More Legendary Ideas

One of these was a shower idea.  Other was not.  Both relate to playing L5R as heroic fantasy.

Legend of the Five Rings ideas February 2022:

Honorable Death

So, lifecasting is cool.  It also irritates me.  Take the most useful characters, the most powerful characters, and give them a high fantasy way to go out in a blaze of Glory.  Meanwhile, other usual schools do their Swords & Social thing.

So, here are the mechanics for an Honorable Death:

For a number of rounds equal to your Honor Rank, you ignore all negative status conditions** and wound penalties including dead.  Afterwards, you die (of course).  In addition, you gain a number of increases to Rings equal to your Honor Rank during this time.  For instance, you have Honor 5.8.  For five rounds, you could add 5 to your Water Ring or 2 to your Earth Ring and 2 to your Fire Ring and 1 to your Void Ring or whatever combination of 5.  If you are Honor 10, add 10 to your Rings in some combination.

**  This mostly came out of a module.  You can be grappled, prone, entangled, dazed, stunned, whatever and none of it matters.  You bypass human limits because that’s what happens in heroic fantasy.

Who can do this?  PCs, of course.  Whoever else seems appropriate.  Look, I’m not trying to play some board game where you can only do what some book says – I’m trying to capture the cool stuff people in books do.

Legend of the Supernatural Investigators

I don’t like Taint.  I think this idea addresses my real problem with it.  I hate the idea that it’s some permanent disease.  The idea that it’s a disease isn’t the problem.  It’s that you get some stupic mechanic and have to fiddle with it forever, including when it won’t matter at all because getting to one Rank in Taint is actually hard if you just get a few pips once in a blue moon.

I keep coming back to how the supernatural investigation stories in Inuyasha have this cool aesthetic.  I’m into supernatural investigation in modern, in historical, and, while I get tired of rolling PER/Investigation or AWA/Investigation in L5R play to solve problems, investigating supernatural stuff is way cooler than trying to pin the blame on someone of higher Status for some murder.

The Taint is essentially demonic energy.  It fades over time.  Unless.  Unless there’s a reason it doesn’t.  There could be a constant source like a Shikon Jewel.  There could be a case of someone being transformed permanently by Taint into a monster.  But, PCs are likely to just face some Taint that could mess them up, then recover after they murder demons.  Monsters in this setting can easily spray Taint at folks without PCs having to burn down villages of otherwise innocent people to scorched earth the region.

The Shadowlands may or may not exist, I’m inclined to it existing, but it’s not a physical place in Ningen-do.  It is instead, like Jigoku itself, a spirit realm.  The Shadowlands are a minor spirit realm that has a major portal on the Crab border.  The Wall still exists, but it’s not so much a physical impediment as it is a magical one.  A great curtain separates Ningen-do from entering the Shadowlands realm.  It’s also not as likely to be a post-apocalyptic place but a realm you might actually find interesting to be in without obsessing over survival.  The Taint not being permanent (except when it is) means you can enter the Shadowlands or enter Jigoku and not have it be a ridiculous exercise in how many fingers of jade you have or how soon your food spoils or whatever completely non-heroic thing that I don’t care about.

Because all Jigokuness is through portals to other spirit realms, there are more portals to Jigoku and monsters just pop up wherever I want them to.  Cursed objects can be used in rituals to create gates to bring in monsters just like how pretty much anyone can summon an oni anywhere.

Shugenja are gone.  I’m tired of them.  The more I play, the more oppressive I find them.  I hate Commune, which is just a cheat code and annoying to adjudicate.  Players hardly ever use Sense or Summon.  However, I’m not against magical powers.  I see having magic dudes who work more like Tattooed Monks mechanically (or whatever that kiho nonsense is about).  You internalize one spell, maybe one spell per rank.  So, sure, the PC who can Path infinitely is kind of useful – good.  The PC who can Fires from Within infinitely gets to burn stuff whenever they want, kind of like anime characters work … or superheroes.

I’ll try to remember to post about my fantasy superheroes idea that is totally not fleshed out and I haven’t thought about in years at some point.  It’s almost like I like fantasy and like the superhero aesthetic.

Now, there’s still a weirdness to samurai and fantasy versus Swords & Social, but, somehow, we will make L5R a fantasy setting full of magic samurai.

So, neither of these ideas is oriented towards courtiers, artisans, other random stuff.

They can still have an Honorable Death.  I did try to think about the Poetic Death mechanic where you arrange some social/artistic coup that kills you.  But, whatever.

What do courtiers, et al, do in Legend of the Supernatural Investigators?  Besides Kitsuki, of course?  Does it matter?  What do they do now?  I’m playing a courtier in one campaign, and I could just as easily be a bushi.

To try to sell the idea of a less political, less social baggaged setting to folks, could look at setting in like Dawn of the Empire timeframe.

Bonus Wheel of Time!

I watched the first three episodes yesterday.

Well, it is *inspired* by the books.

I can sort of see why certain things were done in places due to the lack of pages and pages of exposition to explain stuff or to set up relationships.  But, it’s just so weird how certain characters are so different.  Mat is the opposite of how he is in the books.  Thom is one of my favorite characters and doesn’t even get his cloak, yet somehow gains a guitar.

Do people who know nothing of the books track what’s going on?

Does remind me one of the advantages of books – when you reread them, you can just skip over the stuff you don’t like, like anything involving Whitecloaks besides Rand laughing at them.

Going to try to watch rest of episodes, but I don’t expect to like them.  While some of the really obnoxious stuff is dropped, pretty much everything that is cool is gone.  Nobody comments on Rand’s sword.  Perrin never seems the voice of thoughtfulness that made him cool until Faile murdered him.  They even make the Tinker encounter go from actually cool in the books to hokey as hell.  Sure, trollocs look good, but I don’t generally care about special effects.

Another advantage of books – women are way hotter when you can picture them in your mind’s eye.  Egwene never did it for me in the books – she’s actually way less annoying here, but, uh, others are way hotter in my mind than on screen.  Admittedly, something I thought more about in later books than the first three.  At the rate this story is being told, I have no idea how they tell a complete story, but, then, the book series drags on interminably.

Dungeon Con 2022

Last weekend was DunDraCon 2022 and VTD8.

So, Friday night, first run of VTD8.

Yup, didn’t do an earlier run to know all about puzzles before playing with our group.

Pirate theme – 50% or more pirate-y tokens.  4th level only.  Nightmare.  Six players!

Should have been brutal.  It wasn’t.  My observation is that VTD 2022 is much easier than VTD 2021.  Maybe only having one weekend to play it is a cause, as don’t want to frustrate people who are only running the dungeon once or twice.

First room was a puzzle.  It seemed a numerical puzzle.  Should have used metaknowledge to realize that “Jeff” doesn’t like numerical solutions.  But, we didn’t think that way and never got close going through all of the obvious tries.

Room two was a fight to get back our stuff, since theme was that we were Xia-hai-ed onto a ship.  Very long fight.  I found out why on Saturday.

Room three was fight against undead.  Not that cool looking and just felt gratuitous.

Room four was fight against cooks.  Problem at this point is that have a bunch of fights with “people” swiping at us or waving pointy things at us.

Room five was fight against evil captain pointing at us with sharp thing.  His death, I mean, escape scene (I thought it was a death scene on multiple runs) was hilarious.

Room six was puzzle we approached wrong way.  Due to massive amount of logistics on this puzzle, we didn’t even get to try our approach.  Basically, you get one shot at puzzle.

Room seven was boss fight.  We lost on time, not going after the tentacles.

Since this was our pirate run, we sang a modified sea shanty for the DM and in epilogue.  The DM muted us.

So, there was feedback taken, including favorite room and least favorite.  After four runs, I couldn’t think of a favorite or least favorite.

The dungeon was just bland.  It was five combats.  Four of those combats felt like the same fight, even the one where we didn’t have our equipment.

There were cute comments from a NPC.  I found out that room two’s dice roller results are meaningless for damage, damage handled behind the scenes.

After the run, I got on Discord to talk to some L5R players about character advancement and whatnot.  Stayed up way too late for me.  Eventually went to bed around midnight.

8:24AM – Playing Against Type

I ran 2h paladin.  Trying to get more use out of my Averon’s Deathcleavers [don’t ask].  I ended up “Guarding” the baby shambling mound familiar of our elf.  We got chewed up heinously in room two due to that whole lack of equipment thing.  We had barbarian, bard, elf, paladin, wizard.  Barbarian was ranged.  Bard was melee.  Elf was melee.  Wizard was crossbow.  You may note no cleric or druid.  Bunch of potions were drunk to recover from one room.

Oh, as to the room one puzzle, I had thought about it while half asleep Friday night and realized what the concept was.  Took max damage tries to get the answers right, so accomplished nothing as I don’t care about getting the answers, I care about knowing how you get the answers.

We also had to keep Rustle 2, the familiar alive.

Room six, tried my group’s answer, failed, started correct answer methodology and ran out of time.

Room seven, only the elf survived after tentacles cleared.  The elf survived!!  Victory.  Well, the baby shambler lived, too.

10:36AM – Epic, my group

I ran monk as I just wanted to crush Epic, and monk is generally whether you win or lose on challenging runs.  I also wanted to run 2x Asher’s for poison damage to meta some.

We had seven.  Room one, they never got on the right track.  Room two was the usual slog.  Cleric blew almost all of his healing spells after room two.  We had Gar(r)y Shambling as cleric’s familiar.  Paladin “Guarded” Gary Shambling.

Room six, got answer right as I knew what wasn’t right.

Room seven, dwarf got killed.  Triggered Shirt of the Valiant!!  From hell’s heart I stab at thee – indeed.  We cleared tentacles but still had to kill the main.  We barely did in time rushing through combat at the end.  Couple deaths.

So, other feedback over the weekend:  Where the f* is sea monster charm?  Why are we not underwater at any point (other than dead dudes)?  Typical to create situational tokens for a year, then not actually have them matter.

6:30PM – DunDraCon!

I carry Traveller stuff over to con.  Due to mixup, I’m listed for Friday not Saturday on the door, so I don’t look in program for my table.  I get called out for not being at my table at the right time, as I was sitting at another table closer to the door where Jeff had set up.

Demo stuff.  Give away stuff.

11PM, done.  Walk home.

8:12AM – Anti-Cabal Run

My metaplan for this run was to Ultron up the dwarf.  Instead of my usual archer build, I went with “max” hit points and AC.  I lent out both my Rolland’s’ rings to others and borrowed a +4 Ring of Protection to have an AC of 43.  I was 118 hit points.

We knew the puzzles.

Without consuming a potion, I ended the run with 81 hit points.  I took one meaningful hit from Bad Eye Boggs, which I didn’t bother Shadowskinning as I wanted to save for room seven, never got hit in room seven.

Room seven – beats.  Barbarian did get one-shotted after a while.

DunDraCon!

I get my backpack and walk back to DDC.  I participate in Jess’s events all day.  I give away stuff.  The tournament was essentially gunslinging against Horizon folks in first round, and Jeff and I both lost!!

My first tournament/gunslinging loss to anyone besides Jeff.

6PM, walk home.

Monday, DunDraCon!

In right place at right time.  For a change, someone actually wanted me to sign stuff, so I signed her two-player starter box, her playmat, and imprinted my symbol on her Dwight Cain [she’s now the only Traveller player who probably knows why I inked this card, specifically].

Finish up at 2PM.  Eventually find Jeff, he drives me home because of amount of stuff to dump.

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So:

DunDraCon was entirely my doing Traveller stuff, other than chatting with someone I used to game with.

VTD8 was bland and easy.  But, it was fun.  Shirt of the Valiant!!  Gary Shambling growing 10 toes and leveling up.  Dice roller still sucks, now it creates problems for spellcasters casting multiple damage spells in a round, but that will get fixed.  It just sucks as I take all of these screenshots I didn’t need before, and they don’t even help me capture last year’s magic.

Sea monster charm.  Underwater hindrances.  Come on.  I know they will show up, eventually, but they should have shown up by now.

Effectively a complete con, so I was exhausted Monday evening.

Traveller did go well, in our opinion.  While we see far more players at DDC than exist like anywhere else, at least somebody is enthused about the game.

Knives In And Out

So, this weekend was different.

Friday, ran a HoR4 mod.  Okay, that’s not different.

Didn’t need to deadhead a mod Saturday morning, so I headed out a bit after 10:30AM to visit with a friend I rarely see.

He and his wife were supernice to host me, including feeding me multiple times even when it resulted in excess burning.  Played Viticulture with Tuscany expansion.

I had a start with trellis and my first two vines required trellis.  I definitely needed to understand some of the mechanics better.  I lost 5 VPs when my Architect was stolen.  Game came to the verge of ending when I wouldn’t have won, but we went one more round where I could score two wine orders and had strong star situation.  I built a Wine Press I don’t think I used once and Ristorante, which I’m not sure was actually that great but maybe it was.

For the most part, I got useful cards.  My fields were planted pretty quick to my endgame configuration.

It didn’t blow me away.  I’d be interested in playing more.  For a worker placement game, it didn’t feel like it was that hard to place workers the way I wanted.  Mostly harvesting two fields was where I had to make effort.  The cadence of the game I don’t have much sense for.  I guess I made wine at about the right rate, but I felt like I had too little early on.

While waiting for some BBQ ribs, did find some time to …

The symbolism is symbolic.  I may lead a boring life, but I don’t necessarily get boring results from activities.

I was asked what music I preferred.  That’s somewhat easy and not so easy.  I prefer music written and produced by Jim Steinman RIP.  To honor someone who sang a lot of his songs, put on Meat Loaf RIP.  First song was Paradise by the Dashboard Light.  By the way, I was throwing three knives at a time, so Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad, eh?  EH?

After dinner, I headed back.

After getting back, exchanged messages about Gen Con hotel booking.  Just kind of exhausting.

Sunday morning, get caught up on Gen Con hotel booking messages.  Do my weekly Covid test.  Come back, we get one of the rooms we need with great time.  While waiting for another time, room situation gets sorted out.

Just a miserable process.  I want to be able to actually study different options, but it’s all book whatever is acceptable if you can.  I didn’t realize that Indy has relatively so few hotel rooms.  I thought they were really pushing being a place for meetings outside of things like Gen Con.  Gen Con just is too big for housing to not suck.  Unless you go some year that has less than half the recent volume.

Speaking of games, I watched way more curling than a sporting event with lots of commercials.  Ran a couple errands around halftime.  Decided to use up my aging ground beef in a stir fry while end of the Rams winning was occurring.

Monobob.  Such a terrible name.  Monosled would be way better.

Yup, I’m not boycotting the Winter (aka better) Olympics.  Getting plenty of curling, what all central thinking people desire above all other entertainment.  Monosled has a lot more skidding, which is interesting.  Do prefer mixed doubles curling to “let’s blank this end” curling.

No RPG on the weekend.  People traveling or in between chapters or personal stuff going on for GM.  There was some discussion of someone else’s character and advancement, but I killed the conversation by pointing out that giving advice to people without knowing what they care about doesn’t help a whole lot.

My Yasuki Courtier is going to learn the Way of the (Samurai) Gun.  Arc Flash’s force field is likely to become half as forceful as I think rescaling party soak at this time works where we just have one character who can’t be hurt by stuff.  Not really anything else going on with three other characters.  Will finish up Space Colony Shock next session.

I guess that’s it.  President’s Weekend is True Dungeon and DunDraCon – a Travellerfest of Travellerness for me.

Hero’s Journeying

I got to thinking about accomplishments recently, again, but I already covered the topic in my Accomplishmental post almost nine years ago.

At the end of that post, I left off with a lead in for a post I’m sure I didn’t make (something I’m wont to do even though actually writing those posts would be different content).

Establishing goals … is not exactly what this post is about, either.  Another possible post in the future!

So, do you want to be a hero?

This isn’t a new topic, either.  Based on so much of my RPG play, folks don’t really want to be heroes.

How do I know this?

What do we do that’s heroic?

Sure, L5R can easily become Swords & Social – an exercise in political gain to rack up Status or to not get screwed with or to murder somebody you don’t like.  But, uh, magic samurai.  It came up recently a complaint that there wasn’t enough fantasy in one of my campaigns – a complaint from someone besides me as I generally just subsume my interests in whatever groups are inclined to do, even when the groups don’t want to do what they end up doing.

Thing about fantasy is that it’s a very heroic genre.  One of the reasons I have no interest in reading other books in The First Law series is that the first book is antiheroic.

You can have evil characters, like Kane or Elric, not good characters, like Conan, and still have heroic fantasy.

I felt like I was doing some heroic things in HoR2, Nightmare War, early on in HoR3, and hardly at all in HoR4.  Almost like there’s a reason I have less enthusiasm for playing HoR4 than any of those other campaigns.  Our Bloodspeaker campaign is entirely about murdering evil wizards, yet we never do anything heroic.  Sure, we liberated the Snake from tsukai efforts and dealt with an oni lord, but it didn’t feel heroic at any point.  Trying to help the Snake Champion just felt like work.  The major battle against tsukai at the end of the chapter was one in which none of the PCs needed to be involved.

We tried to make things turn out better in our Iron Empire campaign, though the first chapter was really about establishing the world where we had limited ability to affect events.  My PC’s journey is really set up to be an internal struggle of technological advancement/pragmatism versus spiritual health/honor.  That sort of internal conflict is precisely not what I look for in my fantasy fiction – I look for smiting evil in cool smitey ways.  But, that was the first chapter; we are likely much more free to just make of the setting what we want at this point.

Play by post game’s pacing is such that not a whole lot happens plotwise.  There’s a lot of getting wrapped up in details, though, unlike other play where that drives me nuts, it’s okay to me to basically do cooperative fictions.  It’s not terribly clear what we are supposed to be doing, so my approach is just play and have everything be a mystery.

What is possibly the most egregious case of non-heroic play is in our superhero play.  Hero is right there in the character type.  Now, our side play stuff does come across as heroic, which is one reason I think it works better.  Our main play just drags, whether it’s talking about what to do or in how incredibly slow combat is.  By the time we yet again take out the supervillains/agents/cartelites/monsters, have so little narrative feel for what the point of it all was.  Our most recent session was stopping a super from getting kidnapped by anti-mutant robots.  But, it was just fighting.  There was no real context for why anything was happening.  It didn’t connect to any narrative.  It would have been vastly more interesting if we had failed to prevent her from getting kidnapped and actually had to do something … something … um … heroic … to get her back.

I think one of the major missed opportunities with that campaign is how it started.  We start the campaign fighting a group that doesn’t turn out to be villains.  So, we start out just fighting for the sake of fighting, not actually being heroes.  Then, those characters are vaguely around, but we never actually interact with them in any meaningful way (well, I don’t), so …

It’s hard to emphasize this enough.  Rather than have villains who are important to us, we get non-villains who aren’t important enough to us.  It’s something you would never do in a book.  The second superteam we fought would have made far more sense as being the first team we fought.  They are villains.  They also were pretty rough on us, even if we did win that fight (as we’ve pretty much won every fight or, at least, had the enemy run away even if that was their goal).

A group of barely there, morally unknown NPCs just doesn’t inform our heroism in any way.

Goals and achievements are important to more than just heroic play, of course, but it’s just amazing how much RPG play is so unheroic in terms of what PCs actually spend time doing.

I don’t think it’s intentional.  I think groups just develop bad habits of losing sight on why something is cool.  It’s like how my Star Wars play tends to be terrible.  Star Wars is cool because sword wizard and lovable rogue save the princess and fight the evil knight while pew pew happens.  Star Wars RPG play is how to scam hutts to make money and murder scum with guns or swords.

Ironically, in our Conan d20 play, where we often weren’t the good guys, a lot of play felt like heroic adventuring.  Even looting tombs or whatever felt like something heroic adventurers would do, where smashing undead(?) beetles was way more noble, pure, virtuous, and righteous than most of what happens in my RPG play.

Sure, I may care way more about heroic adventuring than the people I play with.  But, I think they like that, too.  Because I don’t have a leader personality and put up with a lot of suboptimal stuff in life to just do something mildly/somewhat enjoyable rather than play solitaire while watching the golf channel, I don’t try to force play to be what interests me the most.  It’s just curious to me why other folks who aren’t so Charlie Brownish don’t try to push play towards what it really should be.

But, then, I’m rather geniusy in my not-quite-omniscience.  You know, the NQO that leads me to not play with people who look for the experiences I look for.

Six Of Six

Including HoR4, I’m playing six RPG … things.  Most are campaigns, couple might not be.

Shock was hard for me to wrap my head around in reading the rules, and it proved very different when we started actually playing from my expectations.

The audience is way more swingy than I thought, basically deciding wins and losses a lot.  Play is much faster/simpler each turn.  Length of entire thing is going to be way shorter than I thought as antagonists have four cracks at messing with things at most.

We had a really jovial realization after our first play session:  in our world of space colonies with Space US, Space China (nobody is interacting with this), and Space Saudi Arabia, we realized all three of our protagonists basically just have routine office jobs.

Denver CRUSH has been back to playing with full group, well replacement player hasn’t been playing.  We spent sessions on our assault on super agent base.  Combat lasted 16 rounds for me, though round 16 was using Data Retrieval specialty of Computer ability.  I got into a complete stalemate with a nemesis where we couldn’t hurt each other through our massive Soaks, but she lost it and dropped her force field and a couple of animated trees knocked her out by throwing rocks at us as we danced through the sky.  Actually danced, I rolled Dance specialty of Perform while I had a Hold on her.  I was trying to goad her into firing off lightning to consume Quantum, but that wasn’t working.

I start with 28 Quantum to pay for powers.  I ended the combat with 2.  Having only done damage to inanimate objects.

I bought some stuff after last session, but I’m not really feeling any particular mechanical change.  Just want to do more story, which could make advancement more interesting.  If anything, I want to weaken force field as it seems a thematic fail as well as contributing to the Soak problem in the game.

The other four RPG things are L5R.

Iron Empire game is getting closer to completing chapter one.  We are playing out the discovery that the Hare are sabotaging the Iron Dragon project.  We tried to negotiate a deal that didn’t suck for the Hare, but they didn’t care.  So, next session picks up with the Emerald Champion and us getting attacked by a Hare force.

The way I designed my character was to be decent at a lot of noncombat things.  We got 12xp, but I don’t know what to change.  There’s no reason he would get better at combat.  The logical thing to get better at is Investigation, as that has been the main roll, but I’m just not enthused.  Without having a sense of challenges or future activities, hard to have a sense of what I even want to be good at.  Should take Teppoudo, which I keep forgetting about.

Play by Discord post game moves awkwardly as dependent upon other character doing things.  I haven’t spent any XP as I know the first thing I want to do and don’t have enough to do it.  Starting with 40 points is so weird to me in home play as it’s unnecessary and means characters are so basic.  I don’t mind the slow advancement mechanically, it’s just that it feels like no advancement mechanically as we just occasionally get 1xp, where xp seem like sort of a distraction from telling a story.  Yet, we are so bad at so many things that it feels like we are incompetent.  There’s a lot of potential here as could be seen with one of the scenes we had, but asynchronous play is so alien to me and fights my interest in doing stuff all of the time.

Bloodspeaker game has been back to playing.  Stuff is happening with other characters.  My character has never actually done anything during main play, only having done something in an intro with one other PC.  Did gain 100xp because the gap between starting characters and characters who hadn’t died recently had grown too large.  Meant that could be less awful, but I’m trying to rush to SR-3 for simple attacks, and that means buying up stuff that’s a thematic fail.  I’d never bother with INT or AWA if I could get to IR-3 in same time some more thematic way.  But, then, I’ve played the character twice and have done next to nothing, so it’s not like I care about this character any.

Speaking of not caring about characters, I’m making no effort to play the three HoR4 mods I could play.  However, what I am doing is running mods.

One player has been very interested in options for spending xp, where I obviously have lots of opinions.  There are definitely mods I’d rather not run, where there’s just too many mods I have no enthusiasm for running as so many HoR4 mods just aren’t appealing.  Without being engaged in a story, without having interesting fights that feel important, with only a few mods with interesting certs, with so many mods being reminiscent of other mods, just don’t care a lot about specific mods.

It’s certainly not getting me enthused for playing more.

So, the L5R game that has the least weight has my greatest character interest.  Just weird.  But, I think it goes to something I keep harping on.  What sort of story is being told?  The better the story, the more interest in playing the character in that story.

This stuff is keeping me busy, though.