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One Touch Flumph (You meet at the inn...)

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    One Touch Flumph (You meet at the inn...)

    All purpose Dungeons & Dragons and/or other tabletop RPG games. I'm not sure we've ever had one?

    I both play and run games of D&D 5E in Roll20 (& Discord) and have for a few years now. If this sounds like something you might be into, send me a PM and I'll pass a roll20 game link your way. Although the chances of arranging a game is typically small (cause everyone is so 'busy'), you never know, and I have lots of time during lockdown still. One-shot games are super easy to build and have ready at a short notice.

    I also have (happily?) acquired a Call of Cthulhu Keeper Rulebook, and am not immune to just playing a silly one-page RPG in the likes of Honey Heist or Crash Pandas.

    Feel free to use the space below to debate the merits of Matthew Mercer vs Matt Colville vs whichever DM strikes your fancy and/or which stream/podcast you've recently binged. Discuss which celebrity player you'd actually like to see more of. (James Acaster - yeah. More Colbert - please.)

    And so on. Nil thread likely.

    #2
    Wow. My experience of Dungeons and Dragons lasted from the late 70s to very early 80s. Invariably my brother* was DM, crouched behind his yellow card DM’s barrier. We used Minifigs or Asgard metal figures (usually painted), real dice, and photocopied character sheets. Hours of fun and controversy, usually with Hawkwind, Motörhead or Judas Priest playing in the background. “Worlds” were drawn on big sheets of hexagon-marked wargaming paper.

    *I’m sure I’ve bored OTF before now about the fact he was the/a figure painter for displays at the original Games Workshop in London, in the days it was a D&D shop, and before Warhammer was a twinkle in anyone’s eye.
    Last edited by Sits; 16-05-2020, 11:50.

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      #3
      That's the pretty classic 'early days' experience for sure, and quite awesome that he did some painting for the shop.

      My older brother was my gateway as well, but we didn't play enough to really satisfy my itch, and when I got old enough to try an organize a group we invariably spent more time talking about playing than actually playing. I was pretty into 2nd edition rules for a few years, without ever managing to put a group together, it still got me through some scorching Texas summers where it's impossible to go outside.

      Thanks for saving me from a nil!

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        #4
        Looks like I was pretty lucky then. There was a group of us who met up pretty regularly over a summer holiday one year, probably 79 or 80. Always in my brother’s world; he was the oldest, creative and pretty good at DMing. I wasn’t great at the game but enjoyed being part of the the group. I think my best character was only Level 5, a wizard named Phenlas. I’m sure they weren’t already called Wizards by Level 5. He got killed somewhere.

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          #5
          I've got back into it recently after a long time off. I have a group at work who were playing face to face 5th edition (which is really nice), we've tried a couple of roll20 sessions since lockdown but I'm not really feeling it.

          Call of Cthulhu can be very good. I tended to play more White Wolf stuff when I was much more involved with roleplaying, Vampire mostly (I got into it when revised came out). Since the end of last year I've been getting the new V5 books, I really like what they've done with the setting, however much it's proved unpopular. I'm still not sure they've completely purged those aspects that got the attention during the launch.

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            #6
            Online/Voice only sessions are much more difficult to really 'get into' compared to face-to-face (which is much better, but nearly impossible to keep going unless you have a committed group with a solid day/time). You really have to dive into it and not let your focus shift to anything else. That's really tough if the online group isn't helping (e.g. little RP, no music, combat only, etc...).

            I'm never done much Vampire, but watched enough to know it could be really fun.

            I'm personally a big fan of 5e, since I think it is so flexible and easy to get into. Super streamlined is what I always say. You can really just apply the rules to any type of game that you want.

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              #7
              Originally posted by Sits View Post
              *I’m sure I’ve bored OTF before now about the fact he was the/a figure painter for displays at the original Games Workshop in London, in the days it was a D&D shop, and before Warhammer was a twinkle in anyone’s eye.
              Well, that was a new factoid on me Sits, so that's pretty cool I'd say!

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                #8
                When I went to university one of my new best friends set up a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay group within our first term, and I and the rest of our new best friends played that and various other RPs in a regular Monday-evening slot for the rest of our time there. He'd been into that sort of thing for years, but I'd had no introduction to it prior so never played D&D for instance.

                My Warhammer character was a wizard's an alchemist's apprentice to start out with, then became a wizard and ended up specialising in elemental magic: throwing fireballs and the like, great fun.
                Our second most used RP was a Doctor Who one (a ruleset from the 1980s, I think), where I played as an Ancient Greek philosopher – whom I sketched accidentally looking like Sean Connery, whose accent he therefore occasionally acquired as well. We played a little bit of Changeling: The Dreaming back in the first year or two as well, and Cyberpunk, though I remember very little of those now.

                Another friend ran a self-written Discworld RP: the rest of us used to troop down to his halls of residence on Wednesday afternoons to play that, which was a good laugh and was run pretty true to Pratchett's worldview I'd say. I seem to remember it was largely based on D8s, so gave a nice excuse to use the dice you never had much use for otherwise.

                The same two friends also used to come up with some cool one-off RPs on things like Hallowe'en, with a particularly memorable one using the classic 'everyone gets trapped in a mysterious mansion miles from anywhere' setup, and where we were given two characters each because the kill count was so brutally high it was the only way any of us had a chance of getting to the end of the night still active.

                In our long-running games, in contrast, we lost virtually no player characters. Since that first friend, myself, and one of the others (whom he later married!) moved into a house together after 5 years knowing each other, and lived together until we'd known each other more than 8 years (we're talking 1997-2006 here), those characters lived – and sort of grew up – with us for a long time. They've been brought out again a handful of times in more recent years since on special occasions.
                Last edited by Various Artist; 17-05-2020, 04:43. Reason: Suddenly remembered 'alchemist's apprentice'!

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                  #9
                  I haven’t played since junior high school - so 30+ years - but might like to play again. I don’t know anything about rules that have been created since then.

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                    #10
                    Nice, or should I say "noice" VA. That's a good collection of games you've had. Keeping a good game going through 5 years a pretty unique experience.

                    Hot Pepsi I'd say a lot of what you remember as the basics (e.g. 6 main attributes: STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA) is all roughly the same. And fundamentally the experience is still pretty much, DM tells a story, you interact with what he says, roll dice to see how things go. But in 5E a lot of the fiddly rules that might have been off-putting are kind of delayed for the character (weird spells abilities) or not as in-your-face as they once were. (IMO)

                    I can't believe I've gotten this far in the thread without mentioned the best of the best 'one-off for a holiday' game, Dread, which is really easy to run and super fun to play. Since it uses a Jenga set to determine whether you action succeeds or not (and literally nothing else) the tension ratchets up really fast and keeps everyone extremely engaged. I ran a black mirror inspired one a few years ago now (egads - years ago!) and it was well received and had us all sweating buckets by the end.

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                      #11
                      Jenga-based RP! Genius, I love it.


                      Yes, there was something pretty special about how my and my friends' longest-running games kept going so long. The Doctor Who one got played from 1998-2006 (when I moved to New Zealand, which made it a bit tricky to continue...) with at least some of the same players – and thus the same characters – being there for the whole of it.

                      The Warhammer one is something else again: we rolled up those characters when it debuted in December 1997, and we last dusted them off when the group of us rented a holiday cottage (near Cheddar in Somerset in the southwest of England) for a weekend three summers ago, for someone's birthday: this was late August 2017. The same Games Master and three of the five original players, with their original characters, only three or four months shy of 20 years since we first created them as 18-year-olds! There was a brief panic ahead of the trip when the GM asked me if I had my character sheet, and I said "I thought you had it!", but I had a good dig and after some suitable lateral thinking managed to work out successfully where I'd stashed it, so my wizard guy was good to go again.

                      (The cottage, incidentally, was owned by Mick Jagger's brother and his wife, who were lovely, as were their garden that we had the run of and their cats who would wander happily in through our open doors of an evening to say hello while we were roleplaying. This provided a certain surreal note though to the whole experience that someone designing an RP quest would probably have rejected as seeming a bit too random.)

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                        #12
                        A friend who knows I've been having a tough time at work surprised me with a gift yesterday. It's the D&D "Essentials" starter kit with an adventure in the box. I quite fancy having a go at this so need to get some like-minded people together.

                        It is a long time since I last played a RPG. We might have briefly done a D&D scenario but the main game I remember playing was Shadow Run. I really liked that. It's getting on for 30 years ago now.

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                          #13
                          I really like 5th Edition

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                            #14
                            I was thinking of my Warhammer FRP character (as described in my previous posts 18 months ago, above) just the other night, as it was the 20th anniversary of what was at the time a brief revival of our long-running game for a unique adventure.

                            In the surrounding years, as also mentioned above, we tended to do bespoke horror-themed roleplays on Hallowe'en using disposable (fortunately) one-off characters, though in 2000 we were at a point where we were all now living in separate parts of the country – indeed, at the end of that October I was actually in Ontario. Yet by a year later three of us had ended up all back in our university town: this is myself and the two friends who I ended up sharing a house with by the following summer, and who ultimately got married to each other.

                            So in 2001 we, for the only time, did a Hallowe'en Warhammer special, and also the only time we ran those characters in such a small group, i.e. the GM and just two of us players. As I was a relatively advanced elementalist wizard at that point and she was a dwarf with a large axe, magical armour and enough Toughness to make virtually any incoming hit go 'Boinggg' off her character's head even if he was naked, this however wasn't necessarily a problem in terms of coping with whatever was thrown at us... which, naturally, on this 'spooky' occasion was us running across an isolated fortified tower that turned out to be the stronghold of a Van Carstein vampire.

                            I forget the details of what transpired that night, but suffice to say it was, appropriately, a bloodbath. In the sense that it not only featured a rare encounter with Warhammer vampires, but it was also the only episode of that long-running adventure we ever played where no other character survived. That is, literally every single NPC the two of us encountered in the course of the story ended up expiring prematurely and horribly, whether on the sharp end of a sword or axe, immolated by fireballs, falling off high things or sheer misfortune – and indeed even the scenery wasn't safe, as at the end of it all we found ourselves strolling away (whistling innocently) from nothing but the blackened and smouldering foundations of where the tower had stood until hours previously.

                            God, that was fun.

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                              #15
                              Ha, since the thread was revived my offer in the initial post still stands. I'm happy to run an 'intro' game on roll20 for anybody, if we have the bodies to do so reasonably.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post
                                A friend who knows I've been having a tough time at work surprised me with a gift yesterday. It's the D&D "Essentials" starter kit with an adventure in the box. I quite fancy having a go at this so need to get some like-minded people together.
                                I got this last Christmas, with the intention of running it for my friend. But I found DMing for one person really difficult and haven't continued. She really enjoyed it so I need to sort it out tbh. I should mention that it was the first time I'd played a TTRPG for about 20 years, so teething problems were to be expected.

                                Anyway, I'd be up for playing, I think I have a roll20 account.

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                                  #17
                                  I don't have a Roll 20 account but I could set one up.

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                                    #18
                                    I'd be interested in trying it, but I'm essentially a D&D newbie. I was once part of an online game with some friends from an old message board, but it fizzled out after two sessions due to the logistics of getting the twelve of so participants online at once. Another time I was visiting the house of a friend (coincidentally the GM of the online campaign) and had to unexpectedly stay over, they dragged me along to their regular scheduled D&D session and I became a half-orc for the evening.

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                                      #19
                                      Well, three is pretty good for a party. Of course, now we have to figure out the bane of all TTRPG... scheduling.

                                      I will come back to this next week and see what we can manage and start handling the logistical side. Getting a free roll20 account, a free discord account, and 'maybe' a free dndbeyond account are all useful to start - just fyi. But only roll20 is also possible. (Voice chat in roll20 can be buggy - which is why discord is handy.) If this becomes a real thing, we can take some chat to discord rather than this thread.

                                      Nobody has to worry about anything character/class/etc until we actually chat in person. That's much easier, tbh.

                                      Anybody else on the fence or might want to be part of an easy-going session?

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                                        #20
                                        Will not fit with my time poorness or timezone I’m afraid, but I wouldn’t mind reading an update now and then.

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                                          #21
                                          Originally posted by matt j View Post
                                          Well, three is pretty good for a party. Of course, now we have to figure out the bane of all TTRPG... scheduling.

                                          I will come back to this next week and see what we can manage and start handling the logistical side. Getting a free roll20 account, a free discord account, and 'maybe' a free dndbeyond account are all useful to start - just fyi. But only roll20 is also possible. (Voice chat in roll20 can be buggy - which is why discord is handy.) If this becomes a real thing, we can take some chat to discord rather than this thread.

                                          Nobody has to worry about anything character/class/etc until we actually chat in person. That's much easier, tbh.

                                          Anybody else on the fence or might want to be part of an easy-going session?
                                          Thanks matt, I've signed up for roll20 and discord, I will sign up for dndbeyond as and when needed. Let me know what details you need for invites and I'll happily PM them over (within reason, my inside leg measurement is between me and my partner).

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                                            #22
                                            I'd be vaguely interested but like Sits I reckon time (and time zones) make it impractical for me

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                                              #23
                                              I will be sending dms shortly with some additional details.

                                              1) Roll20 link
                                              2) Discord invite to my server
                                              3) a google sheet for scheduling: For this one, it should be self-explanatory - just do what I did - but you can always use the 'notes' to add a rough availability and I will fill in the chart myself.

                                              This is no particular rush, just starting the logistical side of things.

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                                                #24
                                                Also, I have no problem just doing one session, occasional one-off games, or just talking about D&D if you want to know how to run your own games, get advice, etc. So don't feel like this is some major commitment or anything.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Thanks Matt. I will sort those out.

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