Be Excellent To Each Other

I posted this in Bits n Bobs last Monday, but I went to a Dungeons and Dragons club. I've always been intrigued by the concept of it, from reading comics like OOTS and reading Wil Wheaton's blog where he makes it sound such fun.

So last Monday a work colleage invited me along to a D+D club that he attends where they're currently on a campaign that's been running since Oct 2009 (ouch). I was invited to merely spectate at this juncture as, to be fair, I have no idea of the rules. They play a slight variation called Pathfinder, which I'm sure will mean something to someone.

The people there were exactly what you'd expect - the old guy with a beard, the thin, socially maladjusted guy, the fat kid etc etc, but they were all actually really good at roleplaying the characters and keeping ace banter going at all times. I even got to join in with the roleplaying bit by suggesting a possible way to explore through a smoke wall after one character charged through on his own (use grappling skill to attack the guy who went through and use the attached rope to see if he's still standing up, or is either dead or transported to another realm).

So I'm hopefully going back again tomorrow. Currently the party has been hit by a prism ray where the effects of the hit depend on the colour that hits you. The colleague who invited me has had his character disappear completely, and was unable to play for the rest of the evening, but we have researched it this week and it looks like he's been transported to an alternate plane. I guess the choice of plane is up to the gamesmaster, so the character may be completely lost to the party forever!

Good for you, russell.

I've played D&D and D20 modern on and off with Craster and a friend of ours for years. It's jolly good fun, and I miss it.

AD&D 2nd Ed is still better than this new D20 crap though. Kick it old school. TSR knew what they were doing, WOTC are a bunch of money-grubbing cahnts.

I HAVE QUESTIONS:

1) Is there a board, or is it a bit like "You are in a room, it is very foggy, what do you wish to do?" and then you say "I'd like to light a lantern" or somesuch, and then the DM says "You light the lantern, the room you are in is a dank cell, 10' by 6'. There is a door, with a hefty looking lock".

2) What happens when you die?

3) Is there much to and fro between the DM and the players over something or other?

The DM has been experimenting with a diceless game the last few weeks to try and stop one of the group cheating apparently (also seems to have suspiciously higher stats than the rest of the group).

He uses his laptop to roll the dice for them and then tells them the outcome. Seemed to make the game very quick moving, which led to excellent off the cuff thinking for battle tactics.

This is unsurprising. Most consumer dice will have preferences, and if you know the dice you'll know which one to use when you want a 6 or whatever...

Well I was reading the official rulebook and there's a whole section about being a DM where it tells you how to deal with the inevitable dick who tries to cheat.

1) The second one mostly... you can do the maps thing, but most decent dungeons are massive. You used to be able to get interlocking tile sets. I've never been in a game that used them.

2)Depends on the flavour of D&D. If you're low level, roll another character (most DMs will start you off at a reasonable level for the rest of the crew) If you're high level, and are in a D&D flavour that makes it easy, get resurrected in a number of ways.

3)Sometimes, if you mean 'such and such a monster can't do that' 'yes it can if I say so' 'no it can't' type arguing. A reasonable group leaves this till after the session's finished though.

ETA: THAC0 motherfucker! 2nd Ed Represent!

I assume "Call them a cunt and hit them with a chair until they leave/die"?

I missed the Qs from Mali:

1) The DM had printed off some guide rooms from a pre-built quest, but this club had an interlocking tile set which was wipe clean, and they drew on each room in marker pen as they uncovered bits, re-wiping to contain the current room each time.

2) If you die you'll hopefully have a character in your group who can raise the dead. Hopefully your corpse is still available. My friend has been transported to another plane, which is worse than death as even if the DM tells the group he is on the plane of boobies there may be no way for their characters to find that out. In which case he'll be lost for a damn long time and may have to start a new character.

3) It's about finding creative ways around stuff. Last week there was no way for one character to climb a smooth marble 30ft plinth so there was a to and fro with the DM about how his grappling hook COULD grip onto the flat edge, and the DM said no, it is too smooth etc until a suitable way was reached.

You are being too subtle.

I am playing D+D via the interwebnets right now via use of MapTool and some frieds. It is slightly slow. And we are crap. And I am tired and wanting to stop.

Chisel out some handholds, surely. Time-consuming, but marble isn't exactly indestructible.

Well it wasn't me running the game but I'm sure he could have said something about how (with the marble being perfectly smooth) any tool he used would keep glancing off. But there's rules for this shit.

A good DM has got to be flexible. If they come up with a reasonable way of being able to climb the plinth, let them climb the plinth. Then make it really windy and give them a 1 in 3 chance of being blown off it, that'll teach the fuckers.

This DM is apparently very fair, and pretty popular. Supposedly there's a waiting list to get into the group, so somehow I've skipped that I guess.

I think above all, the thing I came away with was how fun it was. I was only there a few hours and already there's this complex world and characters in it that I can't wait to find out what happens to them.

It all relies on a good DM, and a willingness to get into it and have fun. If you can make it less about rules and numbers, and more like a co-operative effort to tell a story, you're pretty much there.

I have to say that my one experience with D&D was one of incredible boredom - everything was so slow. It certainly didn't turn me away from the pew pew computer games.

Still, I'm glad you've found something new to enjoy Mr. Russ.

Well I don't know if it'll become a regular thing. But although slow moving, there was never a quiet moment. Absolutely tons of banter always going on.

I ditto this. The GM was pretty good as well; just the game is boring.

6 hours later and we've punched a few snakes and accidently killed each other. Greaaaaat. It doesn't help that the basic D7D rules suck. New mages get ONE spell a day? woot.

By the sounds of things I've been incredibly lucky.

Plus even though I've been massively nerdy, I am still allowed to look down on Live Action Role Players.

Oi! *grabs his (rubber) sword* This can give you a nasty bruise!

One. Of. Us. One. Of. Us. One. Of. Us...

Me too.

JESUS CHRIST, I READ THIS WHOLE FUCKING THREAD AND STILL DON'T KNOW HOW THEY CLIMBED THE MARBLE PLINTH!

I want to play D&D.

I never played it as a kid - all of my friends were "cool".

They used the "acid spray" spell to dissolve foot and hand holds in the marble? Marble is susceptible to acid erosion, after all. That's what I would have done.

Heh, I was kind of 'tricked' into my one D&D experience by the GM of the game. I was friends with his girlfriend at Uni and he'd asked me to come round to help on a writing project he was doing (my degree is in Research & Scriptwriting for Film & TV - lot of use that's got!), but within an hour all his D&D chums had shown up AND he'd conveniently written a character for me in case I wanted to join in! Dull, dull, dull.

On the other hand, he also does LARP stuff, which doesn't interest me either, but he does have an archery set with rubber tipped arrows as a result. I spent an afternoon fucking about with that once and it turned out I seem to be not too bad at this archery shit. A couple of weeks later we had the Steam Fair turn up in town, so I had a go on the archery stand and hit the bullseye with my first arrow. Won my gf the biggest cuddly toy they had that day!

Edit: lot of good that did me too!

OK. Some of the group could fly, so they were OK. One guy was a monk so used his acrobatic skill to jump up there, but the one guy left behind only had his grappling rope. In the end he didn't grapple the plinth, he grappled the statue on top of the plinth.

Which was a sleeping enemy - aargh random battle!

Man, what a let down!

Human pyramid was the obvious solution if only one of them couldn't make it.

This made me laugh!:D

That said, I would quite like to play it. Is there a decent computer RPG that uses D&D rules, I played NWN, but found it a bit shit.

Baldur's Gate and Sequel, Icewind Dale and sequels. There was a Tower of Elemental Evil remake at one point.

NWN and NWN2 are the best recent examples, probably.

If some could fly, couldn't they have just flown to the top and lowered the other guy's rope down? No grappling needed.

Some had abandoned him and already forged ahead to the next room. The others had finished their move or something. I don't know. This was such a minor point in the grand scheme of things.

Minor to you maybe, not for the poor chap left abandoned at the bottom of the cliff!

You really don't seem cut out for this d&d lark, you know...

I meant it was a minor point from the fact that the whole exchange probably took about 30 seconds out of a six hour evening, but I was using it as an example of there being some back and forth between the player and the DM for what can and can't be done in the spirit of roleplay.

As a teenager, I tagged along with some LARPers once as they were doing their thing in the woods around Keele University. I got put with a couple of lads, or, elves or whatever, and we were to lie in wait and ambush the bigger lads, er, heroes when they came past. Except they went a different route and we never saw them, so I just went home. The End.

I unsurprisingly did a lot of pen-and-paper RPGs back in the day, mostly as a GM, although I never cared for the generic high fantasy AD&D settings much (Dark Sun and Spelljammer were exceptions). My favourite systems were Feng Shui and Shadowrun. I played a fair bit of the World of Darkness games too, although Vampire was too cliche ridden to be interesting; Mage, on the other hand, was aces.

Feng Shui was particularly notable for being as loony tunes as the Hong Kong action movies it was based on. The GM was encouraged to give only very basic descriptions of environments ("you are in the kitchens of a Chinese restaurant...") so the players could improvise around them ("I grab a wok full of hot vegetables, throw the contents at one mook's face, and use the wok to smack the other mook in the face"). It also gave an in-game bonus to damage for any shotgun wielding character if the player, out of the game, mimed pumping a cartridge and made the "click-click" noise. Plus, the short story at the start of the game book features a character who has a faceless henchman fire a machine gun at him and he responds by running up the trail of bullets to kick the mook in the face.

It was ace.

I still have about 40kg of Shadowrun sourcebooks in my loft. It's more or less a complete collection of everything printed for an entire decade, I think.

Here's a reply in the vein of what kern said in his reenactment thread: if you meet up with a shitty group you'll have a shitty time I guess.

Live roleplaying is an order of magnitude less nerdy than Re-enacting though, no one checks what my trousers are made of!

And re-enacting is an order of magnitude less nerdy then... being a football fan. That is the nerdiest of all hobbies.

It can get a bit obsessive, certainly. Check out http://www.authentic-campaigner.com/ for the extreme end of the hobby!



Running around a field in an itchy wool uniform is better than watching others run around a field in a nylon uniform

EDIT: Cripes! That forum is another world again. 4 pages on tucking your trousers into your socks! No wonder I avoid that place... Oh, and, um, I have issues with looking at pictures of corpses to see what they were wearing. Stupid moral-but-farby Kern.

I dunno, that sounds like a pretty accurate enactment of a war scenario to me. Wait in forest for eleven hours. Nothing happens. Back to HQ.

A re-enacting friend of mine who also LARPs described the difference between them as:

Larping - inauthentic outfits; first person impression maintained the whole time
Mainstream re-enacting - authentic outfits; first person impression seldom, if ever, kept up.


(first person - I am an elf/Union soldier/Roundhead pikeman - 'I do this'
third person - I am portraying an elf/Union soldier/Roundhead pikeman - 'they would have done this')

It's impossible to think of Larping, and not think of lightning bolts...

Who needs authentic costumes...



When you've got dragons?

I went again last night.

Afterwards about 5 of us stayed behind with the DM discussing what the next campaign would be, even though it's over ~10 weeks away. I may be invited to roll a character at some point, but the group's already quite large.

My colleague who was hit by the prismatic ray: it turns out he was transported to the plane of positive energy. He absorbed as much positive energy as he could handle before exploding in one happy orgasm. He CAN be brought back by a level 9 resurrection spell (something to do with Divination), but the rest of the party are only levelled up enough to be able to cast level 7 spells. So he's dead.

So he spent the whole session without anything to do! Gutted.

We played a wee bit of Feng Shui back in the day. I'm still very fond of my Masked Avenger - THE FURY! - whose name always had to be pronounced as if it were all in caps. I remember us infiltrating a Mafia wedding disguised as caterers ("You there! The waiter! Why are you wearing a leather cowl?" "Er... acne.") with our weapons hidden inside assorted roast chicken. When the giant wedding cake got rolled out, we all looked at one another and said "there's no way we're getting through the rest of this session without one of us jumping off a balcony and landing in that."

We were wrong. Two of us jumped off a balcony and landed in the cake.

Don't want to be an arse, but that sounds like terrible Gamesmastery.

Oh hi, thanks for turning up, you're dead - so you cant do anything - ha!

During the end of my GCSEs and a bit of my A-levels a group of my friends dabbled with Pen and Paper RPGs. Not the coolest moment in my childhood but we had fun. We played one game of D&D - and in my opinion it can easily lead to pretty terrible play. Especially if the Gamesmaster has been brought up on computer games to heavily and so follows the rules too closely. For example the wizard in our game bought a horse so after he had fired his two shitty magic missiles at the enemy he could run away quicker until he could sleep them back, because he was useless for anything else. Dull, dull dull.

Instead we mainly played short games of Feng Shui (I have to third it's awesomeness) and the Stars Wars (pre-prequels) RPG. And I ran a massive campaign of Rifts* .

The best system was by far the one used in Star Wars - the right mix between being quick and fun, but preventing any excess Feng Shui madness. Rifts was completely broken, and basically meant that it all become smoke and mirrors and I fudged everything - which I quickly realised was the best way to play.

Erm, Ive just started rambling like an old man. Whoops. My point was, erm, hang on.... oh yeah, the GM seems very stuck to his script. There is no possible way that he should have gone away for a week and then come back to say - your dead so sit out.

For example in Rifts I had a big long campaign planned out where the 3 main characters were to become Saviours and/or Destroyers Of The Entire Earth. Along the way they were infected with this vampire like disease when rescuing a girl from a vampire nest (woke with feeding marks - but otherwise fine), and whilst they didn't think much of it, and it was going to slowly reveal itself over a period of sessions as it intertwined with my in depth plans...

But then in the next session a falling out between the characters over the spoils they had found lead to one of them (a short temptered guy, playing an even shorter tempered girl) attacked one of the others.

With a missile launcher.

So the other two killed him. Completely destroying my campaign plans. I could have fudged it into a stalemate - but it's always better to roll with things.

Instead he rolls a new character and they find him next session trying to protect himself (and the village he's in) from a crazy vampire. And it turns out the vampire is only his previous dead character from last week.

And so their main nemesis was born - through which I could feed them hints about the apocalypse the three of them were destined to cause. It also made the others terrified to die, knowing they would come back as far more powerful characters that I would make there lives very difficult with.

Long story short, if I can find away out of my player characters killing each other in the previous game - he can find a way to include the guy he killed off.

* Rifts is completely bat shit insane setting (nuclear apocalypse on earth kills billions whose psychic energy brings back laylines and portals and shit so you have space aliens versus cthulu versus facist sci-fi marines versus mechwarriors versus mutants versus orks versus wizards versus cyborgs etc.

Don't want to be an arse, but that sounds like terrible Gamesmastery.

Oh hi, thanks for turning up, you're dead - so you cant do anything - ha!

During the end of my GCSEs and a bit of my A-levels a group of my friends dabbled with Pen and Paper RPGs. Not the coolest moment in my childhood but we had fun. We played one game of D&D - and in my opinion it can easily lead to pretty terrible play. Especially if the Gamesmaster has been brought up on computer games to heavily and so follows the rules too closely. For example the wizard in our game bought a horse so after he had fired his two shitty magic missiles at the enemy he could run away quicker until he could sleep them back, because he was useless for anything else. Dull, dull dull.

Instead we mainly played short games of Feng Shui (I have to third it's awesomeness) and the Stars Wars (pre-prequels) RPG. And I ran a massive campaign of Rifts* .

The best system was by far the one used in Star Wars - the right mix between being quick and fun, but preventing any excess Feng Shui madness. Rifts was completely broken, and basically meant that it all become smoke and mirrors and I fudged everything - which I quickly realised was the best way to play.

Erm, Ive just started rambling like an old man. Whoops. My point was, erm, hang on.... oh yeah, the GM seems very stuck to his script. There is no possible way that he should have gone away for a week and then come back to say - your dead so sit out.

For example in Rifts I had a big long campaign planned out where the 3 main characters were to become Saviours and/or Destroyers Of The Entire Earth. Along the way they were infected with this vampire like disease when rescuing a girl from a vampire nest (woke with feeding marks - but otherwise fine), and whilst they didn't think much of it, and it was going to slowly reveal itself over a period of sessions as it intertwined with my in depth plans...

But then in the next session a falling out between the characters over the spoils they had found lead to one of them (a short temptered guy, playing an even shorter tempered girl) attacked one of the others.

With a missile launcher.

So the other two killed him. Completely destroying my campaign plans. I could have fudged it into a stalemate - but it's always better to roll with things.

Instead he rolls a new character and they find him next session trying to protect himself (and the village he's in) from a crazy vampire. And it turns out the vampire is only his previous dead character from last week.

And so their main nemesis was born - through which I could feed them hints about the apocalypse the three of them were destined to cause. It also made the others terrified to die, knowing they would come back as far more powerful characters that I would make there lives very difficult with.

Long story short, if I can find away out of my player characters killing each other in the previous game - he can find a way to include the guy he killed off.

* Rifts is completely bat shit insane setting (nuclear apocalypse on earth kills billions whose psychic energy brings back laylines and portals and shit so you have space aliens versus cthulu versus facist sci-fi marines versus mechwarriors versus mutants versus orks versus wizards versus cyborgs etc.

I think he's considered quite a good gamesmaster, but the chap knew he would be dead from talking on a forum privately with him during the week.

I definitely see your point, but by the end of the session the rest of the party were able to complete the module and have discovered a way to teleport back to the surface world where they might be able to meet new characters. In the current dungeon they were stuck looking for a way out so there was no way they were going to be able to suddenly find a new person to join them on their quest.