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Mycelia Board Game Review

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What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

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14 Aug 2014 11:23 - 14 Aug 2014 11:24 #184825 by Green Lantern
The folks you game with should be people you enjoy just hanging with in general, especially when playing an RPG. I suggest skipping the game next session and just plan on a social gathering to give everyone an opportunity to simply hang out. If they can't manage that due to personality conflicts then yeah, it might be best to reboot the group and/or say goodbye to players. It sucks but these things happen.

If you are the GM I would express to any players not having fun to share with you what's bothering them, and if it's not actions you are taking as GM then you need to try mediating the disputes. Like I said, if these folks simply don't like each other that's going to be a tough hill to climb.

Hopefully your group does enjoy the social aspect of your RPG game night and can salvage the game. I think spending a good portion or all of your next session just chilling and talking and hanging out might go a long way in mending fences. After all, if player B is taking out his frustrations in the game and attempting to kill the other PCs then there is certainly some passive aggression that needs to be addressed.
Last edit: 14 Aug 2014 11:24 by Green Lantern.
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14 Aug 2014 12:10 #184830 by Shellhead
I did invite all but A over for boardgames on a couple of occasions. A is a nice guy, but once in a while he really irritates me. Unfortunately, attendance was low both times so not much group bonding took place. Maybe I should have offered XP for attendance and made co-op games mandatory.

The situation where B was attacking A and E was justified, in that first A and then E were temporarily controlled by an enemy. However, the rest of the group responded with grappling and non-lethal damage, while B was hacking them up with a sword.

Even though B is an old friend and A, D and E are merely acquaintances, I think I will let the vote speak for the group. A secret vote will be better, with the results presented by email later to avoid a scene. Although B is a friend, he is sometimes abrasive and he knows it. Also, I don't strongly sympathize with his plight of potentially being ousted, given that he was trying to get A kicked out last year. If the group votes to keep B and that causes D and E to leave, that's their choice.

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05 Nov 2014 13:16 #190019 by Green Lantern
I'm ramping up a game of Savage Worlds soon and was curious if anyone here had any experience with the system? If so please share any GM tips or good game aids you might have stashed. I've never used this system but after reading through the rules it looks like my cup o'tea. Fast and furious with just enough rules crunch to keep things varied. Plus, no hit points to track. Yay!

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12 Nov 2014 13:50 - 12 Nov 2014 13:55 #190539 by Gary Sax
Thread bump.

So seeing my dad, who is an old man now, really got me wanting to do RPGing again. He doesn't do anything creative with his mind, just more workish stuff/hobbies and you can tell... he's a bit of boring dude. I can see myself going down that road since my main hobbies now are boardgaming and videogaming, both of which are fun but don't require significant creative effort.

Anyway, I was reading "A World of Ice and Fire" for the class I'm teaching on it next year on the books and I feel like I had a really good campaign idea for the Ice and Fire setting. It made me want to DM, and I know my wife and a friend from work have wanted to try an RPG. I just read the comments a few pages back on the Green Ronin game, so thanks for that. Still trying to decide if it's the right fit, has anyone played it since those last posts? I'm still digesting the campaign thing but I might bounce it off you guys once I have a better idea.

Also, the actual product line is messy. I find what's on amazon very confusing---like, what is for the current version of the game? I think I found the core book (there's an older core book too???), but I can't tell which of the others might be helpful.
Last edit: 12 Nov 2014 13:55 by Gary Sax.

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12 Nov 2014 20:45 #190578 by Stan Leer
@ Gary- I don't have experience with the Green Ronin system for Song of Ice and Fire. I was interested in it myself for a while.

You might consider going with another system and try to tailor the rules for the setting. You could use something with which you are familiar and change up classes and such. So if you are using say D&D use fighters and rogues only for classes and you get really low magic campaign.

There are obviously gobs of other systems you might consider many of which are free if you mostly want to tell a specific story.

GURPS can do any setting but can be very mechanical. I suppose it depends on how technically you want to interact with the world.
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12 Nov 2014 20:48 #190579 by Stan Leer
On other notes- i have been wanting to try to figure a way to do a role-playing setting for my 8 year old daughter. I like the idea of a story telling game. I'd like to stress problem solving and creatvitiy but dont want to focus on fighting/killing as main interaction with the world.

1. Any suggestions of systems?
2. Anyone familiar with Microscope? [url=http://]http://www.amazon.com/Microscope-Ben-Robbins/dp/0983277907/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1415843252&sr=1-4&keywords=microscope[/url]

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12 Nov 2014 20:51 #190580 by Stan Leer
When I was looking at it years ago, this system was well receieved:

www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-D20-Based-Op...+of+ice+and+fire+rpg

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12 Nov 2014 21:42 #190582 by jason10mm

Jeff White wrote: I'm reading almost universal high praise for the D&D 5e PHB.

Who's got it? What's the word around these parts?


It's been a while so maybe you've played it by now, but I think 5e is pretty awesome. I get all sorts of gushy 2e vibes from it, which was the edition I played the most. I thought 3.5/PF was just too rules heavy, monsters had too many stats, and player options were difficult to work around. Never played 4e outside of whatever version was in the DnD board games.

Only downside is this looong wait for the DMG and a severe lack of gameplay examples in the PHB to figure out how some things are intended to work. But it is a very streamlined system, fast to play, works well with and without a tactical grid, and allows for easy on the fly decisions.

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13 Nov 2014 04:27 #190588 by mads b.
I just finished writing and testing a freeform RPG about pretentious artists struggling to get fame and recognition. It's meant to be played in 2-3 hour sessions, and each session should feel like en episode of a sitcom.

The rules are quite easy and there's not a lot to prepare, but it requires all players to contribute to the story. And the game master is more of a game organizer meaning that he/she can join in on the fun.

Send me a PM if you want to give it a try. It's ugly, but very playable.

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13 Nov 2014 10:46 #190600 by SebastianBludd

Stan Leer wrote: On other notes- i have been wanting to try to figure a way to do a role-playing setting for my 8 year old daughter. I like the idea of a story telling game. I'd like to stress problem solving and creatvitiy but dont want to focus on fighting/killing as main interaction with the world.

1. Any suggestions of systems?


I was looking into RPG's for kids recently and I thought Meddling Kids (Scooby Doo RPG) looked fun. About 1 hour long sessions and, I presume, no murder. ;)

There are a bunch of others on DriveThruRPG if that theme doesn't appeal to you our your daughter.
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13 Nov 2014 11:38 #190601 by Shellhead
My big D&D campaign continues, with a current party of seven. Last session was the dramatic conclusion of an epic adventure that we started more than a year ago: the Banewarrens. The final battle was the biggest that I've ever run in miniatures scale, covering a half mile in horizontal distance and another half mile in vertical distance. At one point, we had a sidebar discussion about how fast things fall in six second combat rounds and ended up looking up terminal velocity during the discussion.

At the time we wrapped up the last session, the druid was dragging off the necromancer and the cleric for possible resurrection. The rogue went looking for them and instead stumbled into a trap that the party encountered in an earlier session that he missed, resulting in his paralysis due to temporary loss of strength points. Elsewhere, the barbarian was guarding the cowardly wizard and the ineffectual chaostechnician, and they didn't know what happened to the others. Because the party has been overspending on magic items, they can't even afford to reincarnate the necromancer or the cleric right now, so those two players are thinking about starting new characters. For in-character reasons, the player of the barbarian is also changing to a new character, as will the rogue, who recently lost most of his magic items to Mordenkainen's Disjunction. The players are disgruntled at the moment, but nobody wants to quit. At least I had fun.

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25 Nov 2014 09:59 #191421 by DukeofChutney
hyperborea.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=316

An adventure and an NPC i wrote are published. AFS magazine is a rather small low print run rpg mag. Consider burning $10 and having a read.
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24 Jun 2015 11:20 #204874 by Green Lantern
Savage Worlds - I've been using the system to run an Orkworld/Warcraft/Song of Ice and Fire hybrid and it's been excellent through 20+ hours of tabletop gaming. I just recently used it to run a large scale battle, the first time I've ever tried something on that scale that worked. Mass combat in Savage Worlds is abstract and at the macro level but my players loved it. We were able to run a battle that encompassed hundreds of combatants on either side and not lose focus on the story or get bogged down in the minutiae of measuring ranges or tallying hit points.

The system has just about everything a GM would ever need in his toolbox to tell fun stories and keep the fun rolling by supporting narrative decisions with easy to use mechanics. Tactical combat is here if you want it and various subsystems exist to run thematic chases on foot or with mounts and vehicles. Social conflict is easily managed with just enough crunch to keep things interesting if you are the type of GM that likes to take into account a player's roleplaying ability (or lack) and his PC's strengths/weaknesses.

Character creation is fast and can be used to build almost any concept imaginable, especially if you start adding in any of the excellent companion source-books. I've been using Savage Worlds for sword and sorcery style gaming but it can easily be adapted for WWII, sci-fi, horror, superhero or any genre setting you can dream up.

If you're looking for a rules light RPG system that keeps the action "fast, furious, and fun" I can't recommend Savage Worlds enough. It's allowed me get a game I've been wanting to GM for years to the table but could never find a suitable game to pull it off. I loved John Wick's vision in Orkworld but the mechanics behind it seemed awkward and minimal. I could have used D20 Pathfinder or D&D but both options were not appealing given how much I hate bookkeeping and the inexorable advance of the PC's into higher levels and added complexity. A Song of Ice and Fire RP from Green Ronin captures the intrigue of court and political backstabbery, but there are no orks. Plus the game suffers from the buckets of dice syndrome and subsystems on top of subsystems so I dropped back and punted on it too. Enter Savage Worlds and it's flexibility and my problem was solved. On top of the elegant rules the game is easy on the wallet too, with both the hard copy and PDF versions selling for under $10.

TL;DR - if you like sword & sorcery action or just need an elegant rules-light RPG I highly recommend Savage Worlds. It's easy to read and put to use at the table and won't hit the pocket book all that hard either.

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24 Jun 2015 11:31 #204878 by Shellhead
My big D&D campaign continues, though the pace has slowed to maybe 18 sessions per year now. The average party member is still at around 11th level, due to deaths and new characters. The party is now somewhat heavy on the spellcasters, with a druid, a cleric, a necromancer, an evoker, a bard/barbarian, and a chaostechnician/sorcerer. However, the 3rd level minotaur barbarian is so devastating in melee that he can make up for all the cringing spellcasters.

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27 Jul 2015 12:47 #207155 by Shellhead
I spent a large amount of time playing diceless role-playing games last weekend. While working on my Amber boardgame, I stumbled across the existence of a local Amber convention, and signed up for it. Attendance was down by half this year because it fell too close to GenCon on the calendar, but there were still enough people to make it work. I wasn't sure if I would have fun with these folks, so I only committed to Friday and Saturday events.

Game #1: Lords of Gossamer & Shadow. This is Amber Diceless with the serial number filed off. We discovered a WMD capable of destroying multiple realities at once. I was playing the Gossamer equivalent of Benedict of Amber. In the end, I successfully persuaded the others to follow my plan of strategically detonating the device to prevent it being used or backwards-engineered by enemies of the realm.

Game #2: Blackmoor. Like many of the games at the convention, this is an ongoing campaign, with various participants showing up at some or all three of the Amber conventions in the U.S. to play in the latest adventures. The campaign setting is standard Amber plus a whole slew of other stuff mixed in, including psionics. Characters go on espionage missions. The tone of this particular adventure was Lovecraftian, so I enjoyed it.

Game #3: Lords of Olympus. This game system is Amber Diceless brilliantly re-themed to the Greek Pantheon. I played a bastard son of Zeus working as a homicide detective, loosely based on Jimmy McNulty and Gary "Fucking" King. Again, the style of the particular adventure reminded me of Call of Cthulhu. We investigated a serial killer in Atlantic City. This was my best showing. I figured out the big bad in the first 30 minutes and worked the case hard. In the end, we forced a confrontation with my wacked out idea to employ a Greek Orthodox exorcist. It ended badly for my character, but I had a great time.

Game #4: Infinite Amber. I wasn't crazy about the campaign, which includes at least a dozen alternate reality versions of Amber, but this adventure was good. We had to defend a weak realm from a stronger one. With seven creative players, it was a very wild brainstorming session.

I was worried about the people, particularly because the quality of the GM is crucial in a diceless rpg, but I really enjoyed playing with these people. Compared to other rpg players, diceless attracts more women, more sociable players, and strong role-players. Everybody there knew each other, and they were happy to get an enthusiastic new player. Only two disappointments. The morning sessions ran really long, and it becomes a bit challenging for me to stay focused and in character after six hours without a break. As a result, there was never enough time for people to sit down and try my prototype Amber boardgame. Fortunately, the organizer of the convention lives just a few miles from me, so we will definitely get my game on the table sometime soon.

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