Of Pens & Papers: Warcraft, more Starwars and killing Hitler with teenagers

A wonderful [insert local time here] to you!

Warcraft!
Last week, I participated in Warcraft-P&P. The GM adjusted the setting a bit, retconning most of the retcons Blizzard did for WoW. It was fun, but not because it was Warcraft - the Setting made no difference, at least for me. We could have been playing "Generic Fantasy 3" and it wouldn't have made any difference for me or my immersion. This may be, in part, because I don't really care for the Warcraft-universe, yes, but there is a much bigger factor: The amount of players on the table. 6 people at the table, 1 GM; 5 players. Keeping everyone's attention, advancing the plot, telling the story and tending to all those NPCs the players are trying to interact with gets increasingly hard the more players you have. Not feeling "at home" in the Setting also didn't help, as mentioned some sentences ago.

Star Wars!
The Star Wars-campaign has turned out to be quite a surprise for me - mainly because I am now the GM. The first Session with me as Gamemaster was well received (the players said they liked it - surely they wouldn't lie?), now I just have to pull them properly into the plot.
The Wookiee is still weird, and the playstyle of his player is even weirder - takes a lot of getting used to, similar to the newest crewmember. The ex-GM is now one of the players, and he is playing a Gargoyle. In Star Wars. Now, Gargoyles do seem to be a thing, but only as monsters/critters, and only on the Dark Side, at least in official lore. However, there was an actual (and kind of overpowered) statline for them on one of the wiki's, so after some balancing, I let him have the stone-skinned, winged monster who is a nice guy.

Killing Hitler!
I honestly never thought I'd be writing that as a caption. Ever. But since it happened, I might as well write about it. A subset of  my friends, me included, enjoy nerding out about Neon Genesis Evangelion, to the point where we tried Pen&Paper in that setting (And yes, we turn just about anything we enjoy into Pen&Paper). After 4 Evangelion-esque campaigns, the player least qualified for GMing in general, out of all my friends,  just really, really had to try and lead an Evangelion-like-campaign himself. It started out 2 years ago, on new years eve. Then we didn't play his campaign, until the next new years eve - but now, he suddenly decided "HEY, LETS PLAY MY CAMPAIGN; I HAD A GREAT IDEA FOR A SESSION!".
Now, knowing my friend, I thought "Oh boy".
But hey, sure, let's do it.
First, time froze (but we - the playercharacters, teenagers who pilot giant mechs for a living -  didn't). Then we discovered that there are others who didn't get frozen as well. One of those was a scientist.
He explained to us that someone is trying to change something in the past, and that time freezes, adapts to the changes, and then moves on. And, of course, that we have to stop that change. Our characters didn't exactly like the Idea, but did it anyway.
But what did they prevent from happening, you ask?
Nazizombies. We prevented Nazizombies, by travelling to Berlin, entering a timeportal, killing Hitler, killing the Timedemon that was inside of him, and returning to our own time.
And once again, time was saved from the evil Timedemons by THE TIMEPOLICE! Or, rather,
3 16 to 18-year-old teenagers.
You might already have noticed that this all is a bit too over-the-top stupol (stupid+cool) for my tastes. But it was absolutely what I expected from my friend, who has absolutely no sense of taste whatsoever(according to me).

Still had fun. Really stupid, stupid fun, but fun nonetheless.

That's all folks. More next time (Which will be sometime this week).
Ciao!

Of Pens and Papers: Star Wars

...or, to call it by its full name:
"The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded"

Facts: d6-based ruleset, quite old. Covers just about anything you'd want to have in terms of skills/Abilities for a character in the Star Wars-Universe. All references to lore are post-Deathstar-destruction (the Rulebook was published 1987), we played just after the Mandalorian Wars, just before the Sith Empire took the stage. For that, we are using material straight from the Interwebs - a considerable amount, specifically tailored to the underlaying D6 System(that is the official name of the underlying System). Most of it is Old-Republic-Era, since people care a lot more about that, apparently. Used Sites: d6holocron.com, some others I forgot.

Onto the actual gaming session: Our DM is a literal newb(read: noob), both in the sense of PnP and Star Wars and just sends the people around, doing random fetchquests with no tie-ins to anything that would be remotely relevant. He has a lot to learn; but so did I, nobody's born a genius. I am playing a Sith Apprentice, on the lookout to kill the one who has killed her master. The other partymembers are a reprogrammed HK-Droid, a gray Jedi who is also a Gand (which are Insect-Aliens) and a Wookiee who is always accompanied by an Ewok who translates for the Wookiee.
Which is WEIRD, but I guess you(I? We?) don't have to take everything dead-serious; the Ewok doesn't really break immersion for me, so I see no reason to complain. Others are less tolerant, but still accept it without flipping the (virtual) table.

Point of Interest: This was the first time I played Pen&Paper via the Internet, using Skype and https://app.roll20.net/. Roll20 does, in my opinion, a pretty good job of giving everyone the tools he or she needs for a successful, if slightly awkward, tabletop-session. All important dice-rolls are supported (even Fate); so far, I have not found anything I could really complain about. It even has Audio-playback for some Background-music.

Sidenote: Apparently, the Audience for Pen&Paper was less serious back then compared to what I am used to. The Star Wars-Rulebook gives a bunch of example characters - one of them is a kid. Qoute:

Connection With Characters: Choose another player character as your older sibling/adopted parent/idol/whatever. You don't have to get the other player's permission. In fact, if he or she is annoyed, that's entirely appropriate.

 I don't even want to imagine the shitstorms I would have to endure, should I ever decide to just play a kid and follow one of my friends' characters around while not even asking for their permission.

Will play a Session of Warcraft-Pen&Paper on Saturday with my RL-Friends. A rather curious choice, as far as I am concerned, but I am willing to see if it has enough substance to support a campaign.

Byesies everyone! *waves*

More journeys into even more darkness

Played more of Descent. Ugh.
It's not a bad game, it's fun for a while. But as soon as the players get some money, which is unrelated to them winning the scenarios, they just stomp everything and crush the Overlord's minions. The game does favour the players in the long run - since you can't permanently kill them, they just stack up on items until they slap the monsters into submission while joking about yesterdays manicure.

If you don't mind thinking up amazing tactics, only to get steamrolled by the opposition because you have a 1/6 chance to miss any attack, then this game can be pretty fun.
For me: too much based on luck.

Will play DnD 4th Edition today, on the side of the players. Trying out a backstabbing Dragonborn, setting is pretty generic fantasy. We just wanted to have some casual dungeoncrawling-fun, without heavy roleplay-action, so DnD was an obvious choice.

Time to prepare,
kthxbai

Descent: Journeys in the Dark

So, I played the Boardgame "Descent: Journeys in the Dark".
People who venture into the dark corners of boardgaming and cardgames a lot will know the name Fantasy Flight Games - they made this as well.

The basic Principle: It's Pen&Paper, without making your own characters, without any roleplaying.
Just pure Dungeoncrawling. 5 Players together on the Table, 4 can be cooperative Players and one has to be the Gamemaster, or, as the game refers to him, the "Overlord". The Overlord gets to control all the monsters, the Players each get one Hero. Then you try to beat your opposition - gaming the system is encouraged, and the Overlord will not only try, but is encouraged to dick you over as much as he can.
That said, his options are usually limited to bodyblocking you from objectives or slapping tripwire everywhere - it is just a miniature-based combat-focused boardgame with some Pen&Paper concepts added in for good measure. Which is not bad at all, it's pretty fun. Also, the quality of the miniatures is pretty good, very detailed.

But.
I would not call it balanced. Yes, all Boardgames are in some way based on luck, but this feels like at least 75% of all won or lost scenarios are purely based on luck, which made the last 2 Scenarios we played rather frustrating. Not only that, but some of the Quests - that's what the game calls it's different combat scenarios - seem to heavily favour one side or the other. Some appear to just not be winnable at all on the side of the heroes, and that's just the basic setup, without any fancy stuff the overlord can add.

Will probably play more of it - we'll see if more playing changes anything.

Read you later, everyone!

Of Fun and Unfun

'ello there!

So, translation!

______________________________

It was raining.

No storm with raindrops coming horizontally at you, not even real rain that was actually capable of soaking you to the skin. Just a slight, summery drizzle rained down upon the small village that was nestled up against the side of a huge mountain. Some time ago, the Village had been a small town, with dozens and dozens of people, back when the Mines in the "Salt mountain" weren't considered depleted. Now, after the Output of the Mines had decreased to the point where the great Alchemist of the realm declared the mining uneconomic, only the ones in favour of the rural style of life still lived there. 30 people, now putting down their tools in the face of the rain to take a break under arches and roofs, if they didn't work there anyway.

One of those under-the-roof-workers, the only smith of the village, put his hammer down too, stretched his muscles and called for his daughter. He felt like relaxing in the Tavern with a cool beer, but someone would have to finish the horseshoe he had on his anvil. "Hilde!", he shouted. "Finish this for me, will you!" No answer, only silence. He shouted again, louder, but the answer, which was none at all, was the same. Only the almost unnoticeable sound of the drizzling rain joined the sizzling of the glowing hot coal in the forge.

He, who's name was Manfred, sighed, put the horseshoe back on the glowing coals to keep it hot and went outside into the rain to give a stern talk to his daughter. He thought about what he would say this time, while the rain cooled his bald head. "And this time for real", he mumbled to himself, while he walked to the backside of the Smithy to follow the narrow and now slightly muddy pathway. The way led him along the wooden backsides of the houses, to the old dry Well, on all sides encased by buildings, only accessible through two paths on either side. The Well was a leftover, from the time before the rapid Expansion. It got enclosed between the buildings, and mostly forgotten – but he knew very well where to find the Well, just as much as he knew that his daughter would be there. And surely enough, there she was, her light summer-dress wet from the rain, back facing to him and giggling while exchanging kisses with the son of the carpenter.

__________________________

Yep, that's it.

Well, no, not really, but that's all I'm going to translate. Now, call me a lazy(which would be the truth), but translating this was just unfun. I had zero fun with this. And I really, really fight with myself when I do things that are just not fun at all. And why fight against myself when I could be doing much more useful stuff I actually enjoy?

So, no more translations if it's not a) absolutely neccessary or b) fun for me, for some reason.

 But now that that's outta the way, I will write more Blogposts, because I don*t have to feel shit about not progressing as much as I want to! Yay!

On a sidenote, I played way too much League of Legends the past 2-3 days. I main Janna now.
I laughed so hard when I bounced a Rengar mid-leap away from my Marksman/ADC with my ult. He flew away like a confused kitten.

So long, Summoners!