Ars Mysteriorum

I feel absolutely crushed. Games are what I do. I loved Warhammer dearly and the way it reminded me of games of yore.

I bought so many supplements for it... and I decided to hold off on Warhammer 40K and wait for a reprint.

I really feel like I've been punched in the gut, as I've heard many others say.

This may be a bit off-topic, but speaking of WFRP...

It's dying! Black Industries is closing shop! Ugh... I cannot believe it!

I've started a topic regarding this outrageous travesty in the Gamer's Cavern.

I was utterly shocked to hear that Black Industries is ceasing production of RPG's as of September 2008.

I simply cannot believe it. Especially after the highly successful sale of their new Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy RPG.

Is anyone else as distraught as I am about this?

Heh. Having characters survive is not the purpose of this game, in my opinion. The story is the key.

I always require my players to state one relative or friend that they correspond with on a regular basis so there is a replacement character always in the back of their minds.

As far as being linear, this campaign is the first to take players abroad and have them explore areas. A GM has the power to make it as linear or non-linear as he or she feels. Being sure to explain to characters exactly what they are getting into and what kind of adventure it will be will aid the player in shaping the character as necessary to give the player a reason to want to get to the bottom of the whole story.

Now... I haven't received this adventure yet, but in my mind no adventure is meant to be played as written verbatim. It is also the GM's task to give flavor to otherwise two dimensional NPCs and creating others as necessary to fulfill the character's own story-line.

But... as I stated... I have not read the adventure. I am confident that I can make it fit the needs of my group though!

It's a really good one. I ran that one two different times, and it went very different both times. Three of my players played both runs through it, and we all had a blast with it.

All games are that way, where the base game written in paper can give you a reasonable idea of what will happen, but it doesn't ever quite work out exactly as you forsee (my group back in high school played the classic adnd 1e mods over and over, and they never turned out the same).

This one really threw me. CoC is a totally different animal than most other rpgs, and it's even more difficult to accurately predict what the pcs will do. The game is so open ended (even with concrete leads peppered throughout) that both runs through this were completely different.

What really threw me was that they nailed it so quick the first time through. They were thinking like 3 steps ahead the whole time, it was amazing. The _second_ time (remember, three of the five had played it less than a year previous) they slogged through it, getting outed, shot up, going insane and generally having a grand olde time doing everything the wrong way.

I don't want to give any of it away. CoC adventures in general, especially this one and a couple others from the same period, are satisfying reads for the GM in prep time. That's saying something. I've read a lot of game material over the years that I feel cheated for the time I spent on it.

The first time was one of the most intellectually satisfying experiences I've had as a gamer. The second time was one of the most consistently hilarious campaigns I've been a part of. I hope you have a good time with it, it's made me smile just remembering it.

Woo! This makes me look forward to running it!

Is it Cthulhu, or what is it? In print or OOP?

SGL.

It's a legendary Call of Cthulhu adventure that's out of print. Probably one of the best.

I thought that was a requirement for playing that game?

Requirement? No....

But if your brain is on, you get a -4 THIS IS NOT AN RPG penalty to every combat action, skill check and saving throw.

Which is no big. If you die as a result you can just get resurrected. I don't know why you'd WANT to...

I needed to share my joy! The e-mail from Noble Knight Games stating it was available popped into my gmail account and I snapped it up with reckless abandon.

Has anyone actually played this adventure? Could you tell me about it if so?

i plaid dunjins an dragns moar then evry1. w00t! ph34r my l33t skillz. I m an RPG h4x0r.

Srelusly. I plaid 2nd edison DND.

I M AWSUM!!!!!!11!!1one

Yeah. I'm a young kid compared to you heavy hitters. But, I would argue that my taste in games is eclectic compared to others my age. You will see not a single d20 supplement or core book of any sort on my shelf. That says enough.

Yup, working stiff over here. Nice break from entering numbers into funky programs to check out what's going on over here.

Otherwise the numbers start to eat my mind.

I was curious as to how, throughout a workday, this site manages to accrue so many posts. Feel free to expand on your choice in the poll above.

Yup. I sucked the funny right out of that joke.

Sigh.

OMFGWTFAWESOMECARTOONW00T!

Ok. I'm a dork.

What did the be-tentacled Great Old One parry with?

Whilst we're on the subject...

Mmmm nice

... though it could be an English thing...

:focus:

Sarah

What's this "could be" crap?

It's PAINFULLY English. However... those cookies (yes... COOKIES) look nummalicious.

Actually, I am not anything close to resembling a patriotic American, so I don't know why I'm doing all this cultural flag-waving... I must think it's humorous somehow.

And it's probably not.

Exit... stage right.

Ah. I kinda wish I had played Runequest instead of D&D. It sounds... deeper.

From what I understand, Issaries has all the rights to Glorantha, right? So there's never going to be a Glorantha setting book for the new BRP?

I'd like to see what made this game so great...

Holy crap.

I was just JOKING!

Holy crap.

That was awesome!

Is the core mechanic difficult to learn and explain? Opposed rolls seem to be getting quite a lot of attention and flak and that has made me skittish.

What are some potential difficulties and/or hang-ups with the system?

I've only experienced BRP through Call of Cthulhu... so... explain it to me like you would to a three-year-old with ADHD and an IQ of 2.1.

Hand puppets and a little show might help.

It's where you send them in some skin from your own back, and they use that to make the cover.

I guess some people get wrapped up in books...

And some books get wrapped up in people.

What's a Yelmalion? :confused:

Ars, I think you have a point about the changing culture.

People have a tendency to treat things as win-loose that aren't. A good deal of the philosophy behind Aikido is based on that. We see things in terms of "winners" and "losers" where the term doesn't apply.

Take a look at how people look at their local sports teams.

I agree with the idea of no winners or losers. Those terms are subjectively defined. I wish more people would apply that philosophy not only to their games, but life as well.

:shocked: That was a long list.

Here's mine:

D&D - (for 2-3 months, the GM's mother brought us cookies and milk every session!)

Vampire the Masquerade - (once, both tabletop and live, gee those players were weird)

RuneQuest - (so much that me and my friends use RQ terminology and rules to interpret RL events)

Call of Cthulhu - (on selected occations)

and soon: Basic Roleplaying!

Impressive, huh?

SGL.

WHAT!? I didn't get cookies and milk! This is lame. I feel cheated and wronged. We got Totino's Arterial Nightmare Rolls instead ONCE in a while.

I actually cut my gaming teeth on AD&D 2nd and then Vampire LARP. And yes, weird people they were. I quickly scampered back to the more "normal" (attaching the word "normal" to RPG players makes me snort my coffee out my nose) and comforting folds of conventional D&D.

And had some of the best times of my youth and adolescence. Gaming will never be as fun as it was back then when there were no outside pressures other than having a good time. Nowadays the group still gets together, but have haggard faces and even 1000 yard stares in some cases. They still talk about high school games like they happened yesterday instead of almost a decade ago. Needless to say, it got a LITTLE creepy seeing them again.

The one with the thousand yard stare is going through divorce after hearing that his wife was pregnant by another man. He is also, apparently, now a cross-dresser. I would have no problem with any of these things if he wasn't in such a gloomy state of denial. That and he prefers WoW to hanging out with friends now. My attempts to be there for as a friend for him were rebuffed with uncomfortable periods of silence and eventually being completely written off outside of horridly boring game sessions.

Depressing. I ended up leaving my old friends who I had had so much fun with in the past. They just never grew up, and strangely, because of that the fun died.

I think gaming has partially changed not simply because of the types of games coming out, but the changing culture of our society. I think that due to the feeling of loss of control that our highly corporate/systematic environment has created and the emphasis on success, when people play games they don't want insurmountable obstacles. They don't want to lose their nifty magical item. They want to win. Failures have turned into minor setbacks rather than interesting fixtures of the story (mechanic-wise, GMs are always the variable) and a rigid rule structure has been created that inhibits creative solutions to problems. A majority of problems in today's games have answers that simply lie in your equipment, skill, and/or spell lists.

Failure has become a negative thing. Too negative. No one sees it as an interesting thing to overcome, or simply an extension of learning and experience. It's a BAD thing now. Failure is wrong and undesirable and not fun. Furthermore, having a personality is secondary to winning. Unless it's a winning personality, then we have a statistic for that.

Yes, I'm bitter. And this is yet another rant. This is what happens when you post at work (probably why corporatism got tossed in there).

I have yet to play Talislanta or Call of Cthulhu successfully with a group. Part of me is scared to, lest it be torn apart by people seeking only to win rather than have fun. Yes, I know those terms are subjective, but after watching people play WoW (World of Warcraft), where people get angry with each other if they don't win and hit one or two buttons repeatedly (and yet this is still called a game, even an RPG), I fail to see how this is fun. It looks more like... work.

Wow, that got dreary.

Ummm... think of fuzzy kittens! And BRP coming out! Yay BRP!

Bollocks.

You are confusing your own lack of breadth of experience with a general lack in the gaming industry.

In the first decade of roleplaying games there were published and sold for profit (ie, not homebrews with photocopier) at least 141 first edition English language rpgs (I include 1971's Chainmail, combatish precursor to D&D for completeness). A look down the following list will reveal that extraordinarily few of them in any way focused on killing things and taking their stuff. In addition, considerably fewer than "90%" of them were variations of D&D.

Hugenormous List

I like this fellow. Nicely done!

Here's for research.

For those struggling with the wording of the 'roll under skill but as high as you can' I believe I have seen it called a 'blackjack' mechanic. It works the same way that the game does- stay under a threshold (your skill, 21 in blackjack) and have a higher score than your opponents. I move that we adopt the term "blackjack mechanic" or "blackjack roll" to describe this. Who's with me?

That's actually a nice analogy.

Digest the opposed test rules so I can aptly explain them to my players in a satisfactorily simple fashion.

I voted modern, but I'd actually like to do a modern fantasy. It's an interesting genre that's a more approachable and there aren't many choices in it when it comes to established RPG's. Really only World of Darkness is the big one, with a defunct tri-stat RPG and Fireborn (which is a bit limiting).

I will not speak of d20 Modern's horribly broken system, aside from the fact that it's d20, which is more of a tactical board war game than an RPG. Oops. I guess I spoke about it.