Nice.

The friend I was painting with told me the story of a competition-level painter that he knows. The guy is blindingly fast. He started when he was 7, and basically didn't stop. Now he's a total monster and they're all astonishingly good. I was wondering how he bends the time fabric to his will like that because I don't see how it's even physically possible to do a block of independently colored, awesomely done footsoldiers in a single session. Assembly line be damned, this guy is an alien.

There are lots of tricks for speed painting, particularly if the minis are to be grouped up on movement bases rather than seen individually as in a skirmish game.

Nice! What kind of character are you playing? I think it's fun to have a mix of noobs and veterans, especially if everything can be respectful.

I played my 2 campaigns on Saturday (they involve some of the same people) including the host of where we played so I just stayed there for 10 hours lol. I got some nice compliments from one of the players (playing with veterans, all 45+) and he said I was really getting good with roleplay and managed not to metagame like I used to. The session with my paladin was pretty cool, we were 3 instead of 5 (paladin, fighter/rogue, bard) and we killed a bunch of ogres, managed to get involved with a noble inheritance quarrel between 3 brothers and discovered that the lords of this village are actually undead (my paladin definitely wants to go kill them right away). I think I may have played my alignment incorrectly (still learning, eh) when I let the bard attack the noble who was running away when we accused him of murdering his brother. He used the "heat metal" spell to stop him and well, it killed him... Anyway, he was a murderer so I roleplayed that my paladin was fine with it since he tried to escape the law (we got a letter from the lords that gave us authority)
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Oh and played my first session of Numerena with Hellblazer and 3 other players yesterday. It was pretty cool. The combat system is really simple and interesting. You only used the d20 (for both attacks and defense) and that's it. The only other dice you use is the d6 to heal yourself. I made a nano (the equivalent of a magic user in this world) who's a scholar (geography) and who can heal people. What's fun in the character creation is that you choose a lot of stuff and it makes the three classes more varied and interesting. What you choose will create a sentence. Mine is:

I am a learned nano who works miracles

Through the focus you choose (mine is "works miracles", basically healing other people), you have to choose another player and make a connection with him/her, that's cool.

The setting is interesting. It's set 1 billion years in the future and 8 big civilizations happened. The world is now a medieval-esque society but they find high tech artifacts of time past!

Doood. Some Book of the New Sun shit. Dope as hell premise.

I'd like to hear more about the change in your metagaming, Tony. What do you do now that you didn't before? More interestingly, how did that develop? I've been giving some thought to how one gets "good" at role-playing. One can't get good at rolling dice, so getting the rolls over with as fast as possible so the story doesn't bog down makes the most sense, and I'm guessing it has more to do with the kind of approach that you're enjoying.

Just finished a crazy 1000 points Warhammer game against my buddy's Empire army. Highlights include my wizard (first time playing with magic since we started playing again) mistakenly blowing his own unit of very elite and very expensive Chaos Warriors up, killing 14 of the 17 dudes. Then my wizard (whom I'd also gifted with some magic weapons and armour) and his three remaining bodyguards proceeded to insanely chew through 3 charging knights mounted on monstrous Demigryphs, killing them and losing my remaining Chaos Warriors in the process. i was also fond of the moment my two erratic and mutated Spawns spewed bile all our my opponents main infantry unit, killing 16 of his Halberdiers.

Yesterday I played Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu twice. I'm a big fan of both the original Pandemic and Lovecraft, so it was really fun even though we got brutally ran over by the Elder Gods both games.

Hmmm, I don't know. I'm really good with the rules and the dynamics of the games so I'm trying to focus on what my character would do. Also, I picked a spellcaster class (wizard) and it was a bit tough to get used to but I think I'm getting good and I'm always prepared!

I'm playing a human warrior, a city guard turned mercenary who is cursed by the goddess of fortune with extremes of luck - horrible things happen to him, but then incredible luck saves him at the last moment. The only way to lift the curse is to lose a vast sum of money gambling, so right now his primary motivation is to acquire wealth so he can lose it. I took the "Lucky" feat to help establish this within the game rules, but we're still just starting out. Everyone knows each other from work already so it's a pretty comfortable setting - no strangers.


Yeah actually, the authors cite Gene Wolfe as a major influence right in the introduction.

That's nice. The luck feat is incredible. The wizard in my Paladin campaign got it and he's using it wisely. I got the "heavy armor master" feat myself (-3 damage to all melee blows done by non magical weapons), it's great for low level characters. People undervalue the fighter class since it's not "special" but it's all in the back story you have and the it's the only class with a 3rd attack!

Yeah I was going to take heavy armor master next, it's incredible, and my fighter is a spear+shield guy so it fits his tanky nature. I dunno, I like playing vanilla characters and working to make them interesting more than having some kind of bells-and-whistles magic-wielding sorcerer-rogue-bard-druid-paladin bullshit.

Yeah my paladin is the party's tank so it was a good pick. It raised my STR to 18 too so I'm a dumb but extremely strong dwarf! I almost took sentinel but it wouldn't had been as useful.

My wizard is a sheltered noble from a high magic lawful good city who decided to exile herself and go full on destruction mage, I kinda plan for her to become true neutral or near it in her quest to get more powerful. She's from a Nordic city famous for their ice wizards but she's using a lot of fire spells! I also almost killed everyone when I used burning hands on a privateer ship and burned half of it! She's unwise, power hungry and she's a dangerous diva.

That's rad. This game looks really cool. I was checking out the art and website last night.


Do you guys know of any RPG's that center around the themes of a detective/mystery or horror mystery, something like that? Mystery something? I remember a while ago there was a mention of a cyberpunk-Cthulu premise, which sounded like a promising scenario. I guess a DM could turn almost any system into a coordinated mystery, but I was wondering if there are any good ones that focus on that more explicitly.

I just found out my city has a closed Facebook group for D&D/pen and paper RPG gaming. My request to join is pending! Hopefully they're still active.

That sounds sweet! I've been invited to play in a game of The Strange, which use the same cypher system which was developed for Numerena. It's set on contemporary Earth, but with alternate reality/dimension hopping stuff like Rick and Morty or Sliders. Should be fun!

I recently bought a Vallejo airbrush-ready pot as it was the closest replacement to old GW Snakebite Leather. It's soooo gooood! My Necromunda Eschers are progressing but not as quickly as I'd like, although my own high standards tend to get in the way XD It's really good when you pick something (back) up and find out you're better than you expected

Hah, painting is not one of my strong suits. I would never, ever get into miniatures because I'd demand nice paint jobs and know I could never pull it off. Jealous of you guys.

Did you get in?

Just finished my 3rd session with my D&D group, managed to kill 32 evil snake cultist elves in one fell swoop with a clever trap involving a charmed cultist, a magical bomb, and exploding arrows. Our arcane trickster rogue used ray of frost on the blood that had been spattered everywhere, freezing it solid and incapacitating the few survivors in FROZEN BLOOD. We then jumped out of the trees and stomped them into mush.

Moral of the story: charm is fucking AWESOME for luring people into traps.

Frozen carnage. Sounds like good teamwork!

Yeah it actually worked really well. Charmed enemies won't do anything that will actually harm themselves, but we just didn't tell the guy that what he was holding was a bomb. I'm really enjoying 5e so far, it's a good "rules-lite" RPG and everyone who hadn't played it before (myself included) have picked up the rules pretty quickly.

Just finished DMing my first ever d&d session. The party consists of a human fighter with not too much in the way of strength but far too much wisdom, a half-elf tank fighter who stands 1.57m tall and weighs 70kg, a dwarf who thinks he is a warlock but will soon realize that smashing things in a fit of rage is probably a better career choice (he has gigantism and stands 1.90m tall), a half-orc bard who used to be in a metal band but is now going solo with his spiked piano (yes it can be used as a weapon) and finally a goddamn bear who can't speak common and just hits stuff with an anchor. In the first session they persued a thief into his lair after he pickpocketed the bard, and managed to literally set off every trap in the place, get ambushed by the thief's buddies, and somehow all avoid death. Good stuff.

Yeah, but since joining they haven't done any one-shots, just their regular campaign which is full, so I haven't gone yet.

I love it. A lot of people have noted that it's basically an amalgamation of all of their past editions, taking things that worked very well in any of them and discarding many ideas that did not. In spite of its rules-lite nature, I still find that there is plenty of breadth and depth to cover almost any situation or play style.

As much as I liked 2nd edition AD&D, it would be brutally hard for someone today to learn it from scratch, especially if it's an adult who also has classes/a job/kids/a social life. AD&D was basically made to be learned by a group of kids with nothing better to do, who could all suck at it together and didn't mind rolling character after character when their 4hp level 1 wizard gets flattened. Considering my group is all people in their mid-20s to 30s, and we only have the time to meet once every other week, everyone would much rather just PLAY instead of having to fuckin study a textbook and do homework on THAC0 and whatnot. And don't even get me started on 4e.

Actually, one "rules-lite" thing 5e introduced that I think was a huge improvement not just in terms of streamlining but also mechanically was how it cut wayyyy back on all the stacking. Your sources for AC are much more limited now, meaning weapons and abilities don't have to have all kinds of modifiers just to hit anyone at all, meaning ANY kind of magical gear is a pretty big deal.

Bad news Tony: I ackwired a copy of the 5th e players handbook! In order to join some gaymz. Please have mercy on me!

Also, good points fails. I also love it more than life itself, but AD&D is somewhat... unintuitive. I keep meaning to get a copy of Basic Fantasy RPG to see what you could do with the basic structure with a more streamlined design philosophy.

So, a friend of mine's gonna be GMing an evil campaign, and I'm really goddamn hyped for it Seems like our party's gonna be really colourful, too! The characters will be:

1) Artor van Kleinz (my guy), a territorial, ruthless count. Think of a mix between Vlad the Impaler and Tywin Lannister and you'll get a decent idea of what he's like.

2) An insane, magically mutated human/hyena hybrid who seeks revenge against his former colleagues, who left him for dead.

3) A traumatized fugitive with control over Shia, a monstruous chimerical beast.

4) A stealthy assassin who's actually possessed by a shadow elemental who, after gaining sentience (but not morals), has decided to free all elementals under human control.

5) A sociopathic illusionist who makes a hobby out of stealing people's memories and identities.

6) A disgraced dwarven ronin with a death wish and an axe to grind with his former master.

This is gonna be a lot of fun

Looks fun but I'm scared it will turn into a pack of murdering hobos!

Glad to hear this, J_S!

Played Arkham Horror with Hellblazer and former forum user Evil Johnny 666 today. A fun 5 hours game that ended by us all dying at the hand (not sure he has any) of Abhoth. I was playing this ex soldier dude with PTSD and a flamethrower!

Nah, man. We all talked about it, and thankfully, it seems like the group is very mature about carrying out a narrative involving unsavoury people. Plus, we made an accord that, evil or not, it's still a party. You mess too much with everyone else, you get your shit pushed in

I made sure to really flesh out Artor too, so as to make him more of a sympathetic character. He has a family (four children, and he's expecting a fifth from his wife) who he actually loves very much, and he resorts to very ruthless tactics so as to keep his many enemies at bay. Particularly, he's known as Artor the Sculptor in his region, due to his favourite method of execution; encasing people in hot iron, and then displaying the resulting amalgams of metal and scorched flesh along his frontiers. Needless to say, bandits and the like tend to steer clear of his territory

Holy shit! He's awesome! So you took the noble background but what's his class?

Oh no, we're not really playing D&D, man. It's a homebrew system, and we don't really have classes so much as builds. It's kind of a thing we're testing.

If you wanna know though, he's a melee fighter wielding a shield (emblazoned with his family's symbol; a sword stuck vertically through a skull) and a morning star. He uses heavy armour that's painted dark red, with a skull-shaped helmet, so as to evoke the image of a half-flayed corpse, and a tattered, crimson cape billows behind him. He also mounts Bonegnawer, a humongous black ram.

Yes, I love this guy.

Sounds like some of our more memorable campaigns! I've certainly done the Tank Elf thing (and Tank Kobold, that was hilarious ) and we've been having fun with Who Speaks What this campaign XD

A tank Kobold? LOL

Played a session of D&D (one with my wizard) last night and it was great. We were continuing the exploration of this Lizardfolk stronghold that was taken from them by sahuagin. We promised to the lizard king that we would help them in their goal to get back their place. There's also a whole story with us being representatives of the city of Saltmarsh but I'll save you this side of the story for now. The stronghold was literally being submerged into the sea. We had to go back to Saltmarsh to get some gear to explore the lower and underwater levels as only the 1st one wasn't submerged. We reached the final floor and encountered a ritual sacrifice (100s of Sahuagin warriors were getting their souls drained by this gigantic crystal). We managed to overpower the sea elf priestess doing the ritual (many sahuagin were actually sea elves transformed into sharkmen) but it was too late and the portal opened. An horrible aboleth was then let loose! It didn't attack us but it talked to us and left the stronghold. We got away with a metal book (100 pounds!) and we discovered that it was written by the aboleth itself and holds the secret on how to create life. He actually helped many powerful beings to become gods and make races in their image! We decided we had to hide this fucking book for now!

This concludes (or put it on pause) this quest. It was the first adventure of those 4 people together so we're now a full fledged adventuring group now! My character has a magic invisibility ring and it's cursed since I really don't want to remove it! Let's hope it's gonna make me insane or something. This campaign is super fun so far.

We tried Star Wars - Edge of the Empire after that with some of the same people and some from my other D&D group and it was pretty cool. It was an introduction module with pre-made characters but it was interesting anyway. I liked the dice system (successes, failures, triumphs, advantages etc) and we even did a space battle! I played this Han Solo-esque character named Pash. We may start a campaign with our own characters sooner or later.

Edge of the Empire and its spin-offs like Force and Destiny are really fun. Maybe it's that I prefer the Star Wars setting or the dice system, but I've gotten more immersed in campaigns of these games than D&D games. Only downside is my local group uses the same overused Star Wars memes at least 400 times throughout the campaign.

Our 5th Ed campaign is one of the prewritten adventures, and we're all well-versed in D&D except one, so the DM decided to show him some of the more odd things. Cue black puddings Also, a gelatinous cube joined the party for a session and a half, which was pretty weird.

The prewritten adventures are weird but cool Our DM really dislikes prewritten stuff but he'd read a lot of good things and got some good feedback from people he trusts so he went ahead anout bought the first, and has kinda been hooked since. He's added madness to the current one and, well, it's going well! :twisted:

that one is Out of the Abyss and I have it. Black puddings and that sentient gelatinous cube named Gabagool are both in that adventure book as written. Not sure why the eye roll?

Okay so my campaign has gotten weird. Right now we're involved in a war between two thieves' guilds (which we started) with the intent of eliminating both of them. We discovered that one of them is operating a secret high-priced brothel and a human trafficking ring, so of course we infiltrated it by dressing two of the party up like guild members and having the other two dress up like a BDSM duo. The dominatrix was our goliath wrestler named Desert Rose, so of course we dressed our ranger up in a green gimp/cactus outfit. His BDSM name was Succulent.

We also liberated a male stripper named Goldenrod, who has a glowing golden penis and performs artistic dances using only his member for illumination. So of course we immediately hired him to work at the inn we own.

Good fucking grace, this is incredible.

Playing my first session with Solstron (dwarf Paladin) in a while tomorrow. We fought a black pudding some sessions ago, the wretched thing ruined my armor! I got an inspiration from the DM for playing my character well. Solstron has 8 of INT, not the brightest tool in the shed so he decided to attack the pudding with his axe... Good thing his great axe is magical so it wasn't destroyed!

The best part was that during this whole infiltration, the ranger kept trying to talk and participate in planning. I had to remind him that, as a gimp, he couldn't talk. So he held his hand over his mouth and just said incomprehensible muffled things for half an hour.