What are you playing? (games)

[juansolo]

Everything in the early days was on tape for us. It wasn't until the ST and Amiga that we fully embraced the floppy. On the one hand it made the games cheap and super easy to pirate, on the other it meant anyone could write games and act as their own distributor. So it birthed the bedroom coders and the UK computer gaming boom.

[chromesphere]

Finally got a chance to play another game of mansions of madness.  So much better to play on a cold rainy night, really builds up the atmosphere; some of our most memorable games.  Not sure if you make out whats happening on the finale room tiles but, yeah, needless to say by the state of the board...ahhh...we lost....

[flanagan0718]

Soon...Very VERY soon there will only be...

[alanp]

I'm still grumpy about how BAD a port Dark Souls 3 is on Steam. Grrrrrr.

[juansolo]

That point when you print out a map for your next session. Carefully divide it up into bits in photoshop, print all the pages, trim them with a guillotine, carefully tape them together, and then realise that you've printed the same map twice rather than both floors...

[MaxPo]

World of Tanks and GTA when I need to make a short break from something

[midwayfair]

My wife's been running a game of 5th edition D&D for the last few months. I'm playing a dwarven bard. His instruments are bagpipes, caliope, and dwarven pipe organ. He has a penchant for putting his foot in his mouth or unintentionally insulting people. He was raised by gnomes and identifies as a gnome if you call him a dwarf, or a dwarf if you call him a gnome.

He also has a talking sword! It's inhabited by a spirit we found in an old book in a library. (It's a long story.)

Recently, the party's ranger stole my bagpipes, painted "I love halflings" on it, rubbed hot peppers on the mouthpiece, and wrapped the bag with wires to make it hold less air. Guess who's not getting inspired any time soon ...

Also recently, I dug out the old magic cards to play a "new" magic format called Old School that's just the cards from 1993 and 1994 (sometimes 1995). This was the end of an extremely long game where I got killed by funguses (I'm on the left):



It's a surprisingly good format, especially since there are never any new cards If anyone's near Baltimore and interested in playing, I set up a website for the Baltimore group: http://baltimoreoldschoolmtg.wordpress.com. (We allow proxies in case you just can't help yourself and need to play with expensive cards.)

[sonnyboy27]

My wife's been running a game of 5th edition D&D for the last few months. I'm playing a dwarven bard. His instruments are bagpipes, caliope, and dwarven pipe organ. He has a penchant for putting his foot in his mouth or unintentionally insulting people. He was raised by gnomes and identifies as a gnome if you call him a dwarf, or a dwarf if you call him a gnome.

He also has a talking sword! It's inhabited by a spirit we found in an old book in a library. (It's a long story.)

Recently, the party's ranger stole my bagpipes, painted "I love halflings" on it, rubbed hot peppers on the mouthpiece, and wrapped the bag with wires to make it hold less air. Guess who's not getting inspired any time soon ...

This is fantastic. Been in a 5e campaign with some friends for the past couple of years. We've been doing basically a 1 year season and then changing it up. Played a sneaky rogue in the first campaign who was out for blood and puns. Now I'm a more respected Tempest Cleric but we've been taking turns as DM so he hasn't been around much. DMing is really hard, especially keeping track of everything.

[midwayfair]

This is fantastic. Been in a 5e campaign with some friends for the past couple of years. We've been doing basically a 1 year season and then changing it up. Played a sneaky rogue in the first campaign who was out for blood and puns. Now I'm a more respected Tempest Cleric but we've been taking turns as DM so he hasn't been around much. DMing is really hard, especially keeping track of everything.

Yeah, my wife spends a LOT of time preparing for adventures. I slightly prefer DMing to playing, but I also have a more thoroughly fleshed out world and a lot of experience as a story teller that lets me wing things fairly often.

The way you've structured things sounds like a good way to keep people interested.

[sonnyboy27]

This is fantastic. Been in a 5e campaign with some friends for the past couple of years. We've been doing basically a 1 year season and then changing it up. Played a sneaky rogue in the first campaign who was out for blood and puns. Now I'm a more respected Tempest Cleric but we've been taking turns as DM so he hasn't been around much. DMing is really hard, especially keeping track of everything.

Yeah, my wife spends a LOT of time preparing for adventures. I slightly prefer DMing to playing, but I also have a more thoroughly fleshed out world and a lot of experience as a story teller that lets me wing things fairly often.

The way you've structured things sounds like a good way to keep people interested.

That's awesome. When a DM can flush all of that out it makes for an awesome adventure. As a DM, I had an idea of what I wanted the players to do but had trouble creating enticing hooks to pull them in that direction. Still working on that bit of it. We also were playing in about 1.5-2hr increments so there wasn't much time to go exploring and stuff. Been watching a bunch of Critical Role and Aquisitions Inc to get some ideas and see how they move things along though.

The rotating DM thing was an experiment to see who liked it the most and would want to maintain it. I'm enjoying being a player at the moment. Still getting the hang of RPing well and being in character. The season type thing just worked out because we decided to rotate at the one year mark. Our current DM is about to have a baby though so we'll probably be taking a break for a good while, unfortunately.

[midwayfair]

That's awesome. When a DM can flush all of that out it makes for an awesome adventure. As a DM, I had an idea of what I wanted the players to do but had trouble creating enticing hooks to pull them in that direction.

First thing is avoid too many choices, and always drop hints with the rule of three. Players don't necessarily pick up on stuff, but if it's mentioned three times, they will always notice. This is a general story telling thing, in fact -- notice that folk tales use the rule of three fairly often. It's an ancient memory aid.

I think one of the secrets is not to try to entice the players to do what you want. If you give them a bunch of adventure hooks and they pick one, they might still feel railroaded. One of the best ways to handle it is to just let the players do stuff and have a pile of maleable encounters that you can pick from at a moment's notice. The players write the story that way, and you simply provide the obstacles for them to overcome. Sometimes you can railroad them in a way that's not obvious, or pull them in from the most unlikely of circumstances.

Say you want the players to explore the sewers under the city. Well, no matter how much you talk about treasures, I'm not voluntarily going in a sewer, it's dangerous down there. But I might go shopping. And the shop keeper might be missing and I might be intrigued enough to go looking for them in the back room, at which point the floor collapses and at least a couple players fail their saves to avoid falling down the hole. The party's not just going to abandon them, and now they're in the sewers where you wanted them. Here the players got railroaded, but there was a possibility that they didn't (all of them save), and even if they didn't, maybe now they're concerned about about other places collapsing and they go do the thing anyway.

The last campaign I ran, my gimmick was "What's the worst possible outcome from the PCs doing something they think is helpful?" The way to run that one is that you find one absolutely irresistible adventure hook (or railroad them at a point where they're okay with it in the beginning), and then you let them "win" but with dire consequences. If they run away from responsibility, then you can have them hounded for that. If they try to fix the bad situation, that's more opportunities to have things go south, and more opportunities for them to feel like they need to fix it. This also gives you plenty of time to prepare for the next session, because you can pretty much always end on a cliffhanger.

[Betty Wont]

Soon...Very VERY soon there will only be...

YES!!! 8 hours left on the countdown.....
Then YOU DIED.

[flanagan0718]

Soon...Very VERY soon there will only be...

YES!!! 8 hours left on the countdown.....
Then YOU DIED.

100% ACCURATE!
Are you a pc gamer or PS4? My PSN handle is flanagan424


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Betty Wont]

Soon...Very VERY soon there will only be...

YES!!! 8 hours left on the countdown.....
Then YOU DIED.

100% ACCURATE!
Are you a pc gamer or PS4? My PSN handle is flanagan424


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Ps4. nofomofo. My 9 year old has beat all the soulsborne games but this one. He is stoked and "praise the sun"-ing everyone.

[juansolo]

I'm running a game of Storm King's Thunder for my friends and their kids. I too am finding that I prefer DMing to playing (it's my first time behind the screen), and it seems to be going well... Well they haven't decided to go back to the old campaign yet where I was a player anyhow. I'm also going to be running a pirate themed one shot for their daughter and her friends next week which should be fun.

As for the players I occasionally ask them what sort of things the characters want to do between sessions so I can tailor the game to them. Thankfully SKT is really sandboxy if you want it to be and doesn't have a time limit to drive them on. They can just hang out in the world if they want being low level adventurers, raiding tombs and what have you. I just mentioned to them, when you fancy getting back on plot, let me know and I'll push you in the right direction.

I am also creating my own little corner of Faerun. The kids are probably a little too young at the moment to get involved in the political aspect of things I've built into it, but I look forward to running that maybe later for them. If anything, I'm just enjoying creating that world and it's contents.

As a player I enjoy playing complicated characters. I tried running a righteous paladin and it just didn't work for me at all and I got bored really quickly. Which is a shame as the mini I painted for him was AWESOME! My longest running character is a blue dragonblood tiefling sorcerer (before Critical Role made them popular). Who was/is a spy. I love that guy, but he's really messed up and has a lot of inner conflict regarding his heritage, being a tiefling with the blood of a blue dragon trying to be a good guy in a world that mostly hates him.

Oh yeah, as for prep, I spend way too much time on it sometimes. But the players do seem to appreciate it. This is for a day of D&D. I haven't finished prepping all the encounters yet, but these are the maps and the handouts (65 pages of A4... counting the map I did twice admittedly):