel Heroclix, but I'm not sure that counts.

[Soyvoyage]

I'm interested in Heroclix, but i've never been able to find any.

[Kaatridge]

I normally go to the Sydney Game Centre for all my needs, I was going to try a tabletop RPG, but I'm not sure how it works. Must you buy all the rule and story books first?

[pecka_a]

I normally go to the Sydney Game Centre for all my needs, I was going to try a tabletop RPG, but I'm not sure how it works. Must you buy all the rule and story books first?

yeah you do I'm going to be having my first d&d day in a couple of weeks.

All I can suggest Kaatridge is that you ask around your game centre and see if any of the people that you play with play them. if they do if can a you come along one day and see how its run.

[Farvana]

With a good group that doesn't rules-lawyer, you don't need the book. My group of five has 2 Player's Handbooks. Our White Wolf game only has one of the core book and a single supplement.

More on the respective adventures and general advice later, when I'm not at work.

[Soyvoyage]

GURPS has two core books, characters and campaigns, because of the massive amount of options for each of them. So we have them and around 6 supplements, which is definately overkill, half of them have yet to be used. We have no adventure books because there is no need of them. Half of the fun is making your own adventures. I have got all my books shipped from america. Now, I shall talk about my campaign!

Gurps by Gaslight (Steampunk campaign)
The PCs (player characters) work in London and do odd (but fairly high profile) jobs for anyone who hires them. Characters, so far!

Dwight Spinnel; an old hunter with prominent skills in climbing and shooting.

Rudyard Linnel; an enthusiastic inventor with lots of mechanic skills.

Claudis Asoff; a Russian mercenary with knives and pistols.

Jaster Mcallef; a charismatic Irishman with a rapier. He can be very pursasive

At the moment they are heading to an exhibition in Wales.

[pecka_a]

R.I.P Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008 )
If you don't know who he is GET OUT!(or look him up)

[Joob]

I play as Jaster in Soys GURPS campaign.
We do totally rad stuff like find out who rigged a sushi machine to kill someone
and electrocute giant rampaging chickens 8).

[Soyvoyage]

This next few days I will be playing GURPS. Hopefully all the PCs wont kill themselves.
Sometime, I draw the characters from my campaign. In the last week I have redesigned them all for drawing simplicity, and have started a comic. A great way to inspire yourself to write a story is to re-write what happened on an RPG adventure.

[Kaatridge]

Joob and Soyvoyage are getting me into GURPS, by the way, as we speak, I am reading the GURPS light manual! So hurray!

[Poisonedv]

I always wanted to get into tabletop RPG's, but I could never find any players, despite living in a college town that is primarily for computer science. I had to settle for getting my family to play "Settlers of Catan" or "Zombies!!!" with me.

[Soyvoyage]

Whoa, really? If you can't get players ther where can you get them.

Kaatridge: That is a good idea, and I do not know why I didn't think of it.

[Poisonedv]

I mean... there are these guys (http://www.cugaming.com/)... but I dunno man.

[Soyvoyage]

Darn D&D! I mean seriously, one of the most enjoyable parts of roleplaying is creating a new world and trying different things! That is why I play GURPS, its whole point is to be versatile.

step#1:Kick down door.
step#2:Kill monster.
step#3:Take treasure.
FOR 20 YEARS! Honestly I would of thought those playing D&D when it was the only thing available would of moved on once they saw oppurtunitie to have some more creative settings.
I thought the whole point was being creative.
Apparently not.

[Farvana]

Whoa, what?

D&D can be as creative as you care to be.

It provides plenty of rules for standard dungeon crawling, sure, but it also gives a pretty solid framework for making your own adventures.

Of course, to do anything cool, you have to fudge the rules, but that's just about any system.

[Poisonedv]

Honestly I've always wanted to play PARANOIA but the guys on that site are like Warhammer buffs...

[Farvana]

Warhammer's pretty terrible.

Paranoia is awesome.

Tell them some dude on the internet said so.

[Poisonedv]

Yeah I want to play it online at Paranoia-live.net but there are no games started. I'm waiting, anxiously.

EDIT:
Oh holy shit, what a coincidence. Soyvoyage, we both live in IL, and I have listened to heroic cthulu podcast before, and then I go on the paranoia forums seeing logan linking to the heroic cthulu podcast and asking for paranoia players. Jeez, the internet is small. I live like 2 hours away though plus I don't have my license yet.

[Soyvoyage]

Whoa, what?

D&D can be as creative as you care to be.

It provides plenty of rules for standard dungeon crawling, sure, but it also gives a pretty solid framework for making your own adventures.

Of course, to do anything cool, you have to fudge the rules, but that's just about any system.

You will be right. The only experience of D&D was some sort of 2nd edition, which I got for $2 at an op shop. It was guessing and what people told me. Still though there will be people playing same old dungeon with same old kobolds, which is unfortunate.

WOO! Heroic Cthullu. If you play a game I will have to listen, and then say "I tought that kid everything he knows." Even though it is not in the slightest bit true.

[Muz]

I like D&D. 2nd Ed was the worst of all of them, IMHO. Too many illogical rules, too many stats to memorize, note down and calculate. I think it's called AD&D for good reason. I actually made a very nice, creative D&D campaign, with a huge amount of detail. As illogical as is sounds, I actually made a world that can be atheistic, polytheistic, or monotheistic. And I made scientific magic, lol. And I only fudged the material component rules (but so do most DMs) :P

Too bad I don't really have anyone to play it with but my siblings. What are the other tabletop games like? I'd like to try them out some day, but the local bookstores only have D&D, Warhammer, D20, and that Star Wars one. D20 was cool, but I didn't bother to look at the rest because they had so much code and stuff I didn't understand.

[Poisonedv]

IMPROVED GM SKILLS!
The original is best, I remember now that I used to play online...

[Swarm Of Killer Bees]

The release of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons has given me a little unease, (on an unrelated note, I agree with Muz, 2nd edition was atrocious, but at any rate: ) after investing so much of my time and hard earned money into 3rd edition books, it seems like rather a slap in the face to have to repurchase it all in a few format I have not the time, will or want to understand and relearn.

[Patrick Alexander]

it seems like rather a slap in the face to have to repurchase it all

Is someone actually forcing you to buy these books?

Because that would be strange.

[Farvana]

It IS a much better system.

The dice only screw you about a third of the time, instead of half like in normal 3/3.5. Also, more streamlined, more in the spirit of 1st.

Still, there's much better systems out there.

[Swarm Of Killer Bees]

It IS a much better system.

The dice only screw you about a third of the time, instead of half like in normal 3/3.5. Also, more streamlined, more in the spirit of 1st.

Still, there's much better systems out there.

I agree, though I still have an attachment to the 3.5 system, I love it for all its complications, though again I side with you on the part about getting beat down by bad rolls.

[Muz]

Is someone actually forcing you to buy these books?

Because that would be strange.
That's not really a good way of looking at it, especially from someone who plays video games, which is aside from the music industry, a medium where publishers abuse their best customers.

Anyway, speaking of that, what somewhat annoys me is the 4th edition. 2nd edition lasted for practically a generation and suddenly when I start buying them D&D books, they change every few years, just when everyone started writing ideas to get around the flaws in the rules.

There's nothing wrong with an upgrade.. it just takes everyone a long time to get used to a new system and by the time they get used to it.. poof! D&D 4.5E will pop up to skim us out of our money. And what with systems being as they are, you can't really play it if you don't play the same version as everyone else.

[Farvana]

It's been five years since 3.5. I feel like it's been long enough.

I've found you don't need more than one DMG and Monster Manual to a group, and only 1 PHB for every two players. In a group of six people, that's less than $200 altogether; compare that to the current console of your choice.

[Muz]

But.. I've only played like 50 hours of D&D 3.5 games, compared to the hundreds and hundreds of hours on my computer.

I'd have to blame my brother for that partly. He tends to make an uber-strong barbarian character who either attacks an impossibly tough character in heavy armor (like the sheriff) or ends up actually killing one of the physically weaker PCs in the party in a fight early on. That kinda kills the game for everyone.

[townleyst]

I like D&D. 2nd Ed was the worst of all of them, IMHO. Too many illogical rules, too many stats to memorize, note down and calculate. I think it's called AD&D for good reason.

Funny you should mention that. I'm running a 2nd edition game at the moment (as well as a 4th edition and writing up a 1st edition (AD&D) one). One of the main reasons I chose to run it is because of its near-incomprehensible ruleset. A player who has never played D&D has little to no chance of understanding the rules, even in the presence of the dauntingly thick books that house them.

For me the good part of that is that my players leave almost all the rules to me. There's next to no meta-gaming, and they play it in a very different way to my 4th edition players. With 4th edition the easiest solution is almost always to fight your way through things. The mechanics are very clear, paladins can have plate-mail from the get-go, and the powers are, well, powerful. In 2nd edition you get a handful of hitpoints (ever remember rolling 2 for your starting HP?) and you really don't know what the DM is going to throw at you.

I guess you shouldn't have to rely on the difficult to understand mechanics to get good RPing happening, but something about the layout of 4th edition seems to attract a focus on 'mechanical' solutions to roleplaying challenges.

I play a lot of different systems, and my favourite is probably still Paranoia, but I have a soft spot for D&D - no matter what edition it is.

[Captain Awful]

How does 4th edition fare online? The biggest deterrent to my D&Ding is that I have no DM. An online mode would fix that, exempting the fact that most people probably wouldn't get along with how I play D&D.

[Farvana]

It's more suited to IRC than earlier versions. The whole powers/exploits system simplifies things.

There's been promises of an online DMing program, but it's yet to be delivered.

[townleyst]

4th edition combat has a lot to keep track of with all the status effects and stuff, so I've actually found combat goes faster with 4th edition when we play via maptools (one of the many online gaming tables), because macros take care of all the dirty work.

No idea when the official DDI will come out though, or how it will be compared to all the free options.

[Muz]

Heh, I have a heavy reliance on tools for all versions of D&D. I dunno, I think it's because my players are a bit lazy to track their own stats and then it's difficult to track initiative, AC modifiers, calculate the actual to-hit, etc. Computers make everything easier for everyone.

[Ensenada]

Whooo necropost.

Has anyone here played Scion? I'm generally pretty fond of White Wolf, and plotwise it sounds good, but the reviews are mixed. Now that I have a semi-consistent group together I want to do as much as possible before we scatter for college.