I only played Lord of the Rings tabletop and Warhammer 40K. But **** me, it was expensive as hell. I gave up after I went into uni and finally gave away all my models when I just moved house.
I would have enjoyed the game a bit more, but truthfully, I felt that most participants are really childish, with a terrible attitude and have horrendous BO. Add to that the extortionate prices (which were ever-raising) and the sheer amount of time that had to be invested in the painting (though I greatly enjoyed) just completely put me off Games-Workshop.
I would have enjoyed the game a bit more, but truthfully, I felt that most participants are really childish, with a terrible attitude and have horrendous BO. Add to that the extortionate prices (which were ever-raising) and the sheer amount of time that had to be invested in the painting (though I greatly enjoyed) just completely put me off Games-Workshop.
I have only played DnD 3ed and 4ed, while I enjoyed the actual battle aspects of 4ed, 3ed is far more loose and open for roleplaying, which is what I love to do.
Bare in mind that my group homebrews pretty much every aspect of the game so calling it DnD can't really do it justice. More like "loosely based on DnD".
Anyway, characters;
Ulfrinn, the Slayer of the Squaww Beast; A shifter druid with the primal form of an eagle. Earned his title by committing murder (In his eagle form), tampering with guard evidence and wanted posters (successful bluff checks), then murdering a civilian that vaguely matched his criminal description, removing his head and presenting it as the murderer and claiming the "reward for killing himself", in the words of our DM.
Spencer, The Bionic Commando; Entirely homebrewed class that my DM allowed me to make. You know the bionic arm guy from my name and Marvel vs Capcom 3? Yea, that's exactly what happened.
Arthen, the McGyver; A Drow Elf thief that was well evrsed in quick thinking, and quick building. Favoring devices over weapons, Arthen created hidden pistols and bombs from scraps of metal, in a cave. He is also the proud creator of a "super mega pimp staff delux 2.0 with an aura of +1 swag".
Bonus Character: Unnamed Rune Priest from a different DM's campain; Slain in combat with his allies by a single overpowered cleave in one turn. Best DnD session ever. best DM. 10/10 would play again.
Bare in mind that my group homebrews pretty much every aspect of the game so calling it DnD can't really do it justice. More like "loosely based on DnD".
Anyway, characters;
Ulfrinn, the Slayer of the Squaww Beast; A shifter druid with the primal form of an eagle. Earned his title by committing murder (In his eagle form), tampering with guard evidence and wanted posters (successful bluff checks), then murdering a civilian that vaguely matched his criminal description, removing his head and presenting it as the murderer and claiming the "reward for killing himself", in the words of our DM.
Spencer, The Bionic Commando; Entirely homebrewed class that my DM allowed me to make. You know the bionic arm guy from my name and Marvel vs Capcom 3? Yea, that's exactly what happened.
Arthen, the McGyver; A Drow Elf thief that was well evrsed in quick thinking, and quick building. Favoring devices over weapons, Arthen created hidden pistols and bombs from scraps of metal, in a cave. He is also the proud creator of a "super mega pimp staff delux 2.0 with an aura of +1 swag".
Bonus Character: Unnamed Rune Priest from a different DM's campain; Slain in combat with his allies by a single overpowered cleave in one turn. Best DnD session ever. best DM. 10/10 would play again.
The_Nameless_Bard wrote:
Palladium (Heroes Unlimited, specifically)- While the idea of playing a superhero game appealed to me, I really disliked this system. Needlessly complicated in some ways, the superpowers weren't balanced with each other often, and the fact that the skill system was d10 based really annoyed me. My character was entirely broken in combat due to the major superpower I chose, which really lowered the fun level for me.
I have posted a collection of my Palladium Books before but here is another picture Palladium is on the left and everything else I have is on the right
Spoiler: Click to viewBut the real problem with Palladium is it breaks the Trinity of TANK, DPS, and HEALER. Which gives you the option of making any kind of character possible. My first Character was a Super Sleuth Sherlock Holmes kinda guy with duel wielding pistols, but my friend made a bionic character who was rolling out 3 times more damage with a single punch then I could with three shots from my guns. Needless to say our GM at the time was doing something wrong with the combat system. However it doesn't change the fact that you need some house rules and a really strong GM who knows what every one is doing/how they are making their character, and what kind of story is going to fold out. Because one character will always shine and the rest feels useless. No one wants to have Goku, SuperMan, and the hulk running on their team when they can just turn into slime and do 2 points of damage every turn.
Overall I have always had fun with the system and I got hella lucky when I walked into my local Library one day and Snagged 40+ books for 10 bucks. Not going to complain
Also sorry I never got a character rolled out for the campaign you were going to run I got a job at a summer camp and was gone 3 days a week for 5 weeks straight.
Also you should really add Settlers of Catan to the board game list (^_^")
sig by HogoPogo
Current Characters?
Pathfinder:
Freyr "the Red" Eriksdottir, Half-orc Skald- think Viking...with a big two-handed sword and white dragonhide armor. She uses her raging songs to make herself and her allies better in combat and her spells are mostly enchantment and illusion spells that she uses to incapacitate enemies. Last gaming session I used a cause fear to make a couple of mounted soldiers' horses run away from me (with their riders in tow) in terror. So worth.
[unnamed], Elf Gunslinger- So far she has a 13k magical rifle and her backstory is that she was raised by gnomes. This character is new so not much yet.
Heroes Unlimited:
Jeris Landen, aka Talon- Alien race (which I created using minor superpowers) that looks somewhat humanoid, with superhuman strength and agility, feathered wings, and extremely good night vision (though she has to wear shaded glasses during the day). Her major superpower gives her control over karma, meaning she is extremely powerful in combat as long as her acts are of a good nature. She was a stealth and military intelligence specialist on her planet, so her skills are focused on that. She uses a two-handed sword.
Past characters (fairly recent):
Chun Li, Elf Samurai: In the homebrew setting we used for this campaign, Elves had a distinctly Asian culture and primarily lived on an island continent to the far west. This character used an archetype we edited slightly so I could have a Pegasus mount. Pretty cool ****.
Isadora, Aasimar Oracle: This character had the fire mystery and was pretty much entirely concentrated on blowing **** up and healing. We were playing a campaign where we traveled on boats constantly, so constantly that we actually bought a boat and got a crew to sail it for us. She went by Isa and the "isa your turn" jokes got REAAAAAAALLY old really fast.
Pathfinder:
Freyr "the Red" Eriksdottir, Half-orc Skald- think Viking...with a big two-handed sword and white dragonhide armor. She uses her raging songs to make herself and her allies better in combat and her spells are mostly enchantment and illusion spells that she uses to incapacitate enemies. Last gaming session I used a cause fear to make a couple of mounted soldiers' horses run away from me (with their riders in tow) in terror. So worth.
[unnamed], Elf Gunslinger- So far she has a 13k magical rifle and her backstory is that she was raised by gnomes. This character is new so not much yet.
Heroes Unlimited:
Jeris Landen, aka Talon- Alien race (which I created using minor superpowers) that looks somewhat humanoid, with superhuman strength and agility, feathered wings, and extremely good night vision (though she has to wear shaded glasses during the day). Her major superpower gives her control over karma, meaning she is extremely powerful in combat as long as her acts are of a good nature. She was a stealth and military intelligence specialist on her planet, so her skills are focused on that. She uses a two-handed sword.
Past characters (fairly recent):
Chun Li, Elf Samurai: In the homebrew setting we used for this campaign, Elves had a distinctly Asian culture and primarily lived on an island continent to the far west. This character used an archetype we edited slightly so I could have a Pegasus mount. Pretty cool ****.
Isadora, Aasimar Oracle: This character had the fire mystery and was pretty much entirely concentrated on blowing **** up and healing. We were playing a campaign where we traveled on boats constantly, so constantly that we actually bought a boat and got a crew to sail it for us. She went by Isa and the "isa your turn" jokes got REAAAAAAALLY old really fast.
Oh I will have to post my Heroes Characters later I have them saved on my laptop, but later I roll up a few PathFinder Characters just so I don't have to keep anyone waiting if we are going to get a game started :P
also anyone here ever play the board game Forbidden Island?
also anyone here ever play the board game Forbidden Island?
Ninja Trigger wrote:
I have posted a collection of my Palladium Books before but here is another picture Palladium is on the left and everything else I have is on the right
Spoiler: Click to view
But the real problem with Palladium is it breaks the Trinity of TANK, DPS, and HEALER. Which gives you the option of making any kind of character possible. My first Character was a Super Sleuth Sherlock Holmes kinda guy with duel wielding pistols, but my friend made a bionic character who was rolling out 3 times more damage with a single punch then I could with three shots from my guns. Needless to say our GM at the time was doing something wrong with the combat system. However it doesn't change the fact that you need some house rules and a really strong GM who knows what every one is doing/how they are making their character, and what kind of story is going to fold out. Because one character will always shine and the rest feels useless. No one wants to have Goku, SuperMan, and the hulk running on their team when they can just turn into slime and do 2 points of damage every turn.
Overall I have always had fun with the system and I got hella lucky when I walked into my local Library one day and Snagged 40+ books for 10 bucks. Not going to complain
Also sorry I never got a character rolled out for the campaign you were going to run I got a job at a summer camp and was gone 3 days a week for 5 weeks straight.
Also you should really add Settlers of Catan to the board game list (^_^")
Spoiler: Click to viewBut the real problem with Palladium is it breaks the Trinity of TANK, DPS, and HEALER. Which gives you the option of making any kind of character possible. My first Character was a Super Sleuth Sherlock Holmes kinda guy with duel wielding pistols, but my friend made a bionic character who was rolling out 3 times more damage with a single punch then I could with three shots from my guns. Needless to say our GM at the time was doing something wrong with the combat system. However it doesn't change the fact that you need some house rules and a really strong GM who knows what every one is doing/how they are making their character, and what kind of story is going to fold out. Because one character will always shine and the rest feels useless. No one wants to have Goku, SuperMan, and the hulk running on their team when they can just turn into slime and do 2 points of damage every turn.
Overall I have always had fun with the system and I got hella lucky when I walked into my local Library one day and Snagged 40+ books for 10 bucks. Not going to complain
Also sorry I never got a character rolled out for the campaign you were going to run I got a job at a summer camp and was gone 3 days a week for 5 weeks straight.
Also you should really add Settlers of Catan to the board game list (^_^")
My issue with the system is it is horribly balanced, at least in Heroes Unlimited, when compared to PFRPG and even 3.5 (which has balancing issues itself). I also think the SDC and HP for both armor and characters is needlessly complicated and just annoying. Just give me an armor class, HP, and call it good, god.
And there's more than just tanks, dps characters, and healers in most recent RPGs lol. Most classes in PF and various D&D editions are effectively hybrids between those archetypes, examples being fighters, who are generally tank/DPS (their hitdie makes them reasonably tanky innately) and clerics who can be tank/healer or DPS/healer (ofc this depends on what you concentrate on). You also have options for controllers, which isn't something you mentioned. Yes, you are restricted to actual character classes, but that's not the same as only having three different types of characters to play. Especially with Pathfinder, you can pretty much make anything you can think of if you find the proper class and archetype for that class. The idea of being restricted to those three archetypes is in how you think about it, not in the game itself. I have made multiple characters of the same class that were ENTIRELY different from each other, purely by making different choices.
None of those archetypes really apply to Druids: they are not tanks unless made such, nor are they true healers or DPS characters due to the spells and abilities they have. They are sort of a type of controller, in a sense, but not really. The Summoner class in Pathfinder is a similar example. So implying everything in RPGs besides palladium fits under one of those three is just not true.
OTGBionicArm wrote:
I have only played DnD 3ed and 4ed, while I enjoyed the actual battle aspects of 4ed, 3ed is far more loose and open for roleplaying, which is what I love to do
I'd suggest just switching to PFRPG, but I know not everyone likes that better than 3.5 D&D
Ninja Trigger wrote:
But the real problem with Palladium is it breaks the Trinity of TANK, DPS, and HEALER.
This isn't a real trinity for most tabletop RPGs. Largely because tanks aren't a real thing in most tabletops, due to a lack of effective aggro mechanics, and also because you haven't listed control (battlefield or otherwise) as an option. Also, playing a straight up healer in most tabletops is both subpar and boring as ****, so you'd be better off listing it as a more support option. Plus, of course, there're ways for characters (or classes) to excel at noncombat situations, which any kind of combat-oriented grouping is clearly going to miss.
So yeah. MMORPG class breakdowns don't work for things that aren't MMOs. Even D&D 4e, which was clearly moving a more MMO-esque direction, didn't break things down that far. It still expected basically everyone to do damage.
Anyway, more on-original-topic. I've GMed D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder relatively extensively, done a bit of GMing for New World of Darkness (nWoD), and tried to GM a bit of old Warhammer 40K Dark Heresy which never quite came together like I wanted it to. I've also played all of the above, plus a super-rules-light AD&D campaign (ongoing), D&D 4e, some other nWoD systems (mostly Vampire: The Requiem and Changling: The Lost), a bit of Warhammer 40K Deathwatch, and a short Star Wars SAGA game. Plus I've got some slight experience with new Warhammer 40K Dark Heresy, Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader, Warhammer 40K Only War, and Burning Wheel (and Burning Empires and Mouseguard, which are related). And I've looked a bit into Eclipse Phase and have a friend who wants to run Torchbearer at some point and another friend who likes the look of Harnmaster. Oh, and I played a terrible and incomplete tabletop RPG called Dark Town one time which had a very interesting sorta'-ablative armor system that I've been considering stealing for a tabletop system that I've been building off and on for a few years now (and which is nowhere near any kind of playable state, so I'm not sharing).
All of the systems have their strengths and weaknesses. D&D/D20 systems tend to focus very heavily on combat, which tends to result in combat-focused games and lots of little fiddly rules that need to be memorized to play at a high level. This is great if you want to focus on combat, and specifically the kind of individual-combatant combat that the system models, and not so great if you want to do other things. Like, say, political intrigue. D&D in particular also makes some assumptions about how characters acquire wealth, which results in the economic systems basically making no sense if you try to apply them to people other than glorified tomb robbers (AKA "adventurers").
On the flip side (mostly), nWoD mostly has rules for handling noncombat things, and they're very loose to help the system deal with unexpected things that invariably come up. However, it doesn't have a very good set of rules to deal with combat, and as a result combat in nWoD ends up being a mess (at best). Still, the heavy focus on rules for interaction and investigation lead to the system naturally tending towards those things. Of course, many of the supernatural-dood expansions to the base system (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, etc.) have a lot of magic powers that do really silly things and break the game easily, so I've found that the best results are generally achieved using just the core rules and playing as normal people who find themselves interacting with the supernatural and have no idea what's going on. (A friend of mine is very good at running these kinds of nWoD games. We often end up not actually rolling dice because we've learned to ask the right questions to get the answers we need.)
I'd also be happy to opine on some of the other systems I've played, but I don't want to make this particular post too long.
A friend of mine has gotten into board games over the past few years, so I've played several. My particular favorites are Flashpoint, which is similar to Pandemic but about fighting fire and much more reactionary; Paperback, a deckbuilding version of Scrabble; Twilight Imperium, a giant strategy board game, although I must warn you that getting a game of TI done in less than five hours is a bit of a feat; and Galaxy Trucker, which is wonderfully hectic and silly. I haven't played all the big board games, but I have played more than what I've listed here so far, so this is by no means a complete list.
OTGBionicArm wrote: Armored wimminz = badass.
My posts may be long. If this bothers you, don't read them.
My posts may be long. If this bothers you, don't read them.
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Personal favorite table-top rpg:
Pathfinder RPG- The classes, spells, and races are all well balanced and unique to each other, a major improvement on D&D 3.5. The system itself is far more straightforward than 3.5 as well, combining certain skills that were needlessly separate (e.g. hide/move silently becoming a single stealth skill) and streamlining combat maneuvers into a single bonus added to a roll against a single defensive number (as opposed to separating things like grappling and trip attacks). The skill system is far better, in terms of how ranks and cross-class skills work. The alternate class options are far better, plus the addition of multiple archetypes for each class makes customization much easier than it was previously. While it can, in theory, be used with 3.5 books, I feel a lot of the spells (especially in the spell compendium) aren't balanced at all.
Honorable mention:
D&D 3.5- While I prefer PFRPG, I will always have fond memories of this game. I like the generic setting of this game (Greyhawk), as well as the Forgotten Realms setting books released in both 3.0 and 3.5. It has its fair share of problems though, as some classes and races are blatantly better than others and the spells aren't amazingly balanced either.
Systems I personally wasn't a fan of:
D&D 4ed- This system felt far too much like a videogame to me. The whole thing felt overly simplified and all the classes felt too similar because they used the same template of powers. The increase in total HP amounts only increased the videogame feel for me. While 3.5 suffered from unbalanced classes, this system overstepped balanced by a mile and ended up with classes that didn't feel unique. All in all, I am NOT a fan.
Palladium (Heroes Unlimited, specifically)- While the idea of playing a superhero game appealed to me, I really disliked this system. Needlessly complicated in some ways, the superpowers weren't balanced with each other often, and the fact that the skill system was d10 based really annoyed me. My character was entirely broken in combat due to the major superpower I chose, which really lowered the fun level for me.
Favorite campaign settings:
Forgotten Realms (pre-4.0)- This is pretty much my favorite setting. I love the complexity of the world and the stories that come along with it. The 4.0 changes were something I really disliked though, as it might as well have been a whole new setting.
Greyhawk- My main experiences with this setting was through playing Living Greyhawk at several gaming conventions and with an official judge with a local group when I was in HS. My experiences with it were largely good, though I had a few less than great sessions at actual gaming conventions.
Settings I'm neutral towards:
Eberron- I wasn't a fan of the weird races at all, I didn't do a lot with it so I don't have an opinion outside of that.
Generic Pathfinder setting- I haven't played much Pathfinder Society recently, but the games I played at Genghis Con nearly five years ago were pretty fun. xD
things I tried and didn't play much, but largely disliked:
Werewolf (WoD): I really prefer d20 based games, also I didn't like how dark it was
Dragon Age RPG: same issue as above, plus I didn't really like the classes
Board games you should try if you get a chance:
Master Thieves
Age of Renaissance
Sentinels of the Multiverse
Munchkin
Iron Dragon
(this list will likely increase in length)