What's Your Current Game about?

whswhs · 11-15-2021, 11:25 AM

There's a thread with this title on the GURPS board, but not all my campaigns are GURPS, so I thought one for other systems might be appropriate. If you're running something that's not GURPS (or TFT, which I suppose could go on that board), this is your venue.

As for me, I'm about to run the third session of Satanic Mills, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign set in Manchester (the one in England) in 1835, two years before Victoria's accession. I'm actually using the published BtVS system for this. I've used it before, and it went well; in particular, it has the best rules I've ever seen for freeform/improv magic, and its mechanics for narrative causality/drama points are a good fit to the way drama is handled on the show.

We have three player characters: the new Slayer, a young woman who's the heir to a fortune and is running a charity hospital; a young man with scientific interests who doesn't believe in the supernatural (in GURPS terms this would be a Delusion); and an older man who's a veteran of the Ashanti Wars, where he saw things he can't explain. They've dealt with their first vampire, and now they're figuring out a train that comes in after midnight bearing a mysterious cargo and strange looking passengers.

Fred Brackin · 11-15-2021, 01:15 PM

The main game my group is doing (face-to-face every other weekend) is a space fantasy in a new ssytem from one of the group members who has publ;ished some small press games in the past.

I'm hesitant to say much about it because it hasn't been published yet (either setting or system) and we're basically the alpha test group.

I will say that it's about as unlike Gurps as possible and some people around here might be weirded out to see me playing it.

The second game is D&D 5e online on a weeknight for two hours trying for once a week. This is the game Ivar Bloodspear is in. Working from a comercial module of course.

We've had three sessions but only one fight which ended ignominiously with us fleeing to avoid a TPK. Mostly bad luck but also what looks like overreach on the module designer's part to me. 57 hp of bad guys (some w/special attacks and defenses) v 41 hp total of PCs with the bad guys using advanced tactics. Where are the giant rats? 1st level PCs need to work their way up from a few giant rat encounters.

whswhs · 11-15-2021, 01:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Where are the giant rats?

That line by itself is worth the price of admission.

thorr-kan · 11-17-2021, 11:56 AM

Playing in a 3rd/4th level 5E game set in Al-Qadim, on Discord. We wrap this weekend. It's a few sessions earlier than the DM hoped, but life is amping up for him. So we'll finish a climatic battle scene, we hope.

Playing a Monster of the Week campaign, based on Powered by the Apocalypse in the biweekly Friday Night Gaming Group, in person. We hope to wrap that this weekend. Then another member will pick something else to run.

Mark Skarr · 11-17-2021, 02:19 PM

We've got an on-again/off-again Modiphius 2d20 Fallout game that I'm basing off of the original Wasteland game.

It's been pretty fun, and the system (aside the awful built-in combat/range system) is pretty solid for a tailorable-generic system. I wasn't impressed with it for Star Trek, and it's a really rough fit for Dune (and not in a good way), but it works really well for Fallout. Other than it's abysmal combat/range system. I cribbed some from GURPS and D&D 5E to put together a significantly better combat system. One that plays more like Fallout than a horribly abused version of FASERIP. We're going to see about converting it into a City of Heroes game.

We've got a wasteland survivor, a recovered raider, a vault-dweller/model (who is dynamite with a pistol) and a psychotic Mr. Handy (SHRIMP: Semi-Helpful Reprogrammed Intelegent Modular Peon--the misspelling is deliberate).

They're in the process of cleaning out a raider hideout, but have had to hole-up for a moment while Marigold (the survivor) repairs SHRIMP . . . again. That robot goes down in every combat.

whswhs · 11-18-2021, 08:21 AM

As for playing, I'm in a Call of Cthulhu campaign that started out set in 1947 and is now in 1950. It's being going on for quite a few years—I've lost count of how many—and we've defeated one set of cultists and are now getting hints of a new threat.

I play Dr. Linnaeus Jorgenson, a retired doctor of Swedish ancestry, now working toward his Ph.D. in physical anthropology. His basic character concept was as having high social skills; he's good at Credit Rating, Persuasion, and Psychology (which has just reached 100%!) and in the new version of the rules at Charm. He knows how to shoot a rifle, but his best combat skill is Syringe.

He's teamed up (currently) with a retired gangster, a pilot, a college athlete, a librarian, and an heiress. The librarian and the pilot are a couple (the librarian is a man and the pilot a woman, incidentally), and the athlete and the heiress are becoming one. There's a lot of roleplaying and character relationships in this campaign.

xerxes · 11-18-2021, 09:01 PM

I'm not running any games right now but I'm playing in a campaign using Blades in the Dark. The system is very different from what I am used to but it is interesting. Since we are playing BitD that means we are a gang of criminals trying to make a name for ourselves in a pseudo-Victorian London setting that has ghosts and spiritualism.

dcarson · 11-19-2021, 08:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Where are the giant rats? 1st level PCs need to work their way up from a few giant rat encounters.

In Sumatra.

patchwork · 11-21-2021, 04:43 AM

Currently, we're dealing with an angry metagorilla who has/had/may be having a time machine (verb tenses for time machine owners can be tricky). Apparently he's from a future where gorillas were uplifted, treated as chattel property and used as slave labor, successfully revolted and established an egalitarian and communalistic society in which humans were full members, and our guy was not having that last part. Surely it's a bad idea to wipe out humanity before a stable population of metagorillas exists? We don't have the details of his plan and I'm not sure he does either. He appears to be having fuel and maintenance problems with his time machine and we are reflexively preventing him from acquiring whatever it is he tries to grab, just because it's probably a good idea. I got a mental amplification device he installed in an unmodified gorilla (mixed success at best) so that's interesting. I'm the logistics and gadgets person so I may do something with that. What could possibly go wrong?

System is a deceptively simple heartbreaker. Previous jobs were retrieving the stolen prosthetic wings of an angel and giving them to Homeland Security for containment, and fending off assassins sent to eliminate a fugitive from - well, Faerie I guess, as the gadgets and logistics person she is not my department. 4 PCs, the others are a newish immortal (born 1920, still hale and good-looking, wounds close impossibly fast), a telekinetic rave kid who's very powerful but terrible with precision and collateral damage, and...I don't know. I'm thinking alien technology, I'm very eager to take apart my fourth partymate to see how she works. She flies, heals and uses directed force beams, I think she may be some sort of autodoc? I am the most ethically challenged member of the party, as is par for the course in our troupe.

thorr-kan · 11-21-2021, 02:03 PM

So...this weekend did not go as expected.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thorr-kan

Playing in a 3rd/4th level 5E game set in Al-Qadim, on Discord. We wrap this weekend. It's a few sessions earlier than the DM hoped, but life is amping up for him. So we'll finish a climatic battle scene, we hope.

The party had been tasked, by a BBEG, to recover a crown from a cursed, undead pharaoh and return it to said BBEG. We only recently discovered said boss was a BBEG; oops. And that said pharaoh, while undead and cursed, had gotten a bum rap. Maybe we should do something about that.

We faced off with the pharaoh, and despite some spectacularly bad roles, we traded a possible solution to his curse for his crown, escaped the collapsing pyramid, and decided to hide ourselves and the crown from the BBEG. And there we broke. Mission accomplished, undead pharaoh possibly redeemed, BBEG without a relic and pursued by more powerful adventurers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thorr-kan

Playing a Monster of the Week campaign, based on Powered by the Apocalypse in the biweekly Friday Night Gaming Group, in person. We hope to wrap that this weekend. Then another member will pick something else to run.

We found rogue members of a cult occupying our Lair. One PC, a non-rogue member of said cult popped in and started using scripture to confuse and disarm said rogues. Meanwhile myself and another PC, rolled up to play Good Cop/Bad Cop to the tune of 'Get off my lawn!"

It *worked!* The Lair is secure, the rogues are relocated off site (and maybe back on the path to righteousness), and we're ready to thwart their Evil Plan. Join us Next Time for, I Thwarted an Ascension Apocalypse, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt!

11-15-2021, 11:25 AM	#1
whswhs Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Lawrence, KS	What's Your Current Game about? There's a thread with this title on the GURPS board, but not all my campaigns are GURPS, so I thought one for other systems might be appropriate. If you're running something that's not GURPS (or TFT, which I suppose could go on that board), this is your venue. As for me, I'm about to run the third session of Satanic Mills, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign set in Manchester (the one in England) in 1835, two years before Victoria's accession. I'm actually using the published BtVS system for this. I've used it before, and it went well; in particular, it has the best rules I've ever seen for freeform/improv magic, and its mechanics for narrative causality/drama points are a good fit to the way drama is handled on the show. We have three player characters: the new Slayer, a young woman who's the heir to a fortune and is running a charity hospital; a young man with scientific interests who doesn't believe in the supernatural (in GURPS terms this would be a Delusion); and an older man who's a veteran of the Ashanti Wars, where he saw things he can't explain. They've dealt with their first vampire, and now they're figuring out a train that comes in after midnight bearing a mysterious cargo and strange looking passengers. __________________ Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more.

11-15-2021, 01:15 PM	#2
Fred Brackin Join Date: Aug 2007	Re: What's Your Current Game about? The main game my group is doing (face-to-face every other weekend) is a space fantasy in a new ssytem from one of the group members who has publ;ished some small press games in the past. I'm hesitant to say much about it because it hasn't been published yet (either setting or system) and we're basically the alpha test group. I will say that it's about as unlike Gurps as possible and some people around here might be weirded out to see me playing it. The second game is D&D 5e online on a weeknight for two hours trying for once a week. This is the game Ivar Bloodspear is in. Working from a comercial module of course. We've had three sessions but only one fight which ended ignominiously with us fleeing to avoid a TPK. Mostly bad luck but also what looks like overreach on the module designer's part to me. 57 hp of bad guys (some w/special attacks and defenses) v 41 hp total of PCs with the bad guys using advanced tactics. Where are the giant rats? 1st level PCs need to work their way up from a few giant rat encounters. __________________ Fred Brackin

11-17-2021, 11:56 AM	#4
thorr-kan Join Date: Sep 2008	Re: What's Your Current Game about? Playing in a 3rd/4th level 5E game set in Al-Qadim, on Discord. We wrap this weekend. It's a few sessions earlier than the DM hoped, but life is amping up for him. So we'll finish a climatic battle scene, we hope. Playing a Monster of the Week campaign, based on Powered by the Apocalypse in the biweekly Friday Night Gaming Group, in person. We hope to wrap that this weekend. Then another member will pick something else to run.

11-17-2021, 02:19 PM	#5
Mark Skarr Forum Pervert (If you have to ask . . .) Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Somewhere high up.	Re: What's Your Current Game about? We've got an on-again/off-again Modiphius 2d20 Fallout game that I'm basing off of the original Wasteland game. It's been pretty fun, and the system (aside the awful built-in combat/range system) is pretty solid for a tailorable-generic system. I wasn't impressed with it for Star Trek, and it's a really rough fit for Dune (and not in a good way), but it works really well for Fallout. Other than it's abysmal combat/range system. I cribbed some from GURPS and D&D 5E to put together a significantly better combat system. One that plays more like Fallout than a horribly abused version of FASERIP. We're going to see about converting it into a City of Heroes game. We've got a wasteland survivor, a recovered raider, a vault-dweller/model (who is dynamite with a pistol) and a psychotic Mr. Handy (SHRIMP: Semi-Helpful Reprogrammed Intelegent Modular Peon--the misspelling is deliberate). They're in the process of cleaning out a raider hideout, but have had to hole-up for a moment while Marigold (the survivor) repairs SHRIMP . . . again. That robot goes down in every combat.

11-18-2021, 08:21 AM	#6
whswhs Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Lawrence, KS	Re: What's Your Current Game about? As for playing, I'm in a Call of Cthulhu campaign that started out set in 1947 and is now in 1950. It's being going on for quite a few years—I've lost count of how many—and we've defeated one set of cultists and are now getting hints of a new threat. I play Dr. Linnaeus Jorgenson, a retired doctor of Swedish ancestry, now working toward his Ph.D. in physical anthropology. His basic character concept was as having high social skills; he's good at Credit Rating, Persuasion, and Psychology (which has just reached 100%!) and in the new version of the rules at Charm. He knows how to shoot a rifle, but his best combat skill is Syringe. He's teamed up (currently) with a retired gangster, a pilot, a college athlete, a librarian, and an heiress. The librarian and the pilot are a couple (the librarian is a man and the pilot a woman, incidentally), and the athlete and the heiress are becoming one. There's a lot of roleplaying and character relationships in this campaign. __________________ Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more.

11-18-2021, 09:01 PM	#7
xerxes Join Date: Jul 2005	Re: What's Your Current Game about? I'm not running any games right now but I'm playing in a campaign using Blades in the Dark. The system is very different from what I am used to but it is interesting. Since we are playing BitD that means we are a gang of criminals trying to make a name for ourselves in a pseudo-Victorian London setting that has ghosts and spiritualism.

11-21-2021, 04:43 AM	#9
patchwork Join Date: Oct 2011	Re: What's Your Current Game about? Currently, we're dealing with an angry metagorilla who has/had/may be having a time machine (verb tenses for time machine owners can be tricky). Apparently he's from a future where gorillas were uplifted, treated as chattel property and used as slave labor, successfully revolted and established an egalitarian and communalistic society in which humans were full members, and our guy was not having that last part. Surely it's a bad idea to wipe out humanity before a stable population of metagorillas exists? We don't have the details of his plan and I'm not sure he does either. He appears to be having fuel and maintenance problems with his time machine and we are reflexively preventing him from acquiring whatever it is he tries to grab, just because it's probably a good idea. I got a mental amplification device he installed in an unmodified gorilla (mixed success at best) so that's interesting. I'm the logistics and gadgets person so I may do something with that. What could possibly go wrong? System is a deceptively simple heartbreaker. Previous jobs were retrieving the stolen prosthetic wings of an angel and giving them to Homeland Security for containment, and fending off assassins sent to eliminate a fugitive from - well, Faerie I guess, as the gadgets and logistics person she is not my department. 4 PCs, the others are a newish immortal (born 1920, still hale and good-looking, wounds close impossibly fast), a telekinetic rave kid who's very powerful but terrible with precision and collateral damage, and...I don't know. I'm thinking alien technology, I'm very eager to take apart my fourth partymate to see how she works. She flies, heals and uses directed force beams, I think she may be some sort of autodoc? I am the most ethically challenged member of the party, as is par for the course in our troupe. Last edited by patchwork; 11-21-2021 at 04:48 AM.