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Cloud64

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Everything posted by Cloud64

  1. Still broken for me 😢 After initial, and prompt, Chaosium customer services response have heard nothing more. Edit: Hurrah! Finally managed to complete the order process. Not sure what changed, but something must've.
  2. I'd buy if I could. When I try to pay, by whatever method, I get this msg, "Something has gone wrong! There was an error placing your order. Please contact us." Occurs on multiple devices, VPN on or off, suggesting it's a problem Chaosium end. I am logged into my Chaosium account at the time. UK customer. MacOS and iOS, Safari browser. Never had a problem before. Edit: Have contacted customer services and received response. Not sorted yet though, but am getting emails from Chaosium asking me to complete my order.
  3. They'd be not in the least surprised, they'd just curse under their breath at the sassenachs claiming yet another Scottish invention as their own.
  4. I'm glad you enjoyed it, but it seems this a marmite mechanic. Having played using it in Star Wars Adventures, we universally loathed it. It puts a faff in between rolling the die and the result. You roll the die, gain some momentum (or already have some in a shared pool) and then have to faff about deciding what to spend it on or whether to save it for another player's action where it might be better used. It slowed everything down for us. The fundamental mistake it makes is breaking the tension of the die roll - usually you modify the target and then roll and get an instant resolution. If there is anything to be done at that stage, I don't think it should be any more than a reroll. We also found our GM couldn't help but build up a large pool of doom points which, by his own admittance, he could've flattened us with if he was so inclined I concede that if everyone is familiar with the momentum options it would flow more smoothly, but given momentum spend options also vary by context, that's a lot of overhead. The 2d20 odds are pretty much incalculable on the fly as well, and it's nice to have some idea of how successful you're likely to be before committing to an action. Dear Chaosium, please don't touch that mechanic with a barge pole. Genuinely a deal breaker for me, it's not something you can house rule out.
  5. Thank you for the update. Nice to know the project is moving on steadily. Really looking forward to this one.
  6. Just wondering – not demanding 'When will this be released!!!!' honest – how progress is going on this project? I've been working my way through the books and am thoroughly enjoying them, so I'm really looking forward to this product. It's easy to see how the stories really suit themselves to an RPG: vestigia as clues, spells made up of component forma, etc.. I've no doubt that news will ramp up as things near completion, but in the meantime it'd be nice to have a few little updates along the way. Maybe it's just my paranoia that no news might be bad news. I don't need an answer to this post, just wanted to say a bit of news now and then would be nice :) Ta
  7. My experience, also, was similar. Enjoyed rolling up characters, looking at the ship plans, reading about the Spinward Marches, but there was little guidance in the original LBBs, much like the original D&D books. Even the scenarios back then were little more than frameworks, and we never got around to role-playing in the Traveller universe. But we played the board games aplenty – Imperium, Azhanti High Lightning, 5th Frontier War and Mayday. After a few decades out of gaming, and thus missing the plethora of Traveller material produced in that time, I now find myself running a Mongoose 2e campaign, and I have to say the game is in much better health. We’re all enjoying it, probably helped by the fact that we are old enough to remember 70s/80s sci-fi, which is how I tend to describe the tech in Traveller if people want a quick handle on it; as a Brit, Blake’s 7 is the easy example, and I even have sneaking feeling that the classic scenario, Annic Nova, was inspired by the Liberator, the ship Blake’s crew found and commandeered in the show. I see, Rick, that there are a few copies of The Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society in you collection. They were hard and costly to get hold of in the UK, but they were where the world really started to live.
  8. I remember being astounded by Trollpak back in the day, and for my money it’s the greatest RPG supplement ever released. It really showed what was possible, and no doubt raised the bar for RPG material. I may be biased by nostalgia, but I genuinely think that if it was released today it would sweep the floor with prizes. <wanders to shelf, opens box and inhales that wonderful, well aged 80s aroma><sigh>
  9. @Rick Meints I have just (16/7/2020) picked up my copy of Dead Light, ordered in by FLGS. It has duff images, like the examples that have been posted in this thread. I will be asking the store to get a replacement. It has "Printed in the USA" on it if that's any help. I am in the UK and I believe main distributor the shop buys from is Asmodee, but that may not be the case for Chaosium products. Hopefully it's a copy that's been hanging about in a warehouse for a few months and has slipped through the net and not another duff print run.
  10. The problem with big campaigns is getting them played. I suspect that they just sit on the shelves of most buyers, or get started with good intentions but peter out and ultimately get abandoned. I’d like to see something that I don’t think we’ve seen before: a scenario book where the individual scenarios work as stand-alone or can be strung together into a campaign with a provided framework. Not just a bunch of scenarios that the Keeper has to tenuously link into a campaign, but explicitly having an over-arching theme and progression. Also, created in such a way that it would be possible to drop a scenario or two without breaking the campaign. This would, of course need considerable planning and co-operation on the part of the writers, but hopefully they would see it as a new challenge worth rising to. You can, of course, argue that creating the campaign plot is the Keeper’s job, but not everyone has the time or ability to do that well. My own tactic is to have a list of scenarios I fancy running and when one is finished pick another off the list as suits. This occasionally leads to, “Damn, if only I’d introduced that NPC back then they would have a far better hook and motivation for getting involved in this scenario.” Now, if that NPC hook was given explicitly as an option in a preceding scenario it’d add to the campaign experience. That’s one example of how it could help the busy/creatively challenged Keeper. Another is players becoming aware of a recurring, shady NPC who seems to be operating behind the scenes. I admit this hasn’t been well thought through, I’m kinda dropping it here as the idea pops into my head, but I think it might better suit the way many of us run our campaigns. Anyway, that’s the moon-on-a-stick I’d like
  11. The whole wording is clumsy. If you are less than a mile you are also within all of the above. That’s an awful lot of cumulative San loss. Of course, we get that that’s not what is meant, but perhaps it would be better to say: At 3 to 5 miles At 1 to 3 miles Within 1 mile
  12. Many thanks, @davewire. Looks like it's worth grabbing then.
  13. Interesting timing for me, this release, as this week I prepped Crack’d and Crook’d from my copy of 2e to play tomorrow. To those who’ve seen the new version, is there anything that makes it worth grabbing now, like new handouts, a map of the manse grounds, additional/tidied up scenes, etc.? I’ve no doubt I’ll buy this volume, but I prefer to get it from my FLGS (with Bits & Mortar pdf) especially now times are tight, but I can’t do that until the physical copy is released. I’ll forgo that if it’s the update’s worth it. TIA
  14. It turns out that now I’m playing online I’m actually getting more games in. Still using FaceTime with my usual FTF gang, but now we’re playing once a week rather once a fortnight, a direct result of people being stuck at home and being able to find the time to game. I joined a club at the start of the year and have just started running a Traveller campaign for them, so that’s another weekly session. Only shame I is I joined the club to play rather than remain the eternal GM, but it’s all gaming at the end of the day. It was my first use of Discord last night, using video with it, and I have to say it works a treat.
  15. Sorry to quash your optimism. It’s an interesting site, but alas known and reported numbers are pretty much meaningless. We don’t have the testing to come up with anything useful, and the variable way the virus expresses in people means we can’t even self report if we’ve had it. E.g. I had a slightly throaty discomfort on Sunday with mildly swollen tonsils, but no temperature. Much improved Monday but not 100% until Wednesday. Did I have it, or some other bug? Who knows? Best result is I did and am now immune, but without an anti-body test there’s no way of knowing. The one thing we have that is accurate, at least, is how many people died from it; they’re the numbers to watch. What I like about the worldometer data is the ability to sort by the per capita columns. Much more relevant to know which country has the greatest proportion of people affected than simply who has the most known cases/deaths. EDIT I see you linked to active cases. That is more useful and yes, Aus looks to have a drop, which is great, but the above stands as we don’t know how many active cases there really are as not everybody who has it needs medical treatment, which is where the active case figures will come from.
  16. I’ve been lucky enough not to need online play until the current situation forced my hand, so I’m just working it out and I agree with your sentiment – KISS seems the way to go. We have had success using FaceTime for video chat and Messages for sharing handouts, along with the occasional DropBox download link for chunkier docs like character sheets. Of course, you all need to be Apple users for this to work, but no desktop computer is needed, for the players at least – mine are just using iPads and iPhones. I think I’d find it a pain having to run from only my iPad, sending docs from my Mac makes it straight forward. The same ought to be possible over Skype and any decent messenger that can send images, something I may have cause to try soon with a different group. We started with a short scenario from Gateways to Terror to test things out, which lasted a couple of hours, but last Saturday we managed 6 hours without too much stress. That demonstrates that the session worked well, especially as we didn’t notice the time passing. We’re sticking to Call of Cthulhu for now as it suits theatre of the mind which suits the medium well. I had a dabble with all the fancy features of Roll20, but found it a bit clunky and more than I want to bother with (and I’m a techy).
  17. Here’s one I liked and found useful… Never Unprepared: The Complete Gamemaster’s Guide to Session Prep by Phil Vecchione. For a change it’s not D&D focused, much more generic. Offers good advice and a structure for your prep that’s efficient. As someone who has a tendency to over prep, I found it very helpful
  18. RPG club is now not meeting, hand forced by the closing of the club where we meet. I expected it to be cancelled anyway, and I’d already decided not to go. Also, my group’s meet tonight cancelled, Dr’s orders to one of the players to not mix, and as we’re already one down no point in carrying on.
  19. Yes, Ive knocked things on the head for now. I game/socialise four evenings a week with different groups, so the risk of me picking it up and becoming a carrier is high. I'm not worried for myself, but my contact with vulnerable people makes me choose to err on the side of prudence. Still having a session this week though, which we run fortnightly; whether it continues will depend on what happens in the next two weeks.
  20. Thanks for the heads up on this. If there's a problem with the print run I will hold off ordering for now, if other copies are OK, I'll take my chance. Given the usual quality of Chaosium products I'd guess this is an aberration, an unfortunately ironic one given one of the selling points for this version is new artwork.
  21. Yes – not to be rude as you do ask –it seems you are. Ask yourself what 5 - 5 is. Then 5 - 10. Now 5 - (2 x 5) and 5 - (3 x 5). Hint, the last two answers aren’t -4 and -9. You are counting each number as a hit point. It’s the gaps between the numbers you should be counting. I.e., HP 1 is the range from 0.01* to 1, 2 is 2.01 to 2. * let’s not be pedants here, this is an example value.
  22. Great subject. One of those ideas that never occurs to you but seems obvious once you've heard it. For your delectation, a couple vids of recreations of dinosaur sounds based on bird sounds. I guess what we need for dragonewts is the extrapolation of a bird sound to a man-sized creature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=52&v=QtpSOpUDCb8&feature=emb_logo https://youtu.be/0oWur4bX4Lw And here's one that discusses how sounds might have been made. https://youtu.be/RwRR_qLgvw8
  23. But there’s no harm in indulging ourselves in some wishful thinking, which was all it was really
  24. I admit, I didn’t realise there was so much to them. Give it to me in a two book slipcase then.
  25. Any chance of these being published in a hardback collection, or is it another case of the quality of the original scans not being up to it? That’s something I’d love to have on my shelf.
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