The Best of … 2020

So, I didn’t so much miss a deadline as much as I just forgot about my annual tradition.

One of my brothers had a wedding Saturday, so the last week plus has been kind of busy.

I actually had a plan for posting before my best of post something, but it has been hard to be concerned about normal things.

Anyway, 2020 was not a good year in various ways.  As I just start looking back at what I wrote as I write these posts, let’s see what I want to call out.

January

Fascinating.

Eleven Decks, Eleven Notes – Part 1

Somehow, this entire series … started in 2020 … ended before we stopped playing.

This is precisely the sort of thing I should do more of – build decks, talk about how the decks perform in actual games.  Of course, it’s kind of hard to play decks when there’s no one to play with.

Other parts are probably noteworthy, too.  After all, they aren’t short play reports, even if I included TV reviews or whatever in some of them.  Can get an idea how bonkers Shadowfist is by trying to describe games in partial detail, though it’s not like I haven’t done SF session reports before.

Advanced Play – L5R & Gloomhaven

I was trying in 2020 to get back to doing more analysis and less navel gazing.  Well, not that anyone needed to hear my Gloomhaven analysis so long after the game came out, but I write about things I do.  Advancing Tatakisu might have been interesting for how I both try to know how to min/max, then do something weird.

Off Court

Why do courtiers exist in a fantasy world where Hell is just to the Southwest?

I’m still playing Akarui.  Team Akarui just won an actual Winter Court event.  Obvious thing for a team of Imperial Herald, Tortoise, and Yasuki to win – shrine building.  Yup, build that shrine better than all of the other teams, which I think all had shugenja on them.

And, that’s why courtiers exist – to have multiple ranks in Engineering, to have Lore: Shrines, to have partners with a bunch of ranks in Lore: Rokugan, to have Ebisu’s Blessing and to have lots of koku koku bills to throw at spiritual projects.

February

Unstable

I almost skipped over this, but this was the most interesting thing in February.  It’s long, so it must be good.

I was just talking to one of my GMs yesterday about how contested rolls in R&K are bad because the system has too much variance.  This article is a lot about how variance creates problems with combat.  Now, maybe it’s just because L5R has lethality.  Maybe a system that wasn’t bad to begin with (most are, bad that is) with low lethality or enough metacurrency to not die can embrace variance.

March

Roll & Defeat

Speaking of the problems with contested rolls and variance …

April

Rather Not Walk

Choo choo.

ARe Wards

More direct about what players like me want and what isn’t as important.

Fiction Destruction

So, how good is my writing?  Much like my cooking, I’d say highly variable.  I don’t care much about getting better at these sorts of things as much as I just like being wrapped up in the narrative (that includes the narrative of cooking).

This is really, really long, but that just means it’s got to be better.

May

Building L5R Characters – Emerald Empire

*shrug*  If people want L5R content, I might as well write about L5R stuff.  How do I know people want L5R content?  I check what articles are getting views at times and it’s mostly old L5R articles.

Friendliness Rating

I try at times to create things for people to use.  Whether I ever use this idea I have no idea.

Gen Con – Early Years

Some Gen Cons are very similar to others.  And, yet, lot of stuff going on every year relative to other cons.

[Classic ] Gen Con SoCal 2004 [12/8/2004]

Why call out this classic post?  Charmed, I’m sure.

[Classic] Gen Con 2004 [8/26/2004]

I had seven posts in May, so it wasn’t like I chose every one.  First time playing Heroes of Rokugan!

June

Fight, Right?

Yet another take on what makes combat better or worse.

August

Gen Con 2020 – Oh, The Horror!

For posterity, the virtual Gen Con.

[Classic] True Dungeon V1 Feedback [2020-8-3]

Well, as much as 2021 was my favorite year for VTD, most recent VTD was vastly better than VTD1.

September

Card Qualit-ies

I am a CCG designer/developer.  Like a real one.  I’ve created other games, but those weren’t actually sold to people for actual money.

October

Brain Squishy

Who doesn’t want to know more about what sort of gamer type I am?

November

Midwest Gamefest 2020

As possibly the only Midwest Gamefest I’ll ever participate in, figure why not.  Besides, had Battle Interactive.

December

Camping Tools

Sure, other people have their lists.  Here’s mine.

So, 2020 was 2020.  I’m trying to get this wrapped up as family is having New Year’s dim sum lunch.  While there’s probably more to say about the year, I guess I’ll just let it go.

Home Movies

I’ve been thinking of how to follow up one of my various loose ends from other posts.

Best thing I have at moment is episodic play in home campaigns.  Helped that I was talking to someone who provided a similar observation to one of mine.

So, what does episodic play mean to me in a more detailed sense than just saying “be like TV shows where episodes are largely self contained and end state isn’t terribly different than initial state”?

By definition, well my definition, a campaign can’t just be playing adventures with same characters with characters never changing.  So, there’s an inherent conflict between minimizing change and requiring it.

Is it just a matter of minimizing the amount of change so that you can pick up a new session with no real concern for the past?  In fact, you could change the order of adventures and it would not really matter?

TV shows are known for being episodic where you don’t need to watch any other episodes to consume essentially the same experience (ignoring multipart episodes).  But, are movies really different?  Well, in that there may never be another movie with same characters, sure.  But, Indiana Jones movies are essentially episodic to the extent that TV series often used to be.

Of course, TV has changed.  In some ways, having lasting story arcs between episodes in a season is better.  In some ways, not so much.  I’m used to storylines just dragging when what makes the characters appealing isn’t the same supervillains plotting for half or all of a season.

Ah, supers.

This is what convinced me to write about home episodic play.

My supers play is vastly more episodic than my other RPG play of recent years.  Sure, living campaign play, like HoR, doesn’t have virtually any sort of multiepisode story … out of the .pdf.  But, where I was into HoR the most was when there was an evolution, sure, heavily tied to mechanical evolution.

Anyway, back to supers play.  If I played my original character sheet, there would be no real meaningful difference in nature of abilities.  Sure, I was unable to hurt things originally and now can kill stuff in two shots like all properly designed superheroes.  Nominally have a girlfriend, though she never shows up.  Still rich.

Because supers undergo such dramatic changes, they need to undergo those dramatic changes to actually feel different.  Sure, stuff gets retconned or undone or whatever, but characters change in some substantial way in abilities or personality or role in world.  We are still Denver based.  Still don’t use any actual teamwork.  We had one stretch where we were trying to deal with a single menace, except nothing really changed after that was over.  We aren’t in a postapocalyptic world run by alien vampires.  We don’t have an Aztec goddess ruling Aztecia.

We pretty much go into every new episode with same characters doing same things and functioning in same ways only with a lot more XP.

Now, was my Conan play that different?  I would say that looking back at play of yesteryear, the more I think about how different Conan play was from so much of my other play.  Sessions could be self contained.  More so, several sessions were largely self contained.  Now, there was character development beyond just taking more Feats and pumping attributes while numbers got bigger.  I don’t see even now describing that play as episodic, it was just closer.

So, what is the draw of having each session or, maybe more accurately, each episode as story arcs routinely cover multiple sessions being largely self contained and interchangeable?  I like my favorite characters doing cool things and being recognized for them, having continuity that matters.  But, it doesn’t have to be all of the time.  Cool characters are generally cool all of the time and not just when they’ve matured or suffered or whatever.  So, characters being minimally different, from the outside anyway, seems fine.  But, what about from the inside?  Do I get bored playing the same character over and over?

Well, let’s come back to that later.  What about plot?  Are long story arcs or short arcs better?  I think a huge problem with so much of my play is the lack of resolution on story arcs, that players don’t get a chance to feel like they’ve succeeded at something important.  Obviously living campaign modules end and you get rewards every adventure.  Again bringing up Conan play, we had lots of short arcs.  I’d say the least enjoyable play was an experiment on the GM’s part to do horror that felt like it dragged on (miserably).  While contending with giants in what was essentially Norse lands took multiple sessions (I think it did), it was still a tight story arc that had little connection to what happened before and what happened after.  It could have happened when characters were lower levels or higher levels, in some different order of play than it did.

What about the setting changing?  One way for play to evolve is for PCs to change, but another is for the setting around them to change.  Usually, both occur.  We started out Conan play with running for our lives from Picts.  Eventually, my primary character became an ambassador in essentially Mesopotamia, even if our adventures didn’t change much because of that.  He changed.  Our world changed.  Is it non-episodic if the setting changes?

I’d have to think more about that.  A sequel to this post already without even getting into anything that meaty!!  So much winning.

What’s the problem with episodic play?  I think a lot of folks would say that not gaining abilities, not becoming more mechanically impressive, would turn them off.  Yet, a lot of power increases are meaningless in a narrative sense – the street gangs just power up too.  I can see what I’d call highly episodic play where PCs became vastly more powerful, so moving on.  What if PCs don’t change in some narrative way?  Care about the same things, do the same things, gain a love interest every episode and lose it by the next episode.  Is that a problem?

I think this was where my HoR 3 and 4 play was weak.  My characters felt hollow or paper thin when they didn’t have events cause meaningful change in their personal story arcs.  Tatakisu had a great story arc, seemingly lucked into it (by Luck failing him!!).  Shigeo never felt meaningfully different.  He was a Sparrow-trained Moshi to begin with and to end with and taking out a couple gods using a pre-Empire artifact didn’t really mean anything.  On the other hand, Takumi did have a story arc … somehow … as my secondary character.  My second HoR4 PC didn’t feel like anything changed for him – once a Frog, always a Frog.

But, is that due to expectations?

I played in a one-shot con event where my party was hunters and werewolves and other party were vampires.  My character got XP and I had great ideas for how to spend it, yet he would have been essentially the same character in the next adventure.  I’ve played the same PC in multisession con events.  I could focus on the plot of each session and not on what it meant in the grand scheme of things.

So, why episodic campaign and not just play a different system every session with new characters?

Episodic shows still have broader stories.  There’s still cool continuity stuff with the Doctor even if someone could watch episodes of two different Doctors and still get that this serial is its own story.

Yeah, I’m not really convincing myself.  I don’t think there is a lot of reason for strongly episodic campaign play.  Yet, the reason why this interests me as a topic is moving toward more episodic play to generate shorter, tighter story arcs, possibly ironically to have more character development and more world development.  When Arrow or Flash or whatever has a season long villain, what really changes in that full season?  More changes when you have ends and not just endless middles.

So, episodic play without episodic campaign?  Maybe that’s the one true path.  That’s what HoR was at its best.  That could be a description of our Conan play.  I’d say it’s how our supers play is supposed to work but not enough about our PCs or the world changes when an episode ends.

Gen Con 2022

Been home since Monday morning, but each year is getting harder and harder on the body.  Sure, last year was different, but last year had many fewer things to do to where I had nothing I needed to do Sunday and didn’t have True Dungeon runs after 11PM …

Tuesday

Start packing.  Getting together the stuff I’m supposed to take to people.  Have boxes and bags of tokens all over the place.  Try to set boxes aside that I know I won’t need.  Things like trade goods since I’m not transmuting any tokens at Gen Con …

Wednesday

Get up at 2AM, right before alarm, which is good sign.  Around 3:30AM, Dave arrives and we head to SJC.  We have to wait until 4AM for Unitedfolk to appear.  Flight to DEN is fairly pleasant – too much legroom, actually.  Layover is short.  Flight to IND is far less comfortable.  Kind of late, but we land before 3PM, so we are still way earlier than the norm.  Uber to hotel, check in easily enough, get vast mountain of drink coupons, vast, vast mountain.

Go to ICC for vacc line.  Takes us about 30 minutes to get through, head to TD hangout area.  I complete my sale of tokens to a reseller … oh, wait, I don’t.  I give unto the reseller a stack of tokens minus … come on, you know what’s coming because this guy is a true master of the literary form … trade goods.  Fortunately, the trade goods amounted to only 1.7% of the value of the deal.  (Do not try to figure out how large this deal was as it will depress you.  Not try.)

Forget Failure #1 – check.

After reseller starts packing up, since not really anything to do, decide to get food.  Go by Steak & Shake and I nix that as the whole point of going to S&S before the Flood was that it was $3.99 for the burger combos.  Why would I spend $8-10 for this stuff?  We eventually end up at Taco Bell in the mall.  I remember why I don’t go to the mall for food.  Actually, in terms of all aspects of meal, this was my favorite meal.  We ate at hotel during their happy hour thing.  So, the ambience was better than any other meal.

Trying to sleep was miserable.  Kept waking up.  In the middle of the night, realized I had not put my treasure enhancer sheet (the one with Charms of Avarice) back into my binder after Skull Con, as didn’t need it there.  Typical pro move to put something out of normal spot for “reasons”, pro as in pro-blem.

Forget Failure #2 – check.

This one mattered more in that I could just mail the trade goods to reseller when got home, which I did today.  Sure, wasted $10, but that’s a minor punishment.

Other thing did in middle of the night was shogi puzzles to get sleepier.

Thursday

I had bought out a TD run the day events went on sale.  Sure, the better move is to leave in cart, figure out who is getting what, release without buying as sitting on $880 of tickets was uninspiring.  I finally sold all of the tickets for it to people through forums.  Some vets.  Mostly casual/new players.

So, two things I needed to do for a run I wasn’t on:  one, deliver rares and stuff I sold to one of the players; two, dump consumable stuff on new(?) players.

My run was 10:26AM.  I was in TD area before 8:30AM.  Because I.  I am a genius.

We eventually do our run.

Ebony Bay

First time for group, which included various people who aren’t regular players.  We only did Nightmare as we wanted a casual stroll to victory.

Because no organization of classes, I ended up doing melee wizard.  We failed one of the combats and one of the puzzles, but we won.  The physical puzzle was amusing.  I was not good at physicality.  Even worse on second Ebony Bay run.

Guess it’s time to speak generally about my TD play at GC because that’s how my mind works rather than having the patience to wait until after all of my runs.

What do I get out of in person TD play?

I don’t care much about puzzles.  There are exceptions, of course.  But, I often don’t engage much with puzzles.  I particularly don’t care about physical puzzles, and I pretty much hate any puzzle involving colors due to prior experiences with color puzzles.

I don’t care about combat hardly at all, unlike VTD where combat interests me for optimizing number crunching with quirky builds.

So, what do I actually enjoy about in person TD play?

Some dungeons are aesthetically pleasing.  Felurian’s tree back when she first appeared.  N2’s ice and snow.

Hanging out and talking with people I know.  People I know.

Almost as if I’m going to foreshadow rather than follow up on this theme.

After TD

I had taken an insane amount of weight with me.  We had time for lunch.  Andy took my bag back to the room, removed the tokens, brought it back.  That bag almost killed both of us.  Somehow, my blue bag which has been used for innumerable CCG cards boxes over the years and gone on most, possibly all, of my international trips since my mother bought it (for her to use) did not tear.

We went to Thai Paradise.  In terms of food, this was my favorite food of the con.  I ate it very late while playing a module, so the ambience was a fail and the enjoyment of eating leisurely was nonexistent.

2PM – HoR4 CIT70

Everyone’s favorite mod.  We played for about 2 hours but it felt dense.  My favorite GM GMed it.  Three of us played with folks I played a bunch with in 2021, which was a nice player entangling.  While it might have been somewhat over the top and nonstop, I like high fantasy.

7PM – HoR4 CIT71

The final mod of the campaign.  Whereas 70 involved feeling like doing something even if a bunch of stuff did didn’t really matter, this just felt like entirely on rails with no meaningful decisions and being dragged around to do something didn’t care about doing.  Played for like 2 hours.

11:26PM – TD Ebony Bay

So, went over to TD area early.  Just removing one binder of the three and not carrying tokens for other people vastly decreased weight.  I bought a Totem of Heroism from someone I’ve dealt with in the past by mail.  Bunch of people had gotten Totems from the Golden Ticket runs, including two of my teammates.  I tried to figure out whether we could be done trying to make more; it turned out we still cared about making more beyond the ones we had either made or could make with what we already had.

I ran staff monk as I wanted to see if anyone noticed my only sliding one slider.  Never came up.  We were playing Epic, and we failed.

So, first time at this con got out of a run about 1:30AM.  That means getting to sleep 3AM or later.  Spent time updating Totem of Heroism component spreadsheet.

We old folks were already hurting walking back to hotel.

Thursday done.

Friday

9AM – HoR CIT69

I was on my own for the intro mod.  I could have enjoyed this for its story.  Has a NPC I care about.  Got to use a Language rarely used.

But, here’s the problem with playing intro mods in person – you get people who don’t know what the Jigoku is going on.  Not just from a HoR4 standpoint.  Get people who don’t know what L5R is suddenly playing some mod that means nothing to them narratively.

It’s just painful playing with these types of players.  Sure, everyone is that player at some point.  But, there are mods that actually suit people who need to be introduced to L5R.  I’m not sure there’s a HoR4 mod that qualifies – I’m too tired at moment to access the memory hovel.

I was fading, predictably.  I considered going to the room for a nap, but I tried instead getting a mocha cookie crumble frappuccino venti where I noticed that napping at this hotel might have worked.

2PM – HoR CIT68

This was fine.  Of course the obvious thing to do in the middle of a war for the fate of the Empire is to stop to help finish a tax audit.

7PM – HoR CIT67

This was not.  Where every other mod went like 2 hours, this took 4.  I was worried about this possibility, which is why I kept bringing a bunch of tokens with me to things that had nothing to do with tokens.

Because I forgot the only tokens that actually get used on every run and our group has a token tycoon with builds for Epic for every class, I didn’t need any tokens for runs.

I rushed back to room to get tokens but also to carry 15+ pounds of CCG cards.  Yes, I did not play a single CCG at Gen Con, not even demo a game I was supposed to demo but forgot about until too late.  But, I took five 800 count boxes of … Wheel of Time(!!) … cards to my True Dungeon run!!  I got to coaching right as it ended, where my build had already been figured out for me.  But, coaching did have the person I was passing WoT cards to as I trade my WoT collection in two shipments for a token [sic] sum.

11:13PM – TD Weird Magic

So, I missed Felurian’s Feast, though I had three cracks at doing a run Thursday morning.  This was the only run of Weird Magic I have ever done.  The final fight was far more interesting to me mechanically than Ebony Bay’s, but I’ll never in my life metagame for it.

Being physically and emotionally spent didn’t help my engagement level.  I did actually cast spells as a wizard.  I could have played more knowledgeably as people knew the dungeon, but it’s hard for me to take combat seriously when playing in person as I have no sense as to how combat is going, which makes me not care about it.  I should just ask people how seriously I should take combat on in person runs, as others have different interests and it’s not like I’m trying to fail.

Saturday

9AM – HoR4 Battle Interactive

We had five going into Gen Con.  We had figured out who to fill out table earlier in con.  I forgot that my Battle dice pool was higher due to burning Book of Water.  I rolled above median … and like one slot too low to get the scenario packet we wanted.

We wanted to face the Undead Champion of the Badger so that our Badger could strangle him to death for some Badger on Badger action.  Instead, I chose for us to face the Harbinger of Hate, us serving under Yoritomo Arashi, Champion of the Mantis.

Ended up we were the only Hold The Line table.  In theory, if we failed, would be quite bad.  In practice, I don’t know that the PC side would ever lose.  If it did actually matter, other tables could drop bonus Victory Points on the Hold The Line encounters no one chose.

We had Hiruma Reikokuna, Defender of the Wall thus the only reason we had a chance on some of these encounters, Kasuga Nekohono’o, two players from Eric’s online group, Ichiro Yuuki and Shinjo Narantsetseg, our only shugenja, Doji Tsudoken, and the least useful battle commander outside of actually making Battle rolls, Kaeru Odayaka.

BR1

I roll 61 on my Battle roll.  Beiden Pass suddenly becomes an Ivory Kingdoms jungle.  Trees 50′ away camouflage 4 Yoritomo Bushi, Mirumoto Bushi, and Crane Bushi.  We never learn their names.  I get a 47 on Initiative.  I fire a fleshcutter at someone coming and do 33 wounds.  I get hit for 16, 11 after reduction.  Reikokuna takes out Mirumoto.  Nekohono’o does 90 wounds to Daidoji who was Guarding Mirumoto.  Round 2, I shoot someone for 51 wounds.  Combat is over, and I Medicine myself to go from 11 wounds to 9.

So, you may not know what Kaeru Bushi School does since a full basic school is a HoR4 thing.  The school is all about staves/unarmed knockdown/disarm.  Do get simple attacks with katana at SR-4, but I’m never going to care with my Kenjutsu 1.  By using a yumi, that I only had because of the favor system in the campaign, exactly none of my five school techniques mattered.

This is known as winning.  Frog blood winning.

We crushed this fight.  But, then …

BR2

I roll 73 on my Battle roll.  The jungle is an illusion!  Still can’t see through the trees.  I roll 48 on Investigation, half our party avoided pit traps.  Yoritomo zombies join Daidoji Scouts and a Soshi Shugenja.  Get hit with Fear 5 from spell, make roll.  Roll 57 for Initiative.  Swap with Doji Tsudoken.  We get hit with Slayer’s Knives from shugenja and take 55 wounds.  All of us.  I’m also knocked Prone.  Zombie hits me and I drop.  There’s a light and an explosion in the distance from what’s going on at another table.  We negotiate a resolution to a fight that can easily kill everyone except Hiruma Reikokuna.  Doji Tsudoken lifecasts to heal everyone else.

His new character is Daidoji Hasai, Daidoji Iron Warrior.  So, lots of simple attacks where ATNs in the 40s are useless is fine for the OP PCs in the campaign but pretty uninteresting for fair PCs like our Ichiro and Shinjo (Moto Bushi).  This wasn’t a group with a bunch of campaign certs.  Only Nekohono’o and Reikokuna were really suited to this level of play in what was supposed to be IR 4+.  Now, if you really want to kill PCs at the end, then, sure, it made sense.  Tsudoken was an Asahina Shugenja, so we did have Soul’s Grace sleaze, but he wasn’t really designed for combat of this level, only having like 37 ATN, when this level of play should have like 47 ATN to start with.

GM was really easy on us.  He had a ton of attacks go to the Defender of the Wall who couldn’t be hurt by the zombies.  Already, this was losing any real sense of satisfaction, even though my goal was to just get the table to the end.  I probably should have sacrificed myself this round in our negotiated failure as it would have helped everyone else in next fight as I switch to a fresh shugenja with the same Battle roll.

BR3

I roll 76 on my Battle roll.  Illusionary trees go away.  “Jun” in black armor with an aura of violent heat causes rage zombies to rise.  We have to make a Rage Roll (like Fear but affected by various disads).  I succeed with 35 as I have no sworn enemies or the like.  Nekohono’o fails … multiple times.  Forced into Full Attack stance while I go into Full Defense.  We are facing the Harbinger of Hate and 12 crazed zombies.  I get 27 on Initiative.  I don’t switch with anyone.  My ATN goes to 65 from FD.  I get hit twice by zombie.  Harbinger of Hate has Init of 99, kills Nekohono’o on round 1.

Yeah.

Round 2, I Guard the Iron Warrior since I fight like a courtier.  Get hit again.  Shinjo and Ichiro are dropped.  Round 3, we are running out of time, so I do the ultimate Frog move – I drop my yumi, switch to Full Attack, and punch the Harbinger of Hate activing my Blessing of Fu Leng(!!) to deal 33 wounds, then miss with second punch.  Iron Warrior finishes Harbinger off after Reikokuna had done most of the work.  Zombies don’t collapse and eat three of our party members or tear them apart or whatever.

Again, we could have easily just been overrun by zombies.  Only Defender of the Wall could ignore them, where I got hit multiple times with ATN 65.

This was also a pretty boring fight.  Really, none of our fights were all that interesting.  Round 1 fight was faceless.  Round 2 did have Investigation rolls but we were so overwhelmed that we never even attacked the shugenja.  Round 3 was just one boss dude with some faceless entourage (that would occasionally jump in the way of attacks on the Harbinger).

I had 3 bonus VPs to give out every round.  I put 3 into killing Bearer of Vengeance first round.  Second round, 3 into saving Mirumoto Daimyo(?) in a Hold The Line packet.  Third round, 3 into saving Seppun Nekono of the Imperial Legions.

Only two of us qualify for going on to final tables.  Reikokuna goes on to fight Toturi the IXth, and I go on to die against surviving lieutenants.

I sit at lieutenant fight table.  I roll Init.  I have 42 wounds already, earthquake does 28 more, dropping me.  The Dark Harrier walks over to me lying on the ground and beheads me, 1 minute in to combat.  Eventually, some of the people at our table flee under Legion of the Moon invisibility.  The assessment of the only PC who was suited to this challenge level was that it was just a pointless exercise to play this out, which I agree with.  We had like three IR-3 characters out of six at the table, including people without much L5R experience as new players were given IR-3 characters for the event.  GM asked if Tsuruchi Archer had a nemuranai weapon at one point.  Of course the new player didn’t.

You know, I feel like making this rant, as the attitude pisses me off.

There is a mod in which players get to choose a nemuranai object.  After that mod, there are tons of situations where not having a nemuranai weapon makes you irrelevant in combat (for those who need mundane attacks to inflict damage).  So, anyone who chose something interesting got fucked over by the campaign.  I then had people argue to me that it “punished people who did choose a nemuranai weapon” to not have people become useless in high rank combats.  That “there were other weapons in the mod”.  So, take a high rank bushi who has Heavy Weapons 7 and base damage of 8k3 or 9k3 and simple attacks with main weapon and have them use some other skill with 1/3 ranks with a weapon that does like 5k2 damage once in a round instead?  That’s completely reasonable.  So, sure, I can have my cool nemuranai biwa for my own personal story that has zero mechanical relevance as a biwa.  Or, I could deal damage to invulnerable enemies.  Mechanics matter, and you just fucked over anyone who didn’t choose a weapon that allowed them to function normally.  And, you didn’t tell them that at the time to make sure they understood the implications of a decision.  And, what about the people who didn’t play the mod, like two of our party members at the end of the campaign?

There’s a reason I’m done with HoR.  HoR was fun at GC22, much more fun than TD was for me.  I enjoy hanging out with people I only see at GC.  Not every mod in HoR4 sucks.  I can survive most of the lack of editing as, actually, some of the HoR3 mods I really liked were a disaster to try to run with how poorly they explained mod specific mechanics.  I prefer L5R to other RPGs I get to play, and I’d put up with the FFG version of L5R (probably).  I just am tired of feeling like I’m a second class citizen when I can just go play L5R in a home game, instead.

I also probably play too much L5R.  My decline in enthusiasm for L5R 4e play has something to do with not playing the vastly inferior other systems more often to remember how bad it could be.

I didn’t mind getting killed not doing anything.  The character never mattered that much to me and should have died at least three times before being irrelevant in what was an activity that never felt relevant to the campaign, anyway.

5PM – HoR4 Political Interactive

I played my deceased character as I did have unfinished business with the character.  I kind of forgot that I was supposed to gain sympathy for the Fortune of Torture.

The PI started as many do – with my not caring remotely about the politics in the campaign.  I was going to contend for shogun, but dead characters couldn’t compete for positions, which just left me to get a chance to talk to people I didn’t have much chance to all con and, eventually, help get Nekohono’o made Fortune of Companionship.  I also helped Moto Jochi get made family daimyo, maybe helped the only imperial do whatever he did.

It was amusing.  Nekohono’o not only got made into a god, he got to see the Scorpion Champion off himself, what with his Sworn Enemy: Scorpion Clan, which contributed to his failing the Rage roll against the Harbinger of Hate.  There was other hilarious stuff involving him, but you kind of had to be there.

Dinner

We went to Yard House.  The lemonade was watery and my Carnivore pizza had plenty of meat that all tasted the same.  At least got to hang out with Bill for a while.

Sunday

I didn’t have an 8AM game.  Not a 9AM game, either.  I did get breakfast after 10AM to get my free bacon and sausage with syrup and a muffin with Coke.  You know, the breakfast of dead Frogs.

I did have a noon game.

Gods of Metal – Ragnarock

The GM asked how we decided on this game.  My first response was “I like esoteric RPGs and found this in Gen Con schedule”, but, actually, I think I’ve read the Kickstarter entry for the game and decided not to back it.

This is what I used to do a lot before devoting most of my schedule to HoR and TD.  Four Colours al Fresco, which I overdid.  Babylon (not 5).  Fate of the Norns.  How We Came to Live Here.  Lots of stuff I can’t think of the name of, but you can read my old blog posts for some of them.

This was okay but very awkward.  I never understood what the setting was trying to be.  It was very freeform world creation with some music theme, but I didn’t feel like enough of a music theme as it didn’t seem to matter mechanically.  I can see an album cover of my turning into a griffin and eviscerating a bearded dragon, but the final enemy being on a roulette wheel didn’t seem to have anything to do with music.

How metal were we?  Kind of metal.  I don’t know anything about different types of metal, which may have mattered.

It was just an odd experience that was pretty neutral where I’ve been far more into other experiences with exotic games.  Maelstrom gave me achieving enlightenment as a puppet, for instance.

Post Con Dinner

My roommates and I waited quite a while for dinner with TD teammates, but they were too busy with Starship Horizons Adventures breakdown, so we went to Punch Bowl Social for dinner to try something different.

I debated wedge salad or patty melt as nothing else on the menu appealed to me.  Yes, overpriced iceberg lettuce was almost my choice.  It should have been.  My patty melt was ridiculous.  I ordered my fries crunchy and they were okay, if still not cooked properly – french fries are supposed to be red.  Because you cook them until they are crunchy on the outside shy of burning them black.  The rye bread was too large for the burger.  It wasn’t grilled.  The onions were raw.  I was surprised the burger had pink in the inside as it had the texture of a frozen patty being cooked.  Didn’t have enough cheese.  It wasn’t a good burger, but it didn’t even try to be a patty melt.

Are my patty melts great?  No.  Some are good, though.  Sure, I don’t make them short enough.  But, I saute the onions, even have done them well before by sauteing them long enough then throwing in the right amount of mustard and vinegar at the end.  And, of course, I grill the bread.

I used to live off of Steak & Shake because it cost $4 for a combo meal, was open at 7AM every day, and gave me protein and fat to get me through the day.  I switched to going to Subway every day because they have sweet teas and are still under $8 for a foot long.  I’m interested in trying Thai Paradise’s “Thai hot” because my curry that was supposed to be “hot” wasn’t spicy at all and because I still enjoyed it.  There are some other places I’d try like a ramen place and a bar and grille.

Overall, the con was a mess.  I meant to lead with this.

I kept expecting to have time to talk to people, even people in same hotel, and everyone was doing their own things.  Even doing TD runs together, there were so many friends of friends who needed attention that couldn’t spend time talking to people, plus runs were too often late at night.  The vast mountain of drink coupons never got used.

The late night runs are too hard on us aged folk.

Next year should be fascinating as I don’t have any HoR commitments to build my schedule around, so I can do things like spend a day doing TD only, spend a day doing something like Starship Horizons Adventures only, spend a day doing Magic two-headed giant sealed.

Maybe I will go to sleep before 3AM and not need to set an alarm for 6:50AM.

The gaming was okay, not significantly worse than other recent years, though I really didn’t care about any of the TD runs after they were over.  I expect Gamehole Con to be different.  Maybe I shouldn’t – expectations are bad, m’kay.

The hotel was fine, flights were fine, Ubers were fine, but I just felt like I didn’t know what I should be doing much of the time, where I usually have my Gen Cons completely nailed down.  The downside of knowing more people and the focus being more on people than on gaming.

The weight of tokens was brutal.  I say this every time, but I need to figure out how to manage having to drag around tokens rather than the beauty of playing VTD from home where I barely touch my tokens.

My forgetting things at home just dragged down my experience.  My mind has been going for years.  I need to simplify.  Though, I really did need to sell tokens this year.

BC 2022

I expect absolutely nobody to understand this post title.  Over time, I won’t get it, either.

One of the things about having a bunch of RPG play this past weekend was it also got me thinking about mechanics I’d like to change.

More specifically, with L5R 4e since four of the five things I did on the weekend were using this system.

Emphases – provide Insight, give better benefits like both 3e and 4e benefits, or do both.

Not so much a change, but I want to see more magic items [*gasp*] and more magical effects, like curses (okay, or blessings).  I may have mentioned it before, but I keep thinking of Rings providing Magic Resistance, whether something like same Ring or opposite Ring or just like Fire Ring provides MR since it doesn’t do anything.

I played two HoR mods Saturday.

Should my Frog have died again?

Well, as we talk about, if the GM was motivated to kill PCs, could kill them all of the time.  Not any closer to Meido than any other PC this time around.  Now, if I hadn’t raised Earth to 4, he would have died in one attack.  Got the favorable result of being reduced to Down where we had no shugenja in our parties (same party each time) to allow him to fight in wound penalties and get eviscerated.

Then, duel to the death.  Duel to the death with one rank in Iaijutsu as a R-4 bushi.  Opponent rolled horribly on Assessment, so no bonus.  Opponent beat me on Focus by 22 …  He used all of the Free Raises for damage with his Reflexes 3, so he missed my temporary 45 ATN.  I didn’t miss, Lucked my damage from 30 to 38.  He beat me on Initiative 40 to 39.  My ATN dropped to only 35.  He missed … twice.  I switch to Full Attack and hit with my first attack and the duel ended.  I hit with my 7k5 Full Attack.

Yup, standard high rank dueling – Iaijutsu 1, Kenjutsu 1.  I had to calculate all of my katana stuff, as I had never used a katana with this character before.

The dice were ridiculously kind there.  If I had his stats, I would have made sure I hit, of course.  As a PC, I would have Luck back up or Honor Roll back up to hit.

I liked the first mod.  Sure, when you feel challenged and succeed, RPGs are vastly more fun.  But, the mod felt meaty, unlike so many HoR4 mods, and it had decisions that felt like they mattered even if some of the decisions didn’t feel like meaningful ones.  It actually could have used more scenes as it introduced NPCs that you never really interact with but should.

The second mod just felt like moving from train station to train station.  The climactic fight that I basically didn’t participate in had lots of extra meaning for our group.  While I’m hesitant to spoil things at this time, maybe after Gen Con I’ll remember to explain why.  Or, if for some reason someone I play with who wasn’t on this run reads this, can talk about it offline.

It felt sparsely populated with things to do.  NPCs didn’t matter at all.  There were no real decisions.  It was okay.  Yet again, the weakest character doesn’t get anything special while the strong get stronger, which is really aggravating.

You know, I haven’t spent a lot of time ranting about how HoR play is a rich get richer and screws those who are behind.  But, anyway, it is what it is.

That was exhausting doing two online mods back to back.  I checked off the only necessary buy for my 350 point character.  I know what the next 16xp goes into, which won’t somehow make him do meaningful damage – he finished off a major enemy with two attacks that did 9 damage and 13 damage … because the rest of the party did like 240 wounds before I attacked.  It was funny to use a katana and deal way more damage than primary weapon.  I do as much damage unarmed as with magic pipe.

The weapon discrepancies in a game that shouldn’t be about equipment are just so obnoxious.  Just fixing the exploding 9’s problem would do so much, though still nobody ever has a reason to use a k1 weapon.

Sunday morning did a bit of stuff in PBP game.  Where at one point had no real advancement ideas beyond not be a moron because XP were kind of random and paltry, once we started getting XP in bigger chunks, now have numerous things that would look to advance.  I’m one Insight from IR-3.  Will go with regular Shiba Bushi 3 rather than a path, where I only made up my mind after a recent battle against gaijin bandits, where if one of the NPCs or the other PC had gotten into trouble, I would have gone Shiba Yojimbo, but they didn’t, so float on free Void whenever I make my next XP expenditure.

I guess I could get emphases to not rank up, but I don’t actually have a reason not to rank up even though my hightest weapon skill is R-2.  Yup.  I’m almost a R-3 character whose highest skill is 3, and that skill is Lore: Cartography.  This amuses me, though not as much as it once would have.

Maybe you will get amused … I mean that is kind of the point of my being a member of the blognoscenti … by my six R-2 skills:  Kenjutsu 2, L: Theology 2, Courtier 2, Sincerity 2, Commerce 2 (SOP for Shiba Bushi), Investigation 2.

At some point, being able to draw a katana as a free action will be important.

Aberrant

Yes, not L5R!?!

We spent forever planning, which I never understand.  I play RPGs for heroic adventuring.  No part of heroic adventuring involves caring about plans.  If your plans work well, that’s boring, anyway.  This is why I have no interest in heist games, even if I’ve had okay one-shot heist games.  We spent like an hour actually doing anything that mattered.

I finally got blasted with an energy attack.  I’m not sure what would happen if I didn’t have a decent force field (for my “weak force field” power) up with my additional soak against energy attacks, as the Crusaderbot was still rolling 11 dice on damage after my soak.  Other than taking three levels of bashing damage, nothing really difficult occurred.  PC botched a roll and initiated self destruct, then that eventually got turned off.

For the first time in months, though, I did spend XP after the session.  I bought one dot of Intrusion and the Electronic Infiltration specialty for 4xp.  That just leaves me 28 unspent XP.  I could go from average human strength to being as strong as Spider Man with 21xp.  But, I’m not a brick (yet).  I could spend on dumb stuff, but maybe I’ll actually want to get better at something that matters someday.  I could get better at something that matters, but I don’t feel any reason to get better as I don’t fail enough.

I didn’t pick up Intrusion because we fail at Intrusion.  It just fit thematically really well given how many times with our Intruder PC and how often I’m in “What happens if I just flood this electrical system with lightning?” situations.

It’s okay to not advance mechanically.  What would be preferred is more happen during sessions.  Then, I’d have more things to react to for advancing esoteric stuff, like maybe doubling down on Genius-ness.

Iron Empire

We actually haven’t played this campaign that much.  Wedding stuff and conventions throughout the first half of 2022 have led to a lack of momentum.

So, we did have some play not that long ago that set up the next story arc.  Gaki time.  We have no supernatural characters.  We do have guns, though.  I tried to shoot a gaki in the head and … missed because I failed a Fear 2 roll.  Two out of three PCs are Earth 2.

I did get to pray to Ebisu whose blessing I have and feel that he’s got his eye on me.  It’s this sort of thing I want to see far more of with L5R.  Fortunes are interesting – there is a reason my Shiba Bushi’s only disad is Fascination Fortunes.  Supernatural leads to unknown, leads to variance in play, leads to mysteries that aren’t murder mysteries.

While our party is pretty awkward – private conversations with NPCs or my yojimbo PC not having nearly as much to do, far more play was played.

Advancement with this game is strange.  The idea was bursts of XP between chapters.  The new plan is intermittant XP gains.  But, it’s hard to know what I want to do with XP as it would be nice to build on strengths or shore up weaknesses, but it doesn’t seem likely to be able to do both.  I keep looking for Sage on my character sheet.  I’m sure I intentionally didn’t take it, but it’s hard to play L5R without Sage.  “Don’t have Lore: Spirits.  Don’t have Lore: Theology.  Don’t have Lore: History.”  Sure, in HoR play, where you know you get 4xp a mod, you can plan buying up your R-1 skills, but my home play at the moment doesn’t have clear XP patterns.  Also doesn’t have a clear “this is who I want my character to be in the future”, which should be a good thing, but I’ve gotten so used to playing campaigns where mechanical competence matters that I’m not used to just going with the flow and not trying to hit thresholds of viability.

Well, in L5R play, anyway.  I have no sense of thresholds of viability in Aberrant play, thus why the only things I prioritized was not being one-shottable by pretty much anything and having an attack that would do more than one die of damage when I hit.  I’ve played so much L5R 4e, that I naturally gravitate to certain numbers.

I said to the other PC in the PBP game that if this was HoR I would have had Kenjutsu 7 a long time ago.  I wouldn’t have been a R-2 bushi with Earth 2 and Reflexes 2.  But, in our Iron Empire game, how important is Earth 3?  I have no sense.  I’d rather get a 4 in some trait (or Void!) than care about Earth 3 because “round” characters aren’t as interesting to me, but characters dying is a problem.

Well, that was a dense gaming weekend.  Four full slots of RPGs with some additional PBP.  I did think of other gaming things at times but can never hit “must blog about” level on those other things.

Balsamic

At times, I’ll think ‘I should use this current thought/conversation for a blog post.’  I just haven’t felt it strongly enough to execute.  Every day has distractions.

I didn’t play any VTES on Easter.  I haven’t played any VTES since Origins last year.

What I did do Easter is try to recover.  Get some sleep.  I didn’t have a lot of responsibility Friday and Saturday, yet maybe due to adrenaline or whatever, I felt a need to try to recuperate after Saturday’s wedding.

There were a bunch of games brought for the groom, best man, and groomsmen to play, but we didn’t play anything.  It would have been funny to do a VTES cube draft on the day before Easter – Brandon brought a cube.

Because of Easter, didn’t have Sunday Aberrant game.  Because of wedding, Iron Empire campaign has been on hold.

Did talk a bit about AdeptiCon, that the groom and best man had gone to and that I had not.

Didn’t play any pool while at the wedding site, even though the pool table was prominent inside the golf course’s clubhouse.  Whether pool would fall under gaming is also moot.

Have had my PBP game going on.  There’s some question as to how to spend XP as I find it hard to plan when don’t know when will get it or how much.  I’m fine with a game that isn’t about advancement.  Keeping two dice is amusing, in part because failure is far more likely than usual, which perhaps not so oddly makes success feel more important.

HoR4 is in catch up mode.  My catching up is queued behind earlier mods being run, so I haven’t been doing much.  The nature of creating characters with 300xp rather than evolving characters to 300xp is more noticeable when, um, it may happen.

Speaking of which, one thing I thought of blogging about was more campaign ideas for L5R play.  One idea I had was start everyone with 300 points.  Another idea was to have people build the character they have in mind without consideration for how much it would cost – this is something I read about with superhero play due to how systems don’t necessarily handle well enabling the vast differences between characters.  The ideas that people come up with for HoR4 concern me, though.  Of course, there’s an element of making fun of the setting that arises with HoR play anyway, so maybe people would make some effort in a home game to have characters that fit.

I just don’t see the point of zero to hero play with experienced players.  I do see that characters don’t become more than character sheets until played for a while, but I can see that no matter how powerful you start out.  My Kaeru has played around 10 times, and I have little sense of the character with virtually no hooks to lean into.  That is different from other characters who were less mechanically based.  But, with more play, maybe something will click.  I want games to be about what the characters do, where it doesn’t really matter how they advance even if I do enjoy advancement myself and am not enthralled with the idea of RPG campaign play where characters may change but never actually get better at things.

Would I enjoy buying up Games: Chaturanga as much if that’s the only sort of advancement anyone did rather than go from Kenjutsu 7 to 10?  I don’t know if part of the appeal of interesting buys is that other people don’t make them as often.

More recent sessions of Denver CRUSH have worked better.  In particular, the session before last was much more my thing – “I guess I have to shoot the succubus with lightning, now.”  There’s just such a large difference between having my characters do things and not.  Weird, huh?

So, I have nigh infinite amounts of balsamic vinegar.  I mean, you approach infinity after one bottle, and I have far more than two bottles.  I was thinking of trying to produce an analogy of having the wrong amounts of things and how that impacted gaming enjoyment.

But, that seems like too much effort.

True Dungeon token development has been going on since April 1st.  I could have used design/development thoughts brought up during this period as blog fodder, but it all just feels like much the same thing as what I typically spew, even if it isn’t.

Of the 20 ultrarares, I’d like to see 10 of them not make it.  Far too late for that, but it’s interesting how 2022 only saw four and 2021 around three.  While there are multiple reasons I don’t like so many of the URs, in general what bothers me the most about the 2023 set is that it’s not trying to be thematically consistent.  It’s just putting out mechanical constructs to appeal to people purely on mechanical terms.  The dagger that can be used by clerics, the scimitar that can be used by almost every class when every scimitar in history has been far more restricted by class, the latest reveal that acorns are shuriken.  It’s just forced.  I would be fine with the to hit/heal gloves if they were cleric only as can cobble together some thematic reason someone would have crafted such for clerics.  But, usable by all?  That’s just pandering with no internal consistency at all.

I don’t think people take me seriously …

I don’t think people take me seriously when I say I count Coup on how many token titles I create rather than how many changes I cause to be made.  Mechanical changes are just quixotic.  I had some good names for the Arcanum Shirt that is capitalized in this sentence because that’s going to be its terrible name.

This weekend is a TD weekend.  Maybe will be more enthused about the game after the usual bitterness that arises during development where often wonder why care about having all of these tokens.

Well, think I need to stretch a little bit more to hit the 1000 word count.  Victory!

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.

NovemberCon?

And, lo, many a gaming thingie converged to produce … less than the sum of the parts?

True Dungeon 6C was on the schedule for ages.  Then, HoR4 decided to have Memories in Rokugan on the same weekend.  That did mean that my scheduled Saturday RPG was unlikely to happen, removing one conflict, as two-thirds of the people in that game play HoR4.  Then, weekly Sunday RPG.

But, then, various things happened to remove a number of conflicts.  Our group only had one 6C run, so it only conflicted with MiR.  My early Sunday run had no conflict with my Sunday RPG.  Due to not getting time off from work and availability of mods and my increasing ambivalence towards mods, I got my MiR stuff done early and wasn’t sufficiently motivated to try to get more mods in Saturday so had rest of Saturday free to do another TD run.

Thursday 5PM

So, 7PM CST slot.  Do Boiling Point and just not that excited.  The mod has no sense of place.  As much as there may have been an idea of the MiR mods being played in a particular order to establish why you are where you are, every mod should explain what the setup is more clearly.  I was still afflicted with Permanent Wound, so a high rank combat mod was going to be theoretically interesting, except I never took damage.  I got to enough favors to get rid of Permanent Wound … yeah?

So, I think the kharma system for HoR4 is vastly better than any other HoR.  I do think, though, that one of the things it causes – constantly putting out higher rank mods except for intro mods whenever new mods come out – is offputting.  It would be different, I guess, if mods consistently had options for playing low or high, but I’ve been told that’s not going to happen.

If you want to play the new mods rather than find tables to backfill older mods, you are stuck playing max level mods intended for the folks who have played everything.  Is this foreshadowing?

Friday 12PM

So, 2PM CST slot.  Keeping the Peace.  Though this mod was much better, with vastly more going on, there were two things that made it less appealing to me.  One, I’ll fail to mention.  The other was failure.  I don’t know if I’ve actually failed a mod prior to this in HoR4.  Feels like it, but it’s the only mod I see where I got only 3xp.

The party was way underpowered for a high rank combat mod.  The average rank was slight under 4.  One PC had Earth 2!?!  He died.  On top of that our combat tactics left a lot to be desired.  I’m still unclear on how people who play L5R a lot don’t understand probabilities, but they seem to enjoy blissful ignorance.  Our best fighter had nothing good to do in combat, which made even less sense for someone with a relevant advanced school.  Just too many assumptions for us to not be at a massive disadvantage vis-à-vis other tables.

As evidence, our friends played at another table and just ripped through a combat we had no chance of winning.

But, again, we had no chance of winning in part because combat tactics were atrocious.  Also, I got to thinking about some things.  For one thing, I’m not as worked up by failure as I once was as I have tons of XP unlike, say, HoR2 and HoR3 where I didn’t play every mod and had multiple characters bleeding off XP.

But, nobody cares about me.  I got to thinking about failure.  Failure has to be an option, otherwise success is meaningless.  Sure, in HoR play, you expect to have 4xp per mod and do advancement plans around that.  But, we should have failed.  Our table was insanely underpowered compared to the norm even to where if there was an option to play the mod low we should have failed.  Great tactics could have saved us.  Great die rolls could have saved us.  Great tactics is something I never see in L5R combat, so that’s irrelevant.  Then, the cost of failure was one fragile PC bit it and the rest of us lost like 1xp.  Oh no, time to ragequit.

This mod ran long.  I had no mod to play at 7PM CST due to lack of availability, so I was free to post comments on Discord about our experience.  I was exhausted after this mod.

Saturday

I go to Trader Joe’s.  Only two things drive me to TJ’s – cat treats and frozen naan.  Sure, I buy other stuff, like weird dips/sauces/condiments, but frozen naan superflexible, being possible for pizza, bread taco, sandwich, eaten straight, dipping bread, whatever.  Cat likes treats more than anything else and they run out.

No naan.

Also, my jicama was already going sour, which is so annoying as I hate cutting my own jicama both because of the skin/ends up being way too much/eventually goes sour and because I don’t eat nearly enough vegetables as I don’t like most of them.

Then to the pet store, which didn’t have the cat food I wanted.

This is boding well.

1236 CST

Our group’s only run as people got sick of three weekends of the same dungeon.  We go Epic with six.  I play ranged Templar with Druegar’s in neck.  Get to completely not forget to use Restore Power and Restore Spell since Templar doesn’t have those.  Unfortunately, I remembered to use Divine Intervention for a change.

That killed us.  While it didn’t take us six minutes to figure out what DI meant when the DM rolled me a “Do 100 damage” roll, when the horn went off, I was like “Wait, that’s not the 6 minute marker?  We are out of time?”  We probably wasted at least three minutes on talking about dealing max damage.  Time just flew as we only completed three rounds of combat.

Yet again, our group fails Epic because of poor play.  My takeaway is to never use DI again as even the die roll eats up time.  Maybe use it outside of combat for group heal.  We are just too slow and unfocused when we get to room 7’s.  We actually were doing really well up until that point.

As for 6C, boring.  I liked the guard tower option in rm1.  I did not like the rm6 puzzle.  It was just an exercise in process of elimination without requiring any actual thought.  Rest of the stuff was same old, same old.  Ranged Templar was okay, not a waste like Cavalier was.  Critted a bunch of times, though had to spend time healing in rm7 because Epic is actually hard for less than full groups.

624 CST

In a usually private double down.  Talk of Epic, but we sensibly go NM.  I was going to run Elf due to party composition, but one of the players didn’t show so I changed to Monk “for best damage build”.  I start the run averaging just under 100 damage a round doing nothing special with my melee weapons at range build.  We do puzzle in rm1 as people forgot it, where it was my like 10th time doing a boring and mediocre puzzle.  We succeed.  One thing that made this run better was Ranger did more damage than I did in rm7, so it wasn’t like totally unbalanced.

So, four player NM went well.  Is this foreshadowing?

Sunday

I go to normal grocery store, since TJ’s requires vastly more driving than this one.  I get my onion and broth for my planned parsnip soup.

1012 CST

Play Against Type NM DD run.  I make the comment at one point that I think the best balanced runs I do are themed DD NM runs.  Now, Play Against Type tends to be rough as people come up with some pretty sketchy builds, like my build.  I did Rogue for the first time ever.  Rogue that was afraid of puzzle boxes, that had no way to sneak attack as I didn’t even bother equipping a melee weapon and ran +1 Shuriken for my offense, and that never Flanked.

We succeeded, but there was a lot of Grunnel stuff going on.  Paladin got revived twice due to the well fed Grunnel.  Enjoyable but not as much my thing as winning through ridiculous levels of dungeon metagaming.

CRUSH

We only had three players, which was interesting as we have been talking about the idea of side quests.  Was this perfect?  No.  But, I thought it worked well.  I think it highlighted something important, but let’s stop to get into narrative.

We are hanging in Mexico City to deal with cartels, vampires, time travel, wrestling teleporting smoke animal making professor, and pieces of a statue.  Seismic disturbances turn into 60′ tall giant from Aztec mythology shouting about taking vengeance against Tezcatlipoca.  As I speak Nahuatl (as all my PCs are wont to do), I try to talk him down, but he attacks, and I blind him for two rounds.  Hauptmann Deutschland and Ghost Wolf try to knock him over but don’t.  I don’t just spam Strobe to keep him blinded but fly up to power up for the awful Max Power mechanic in true anime style … until he jumps up and crushes me in his hands (fortunately not Crush as that would be even worse).  We do some math, and it’s the case that his base damage is enough to put me one level away from dead, where he rolls additional damage but we handwave Max Power being used for soak, even though we didn’t even do that right as Max Power is trash, so that I’m exactly one health level from dead.  Showing that Arc Flash only fights to make team members look better, the other two take him down, largely through GW’s offense, though HD takes a kick right to the shield and takes zero damage.

Yup, Aberrant is a bad system.  Now, it’s a bad system in general.  But, as everyone says, it’s not intended for comic book play.  One person said something like “Aberrant isn’t really playing superheroes, it’s playing normal people with godlike powers.”  I agree with that.  A highly lethal system is the antithesis of a superhero system.  But, then, the biggest problem with the system seems to be that it’s easy to make a build that can’t be damaged by common attacks.  Sure, you can get around with cheese, but there’s some ability to counter things like mental attacks to get back to the invulnerable problem.

And, yet, my getting destroyed was fine, even positive in certain ways.  I mean it when I say that I make teammates look better.  Somebody has to get beat up, and it makes more sense for it to be the energy projector than for some tough dude to get one-shotted.

In the hospital, I explain Aztec stuff because I happen to be good at that sort of thing.  Actually, Quinametzin are pretty interesting.  Where some mythological stuff is hard to get info on, there’s some info on them, even if it’s terribly conflicted.  We just need Tzitzimitl to descend from space for other giant Aztec stuff to deal with.

Anyway, the side quest did what it was supposed to – action.  This is important.  I’ve played a lot of sessions with this GM and I tend to prefer his side adventures because they are about action.  I’m really tired of investigation stuff, but this is also supers, supers where my character is bad at investigation stuff (well, besides his ample brain and his Witsiness that never comes up).  We should be actioning constantly, except in those calm between typhoon sessions when you find out your significant other is an alien robot demon.  Not only was it actiony, but it did two other things.  One, it had the PCs actually interact with each other.  We don’t really interact much.  Both in combat, where Strobe to set up others to coordinate attacks makes tons of tactical sense, and outside of combat, we engaged with each other way more than usual.  Two, it still tied into the plot.  We are debating how to deal with a statue of an Aztec goddess, and some First Sun or maybe Second Sun or is it Third Sun or possibly Fourth Sun Aztec giant appears to add to the Azteciness of it all.

So, I’m adding soak to my character.  Oh, not to not get one shot into unconsciousness but to fight the system and not get one shot into dead.  I have the perfect thematic justification for learning Force Field to add to the defense, not that I particularly needed thematic justification.  I’d just rather not need to add another stereotypical energy projector power and continue the damage/soak arms race.  Not that I’m in a damage race.  I either murder normals or do 40% chance of one level of damage to anything of significance using the exact same Lightning Bolt because this is normal people with godlike power rather than superheroes.

I did start thinking about what my character would look like in Champions, not that we would switch to that.  More likely to go to Mutants and Masterminds if we got sick of the system.  My dislike of the system is growing, but some of that isn’t the system but due to not understanding just how badly it does mainstream supers and not keeping everyone within a tight band of damage/soak at the low end.

Eventually, I made parsnip soup.  Now, the recipe I saw was parsnip + carrot and was pretty simple.  I often throw out stems of broccoli and cauliflower, so I threw in broccoli and didn’t bother with the cauliflower.  Then, I overcomplicated by putting some cinnamon in.  Too much.  Learning experience.  The baby corn worked really well, having a crunch that my few parsnip deepfried chips didn’t add both because few and because I let them sit too long in my bowl until they got soft.  I’m agnostic on parsnips, having maybe less sense of them than radishes for my dishes.  The broccoli was good in the soup.

I’m thinking of eating with pasta shells.  Did add some parsley to try to combat the cinnamon.  Of course, I haven’t tried as a leftover, so the taste may have changed.

What does the soup have to do with anything?

Try stuff that’s different.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Action leads to results, where planning just leads to wondering where the time went.  Learn from the mistakes.  Seek other things that sound good.  Just keep adapting.  Gaming and cooking are at least not doing things that are horrible.

Gen Con 2021

Yup, I went.

Because lots of people didn’t, this is going to be more spoilery than it probably normally is on HoR stuff.  Problem with being vague on HoR stuff is that’s all the gaming I did besides an escape room.

I’m usually stressed (and tired) when the packing begins.  This was much more stressful in some ways.  My travel knowledge level had waned to where I forgot things like ear plugs, but the trip out was surprisingly smooth.  Flights were mundane.  First sign of attendance difference was lack of bunch of vehicles taking people out of airport.  Only a few cars with scattered gamers.

Get into room.  Five of us in corner suite.  I get a bed because others have their own plans.  Sofa was terrible for lying on and not great for sitting on, but Dave put up with it.  Room was very internally quiet – doors quiet, though there was some clanking when the air conditioning went off.  External noise was significant.  I executed on getting us more towels and an additional blanket.  They don’t do roll aways.

First year going to Indy for GC that I didn’t organize the room.  Others in favor of Embassy Suites for breakfast buffet, happy hour, or whatever.  Elevators pretty functional.  Nothing terribly wrong with the place.  Decent drinks in buffet room – sweet enough orange/peach juice, sweet enough Coke.  I didn’t care much about breakfast buffet, but it was fine to start my day out with bacon and sausage rather than Subway (apparently, Steak & Shake hasn’t gone back to 24 hours, so it remains useless to me).

I tried to go to bed at 8:30PM, but it didn’t work.  I didn’t really get any sleep until after everyone had arrived, which was after 1AM.  Didn’t get much sleep after that.

Thursday

9AM – Pearls of Wisdom

Intro mod needed to be done first as my new character couldn’t spend XP to play mid/highs and still be able to play intros.  I enjoyed this.  I’m into Moshi Saori, tried to get deeply into her, though I only tied her on my Temptation try at the end of the mod after Lucking the roll.  I do not plan on taking Lore: Satellites or Craft: Satellites, but I did take Language: Naga along with two other languages due to still being in grace period.  Had to be careful to keep both versions in sync, as I already had IR-4 version statted up on printed out sheets.

It is weird playing a low Honor character.  It was extremely weird to be rolling 2k2 damage with my primary attack.  The single biggest takeaway of seriously playing my Kaeru is that bad weapons are way worse than I thought – I keep learning new things with 4e.  Sure, I can call raises for damage, but, then, I can’t hit things that are a serious threat to the party.  Even a 1k2 weapon is significantly different from a 0k2 weapon.  While Kaeru Odayaka was only Strength 2 at IR-1, STR-4 at IR-4 was arguable more embarrassingly inoffensive.

I liked 00.  I liked 13 better than most of the Ivory Kingdoms mods as it at least tried to introduce Balishnimpur.  My 26 experience was okay, though most of the party was lost on what was going on.  My 36 experience was blah, mod being about different stuff from what I thought and with a lack of personal agenda time.  41 was fun, it’s such a ridiculous mod even if it’s way too short.  53 was solid, probably my best experience all con.  I’ll get to 56 later.

2PM – Pale Reflection

I played a bunch with a group that I know about indirectly.  Utaku Zhe-Dong and I talk much more than most, but we had never played together to our knowledge.  This mod broke my string of rolling Temptation in every mod, which actually was the main downer to me.  See my posts on why romance/”romance” is a good thing.  Yes, one of my seven languages was highly relevant in theory and meaningless in practice – things were so different back in the day when you actually got to do personal things to help your personal narrative.

After this mod, UZD and I talked, and we had the same feeling – too inconsequential.  He frames it in terms of there being no personal stakes with so many mods.  Same complaints Andy and Eric have when we talk about a lot of the mods.  After playing six mods at GC 21, my takeaway was that it felt like none of my decisions in any mod mattered.  My personal narratives were mostly around a NPC that appears in the intro mods.  I can’t tell you what Odayaka did in this mod besides try to justify having me roll Temptation 1+ times.  In combat, I like Guarded a NPC and rolled badly on some rolls that I didn’t need to make.

7PM – Souls of the Fallen

My worst experience of the con.  One of the reasons I tried so hard to get in the intro mods with my new character is that I need to establish some sort of identity.  This mod involves politics that Tatakisu largely wouldn’t have cared about, where Odayaka couldn’t care less what the Unicorn do as long as it isn’t create more Shadowlands bases.  Then, in part two, the indecisiveness and inconsistency of decisions drove me nuts.

NPCs dies that meant absolutely nothing to me, including a NPC only I talked to in part one.

Not much sleep as stayed up talking.

Friday

Sausage patties became sausage links, never had sausage patties again.

Thursday, got two foot longs from Subway – way more food than I needed.  Only got one today, and it was sufficient.

9AM – To Serve Justice

Backfill a mod relatively few people have played.  This was a much more pleasant experience.  Investigation went fine and nothing annoying happened.  We didn’t take forever to decide what to do.  Just rather bland where I didn’t really care about the plot.  I could see how same elements used differently could have made for more interesting experience.

2PM – Shadowed Path to Victory

So, Kaeru Odayaka died by exactly enough damage to kill him after armor reduction.  That affected my experience.  Sure, he lives on due to the generosity of another player in handing me a cert to mitigate death.  Because I didn’t earn the cert myself, it feels cheap.  On the other hand, there’s no point in holding on to certs and never using them, so I got to use a cert that otherwise was doing nothing.

Oh, I need to backtrack.  I had one of two charity certs from last year’s MWGF.  I wanted the other one to pass to Eric, but someone I knew took it before I could, then promptly died making it useless.  One I got started out useless as I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to do.  Being able to harass people in person meant I could at least try to understand it, but I still didn’t.  UZD’s player mentioned knowing what he would do with it, so slam bam, thank you ham eater.  Someone got use out of it!  Huzzah!  Certs doing something!  One of the pros of Tatakisu dying at WiR was using all of those death prevention certs, though it would be nice to still have at least one of them.

I can’t tell you what I did in this mod besides use one of my seven point-costing languages.  Yet another mod that comes across as “you are a witness to important events, but you don’t get to do anything about them, so your personal narrative is completely unaffected by this adventure”.

7PM – Ruins of Shiro no Fukuro

Yet another intro mod that shouldn’t be.  One of the players quit halfway in because he was lost and not enjoying the experience when he came to play something basic.

Both actually relevant to metaplot and full of references to older HoR stuff.  Seemed cool, but it was hard for me to follow what was going on or what we were doing.  I kind of like the interesting rewards for the intro mods, but I also don’t because there’s no incentive to play alt characters.

Oh, I played my alt character Kitsu Munashi because I didn’t see how I could justify playing the rank 1 version of Odayaka after playing him as rank 4 in the other mods.  The two versions had gotten too far out of sync, for one thing.

I enjoyed this, though not greatly.  Has one of my fave NPCs, but Munashi doesn’t want to do the same things to, um, with her as Odayaka does, and it was just really hard to process what was going on.  Table’s least experienced player did get to win a duel to the death playing a duelist.

Stayed up late knowing that Saturday had no game until 1PM.  Still probably dumb, but this gets into an important difference with GC21.

Actually, I’m writing this pretty incoherently.  I meant to start off by comparing and contrasting with other GCs, and making the profound statement that GC21 was far more akin to other GCs than I expected with one major difference.

That major difference was free time.

Saturday

Have breakfast with roommates rather than sit with them as they eat, try to go back to bed, don’t get much sleep after breakfast.

We head out to a room three doors down from HoR rooms for escape room.  I get a thirst for some Sprite, a thirst that was never going to get quenched, though my “situational awareness” did come up later at dinner.

1PM – Escape Room

We do the escape room.  By “we”, I mean “they”.  I did virtually nothing, where even my itching curse didn’t matter at all.  Though True Dungeon is nothing like this escape room in terms of level of effort or complexity – even a complete run of TD has less puzzle stuff by far, I do find them similar in this way:  I like to help, but I don’t really feel like working on puzzles with others.  This sort of thing is the sort of thing I can appreciate doing by myself.  With other people, it’s just too hectic and time focused.  I’m easily distracted by things like motion and people talking about what to do, so I can’t concentrate on solving puzzles when other people are around.  One of the benefits of VTD is that I can just take my headset off if I want to think about a puzzle.

There was one dungeon not that long ago where I soloed a puzzle room while other people were approaching it ineffectually, though it was hardly a puzzle, it was just a matter of tracking a line through a bunch of reflections.  So, it is possible to tune other people out some of the time in physical TD.

3PM – Battle Interactive

I engineer the situation that I thought would make the most sense going in.  I table command lower rank samurai.  There are four high rank tables, five (essentially) rank one tables, then the folks in the middle.  With a monster mass battle roll, I have the combination of status, Battle, and lack of interest in being major combatant to lead team “In Between”.

Table commander interaction was largely meaningless to me – we started in field (options were city or field) because we had an Utaku Battle Maiden.  We never left the field.

I rolled like a 44, got +3 due to my Status, ended up with three skilled commander points due to having Tactician (primary point of this build was to be a BI table commander).  Skilled commander points are a mechanic first used at WiR.  I spent our three on +5 Initiative and +10 ATN on first round.

Rd1 – Maze of Earth, Tier 4

We are trapped in a labyrinth of Earth.  We wander around looking for exit, find a shugenja with one spell slot left and encounter enemy at the exit/entrance.  Two Earth shugenja and three Shiba Bushi.

I fail to finish off one of the badly wounded bushi, so he gets Force of Willed.  Another bushi, an archer, attacks us from behind.  One of the shugenja gets off Kami’s Strength on one of the bushi.  We start dying.

Utaku Battle Maiden’s horse gets one-shotted.  Utaku Battle Maiden takes 63 after taking damage earlier.  I get dropped.  We basically have one way out of this maze of death … trap ourselves in it.  Fire tensai casts Wall of Fire so that we are cut off from the enemy.  This creates confusing situation where it’s unclear how to resolve rest of combat.

Eventually, GM lets us drop Wall of Fire after their buffs wear out, and we do another round of combat.  Their bushi are taken out, and the two shugenja use Embrace of Kenro-ji-jin to flee.  I get woken up with Medicine.  Our lack of healing in a party with two shugenja means I’m going to stay in Injured until I get killed.

This was interesting.  We didn’t start off fighting right away.  Skill rolls outside of combat happened.  The scenario provided us with a tactic that was interesting.

We should not have done a Tier 4 encounter.  While we had an extra PC, we also had a PC with no combat plan in the build.  I was much more fragile than one might expect and the only other PC with simple attacks, while not being a murderer.

We plan to do a Tier 2, unless its description sucks.

Rd2 – Boring Stuff, Tier 2

Two Earth shugenja and four Shiba Bushi …  This was really boring given the previous round.  There was a lot of shugenja plus bushi encounters.  This one had no real hook.  It was amusing for my spending the whole combat in Full Defense, just slowly advancing each round.  Two other PCs used my patented Leapfrog Gambit to slowly advance while guarding each other.  Meanwhile, fire tensai and his yojimbo and Doji courtier did killing, until eventually shugenja surrendered with three of us having not attacked.

Too easy, so we talked about tier 3 for final round.  I had the highest Battle roll this round, 67 or 68, and I, of course, passed on the unique encounter.  Our inability to recover wounds was … crippling.  I used my skilled commander points on Forewarned is Forearmed to find out capabilities and +5 Initiative due to starting out at distance.

Moshi Shugenja had like one spell slot left that mattered.  Fire tensai had five.

Rd3 – Crazed Warrior, Tier 3

Not sure actual title.  I had highest Battle roll, again, with 48.  We could have faced Phoenix Clan Champion, but I shot that idea down as that would have been a quick suicide, unless we tried talking our way out of the fight.  I used skilled commander points on +10 ATN for first round.

This was all about some crazed Shiba Bushi one handing a no-dachi.  He was supported by some Shiba Bushi and only one shugenja.

Our tensai gets to go first due to Initiative switching and drops Fist of Osano-wo on the non-berserkers.  He rolls 65 wounds against the shugenja!  I don’t care that much about the rest, but they seemed to have wound penalties as well.  Berserker drops fire tensai in one shot.  Doji takes down shugenja.  Fire tensai uses cert to cast Be the Mountain on his yojimbo so that she doesn’t just get one-shotted by berserker.  I burn one of my two certs to ignore wound penalties on my second attack against berserker and knock him down.  Other courtier jumps on him to initiate everyone’s favorite mechanic.  Yoritomo (Moshi Shugenja) casts Tail of the Fire Dragon.  I disarm berserker and knock over bushi, who slowly get removed from combat by my fierce 4k2 damage rolls of like 10 wounds.  Berserker headbutts one courtier out of combat.  Other courtier jumps him.  Our Shiba Bushi, Yoritomo, and I continue whittling berserker down until he’s out of combat.

This was easy, but it would have been entirely different if not for quick, brutal Fist of Osano-wo.  It was definitely funny, so it gets points for that.  My knocking people over schtick actually worked well not just for combat control but also for not killing honorable samurai, not that anyone was likely caring how many nameless NPCs died.

In the end, I felt bad that one of my unit got killed and I didn’t, as I sort of deserved to.  Surviving that first round, especially without taking massively more damage, got our table through the BI.

Then, it was just lots of waiting for the top tables to resolve the battle with the big bad.

So, Kaeru Bushi – mechanics specific to HoR4 – is a really annoying combat control school but one with an amazing lack of kill.  My base punch damage is higher than my pipe damage, though the Free Raise with it essentially makes the two equal in damage.

I did enjoy that everyone at my table got to do stuff.  I did enjoy the rest of the party surviving and winning.  I don’t want to create a new character, so I guess surviving is a good thing and, maybe, I will get around to writing a fiction of events to make the activity more meaningful.  It is rough to play without any survival certs at this level of play with this character.

Overall, HoR this year was a mixed bag.  I got to hang with the “Unicorn table”.  I spent a good amount of time talking with Mike T.  I just wasn’t that into what was going on in mods, outside of the intros.  The politics of this campaign don’t matter to me.  It’s tiring to just be caught up in events without any actual say in how anything goes, while at the same time not having much opportunity to advance a personal narrative.  It’s fine to be unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but every player should have an opportunity to tell a personal story in the shared community.  “Really should be dead by now” just isn’t that interesting of a personal narrative for Odayaka.  Since romance with NPCs is off the table for seemingly anyone besides the inner circle of the campaign, there’s not much reason to care about any NPCs.  Not like going into business together or they do cool stuff to keep PCs alive or they roll out go matches (yeah, I get to play go with some NPC and … I have zero idea whether I even won or lost).

Btw, this may indicate why I call out playing go:

Around 10PM, finally done with BI.  Head to area to meet up with roommates/TD folks.  They keep referring to area as food court.  Now, it’s fair to say Georgia Street food court.  But, just food court makes me think of the mall, as it’s an area of the convention center I spend very little time in.

After Cardhalla gets destroyed, we go to dinner at Goodwood.  I get the BBQ burger thing called Barbarian Burger or something for GC.  The tater tots are good, though over time became kind of bland.  The burger was not.  I pulled the smoked brisket off as that’s not something that should ever be on a burger.  It was far too much like pulled pork.  I used other people’s tartary sauces to add flavor to everything as everything was so bland.  The burger and brisket really should have been drowning in BBQ sauce.

I stay up way too late.  I play Dave at Magic with his blue/red deck in a format where every creature can gain flying and colorless firebreathing.  I don’t understand this deck at all, as the average cost of cards in the deck is one too high.  Yes, I mean the average cost and a full one mana.  There were so many four-drops, it was ridiculous.  I had no idea how it wouldn’t just get rolled by his green/white deck with a bunch of bears.  While I lost, it was because I wasn’t thinking.  I could have traded both my creatures for his and tried to find a way to get one more creature than him to be able to go on offense, as I never did anything of consequence to him as I rarely had creatures in play and needed to use burn to clear his board of threats.  It’s actually possible this happened Friday night – I’ve been that tired.

Sunday

Jim has a plane to catch.  The four of us who don’t get up late have breakfast.

I go back to bed.  Somehow, I actually get an hour of sleep after everyone else is out of the room.  I sweep the room and head to HoR area to hang for a bit, then folks I engage with leave and I have nothing to do until I realize two people I know are playing Stargate.  I wait for them, am forced to enter exhibit hall, we go to Goodwood again.

Seemed okay the night before, but I order Belgian waffle and it’s just not good.  Way too soggy.

Try to get to airport while lots of football fans around.  Finally get home, but it’s rather miserable at every phase.

If I don’t have Covid again (got test today), a success.  But, end was not fun, so recency bias.

No Hero Here

As I mentioned, lots going on last week.

I’ll get to True Dungeon thoughts later.

I’m no longer playing Miya Tatakisu.

He left Ningen-do, Saturday.

Too busy to stay
One arm tires more than other
Just service still waits
Play with Fire that will not die
The stables still need cleaning

Heroes of Rokugan

Monday, played CIT51.  Did very little.  In three rounds of combat (total), took one turn of actions.  NPC interactions were mostly made up as mod just lacked NPCs one could interact with.

Tuesday, played CIT50.  Lot meatier.  One conceit of the mod I liked quite a bit, though I wasn’t tracking the resolution very clearly.  If this campaign didn’t hate romance, mod might have been more meaningful.  Went reasonably well.

Thursday, deadheaded CIT49.  Technically did stuff but had no reason to.  Party was plenty sufficient.  In fact, party did exactly what it should have, then got bogged down in trying to figure out how to proceed, then achieved ultimate victory.

Saturday, only had time for Battle Interactive.  Now, I also only have two mods I can even play and one of them isn’t available and the other I couldn’t play with Tatakisu, so it wasn’t like trying to do things around True Dungeon made any sense.

The Battle of Breaking Dawn

Going in, we think vanguard, but our Defender of the Wall is going to be late and may not even end up playing, so we think siege weapons, but so many tables want to do siege weapons that we are back on vanguard. Get unique, snail oni with bunch of attached husks that it uses to regenerate and a couple controlled Crab. We eliminate Crab quickly and take so much time that GM figures we would finish off oni, so we succeed. I take total of 8 wounds, 1 from attacks due to Be the Mountain, 7 from acid. Oni never gets to do its thing due to others having high ATNs and not good attack rolls.

Round 2, stay at vanguard, get what seems much tougher fight. Four trolls, Lost Taskmaster, Genso no Oni. Again, oni abilities don’t end up kicking in as Genso never hits anybody. Defender of the Wall messes with Taskmaster and Taskmaster tries to create separation. I focus on trolls where their low ATN (20) means I can call 7 raises for damage. I pick off Genso when he’s almost done. 1.5 trolls wander away after Taskmaster finished off. Combat was 2 rounds.

Round 3, still vanguard, get unique. Maho-tsukai, yojimbo, oni yojimbo, hulking oni. Maho-tsukai goes first and casts Kami’s Strength. Both yojimbo taken out quick. Hulking oni moves away to destroy. Party starts chasing. No attacks on tsukai are doing anything as ATN was 67 and DR was 25 or 30. I get hit by bird attack from tsukai for 50. Shugenja heals me with nemuranai, which is deactivated by tsukai after one use, all other spells he tries are countered by tsukai. All the rest of party chases after hulk, where I’m so slow that I didn’t bother trying. I full attack grapple tsukai and roll 82. Because I don’t have more Jiujutsu ranks than IR, maho effect grapples me instead. As others chase and attack oni, which actually wasn’t hard to take out, I get crushed by tendril while tsukai walks back towards Shadowlands. Eventually, Marked by the Lords of Death triggers. Then, I burn Intervention of Fate. Others can’t get back to me in time to do anything that matters. Because of Offering of Bone, GM has me roll to resist Taint at end of fight. Have Strength of Crow on me, roll 8k8+10 for a 75. Tsukai tries to take soul but end up in Meido with Lords of Death and begin my servitude to them … as planned.

I usually make anti-Shadowlands characters. Tatakisu is not one. I was playing way above where he should have been, whereas normally only playing somewhat above where should have been. Because I burned Book of Fire at beginning of BI (would have BoE but used that previously), I was running around with Agility 7 and 10k10+4 attack rolls. Going out in a blaze of … well, not glory since died … blaze of boneguardiness.

The end was fitting.  Both in good ways and in bad, very fitting.  His weaknesses killed him, and his strength of *character* saved him.  The only party member to wound the maho-tsukai, though that didn’t matter mechanically.  I had a vision for how Tatakisu would achieve his pinnacle of achievement.  This result was like the exact opposite.  Instead of going one on one with a monster while the rest of the party went off to win the day, the rest of the party went off to win the day by dealing with the monster, while he helplessly got crushed to death like some chump.

There are no Miya heroes

Miscellaneous thoughts:  The mechanics of the BI were good.  Had special effects could buy for exceeding Battle rolls.  Our table had most victory points; it was weird that our table was at top of power curve, but I guess once everyone besides shugenja have simple attacks and you have a R-5 bushi and a Defender of the Wall in a Shadowlands event, you’ve made it, kid.

Miya Herald

So, I never got to SR-5.  I betrayed myself by taking R-4 technique that actually does something.  I intentionally made it harder to use my techniques.  My experiment of taking one of the most irrelevant schools and playing it through 230 additional XP didn’t tell me a ton about the true power of shishadom.

On the other hand, I never used R-2 nor R-3 techniques.  They really are moronic.  Well, in anything resembling a typical campaign.

I was supposed to be Earth 5, Void 2 (possibly 3) at this point.  Earth 3, Void 5 because planning ahead is less fun than making choices in the moment.

Agillity 6 wasn’t necessary, but I enjoyed it.  I got enough use out of it to make it fun in actual play not just in a “look at my build!” way.

As I wrote about so long go in my Elemental Party post, the “showoff build” was exactly that.  Horribly fragile and easily countered by doing (ironically) intelligent things, but he got to show off.  He dealt 112 wounds in one round in one of his last mods.  In the Battle Interactive, in one of the rounds, he dealt 155 wounds to two trolls (subtract like 15 for Reduction for around 140 net).  With a wakizashi.  A normal wakizashi.

I’m going to miss Agility 5, I think.  While it’s far, far better to do a Reflexes 6 build with Great Potential Kyujutsu to get multiple yumi attacks, what now mechwarrior?

Thematically, it might have been awkward for a while, but it came together.

I did miss out on calling 5 Raises on a non-Kenjutsu roll.  I did fail to beat a Unicorn in a horse race, though part of this is my fault as I forgot to reach out to other players and get into a horse race with a PC.  Failed to sneak kill the Emperor, but, hey, there are no Miya heroes.

Witch Doctors

What?  Yup, in the middle of Weekend in Rokugan and VTD 4B weekend, played second session of New Amsterdam.  It went well, but we didn’t finish.  I think if we had played right after first session, we would have wrapped in two, but the delay caused a fuzziness that we exacerbated in how low key we approached further investigation.  Two sessions, still haven’t used any magick.

True Dungeon 4B

Only four runs.  First run was Friday night.  Notrangerhate was kill things only with physical ranged attacks while rangers sits this one out.  We had seven players.  I played that noted missile master cleric and rarely missed.  We were doing fine, but we decided to do room 7 puzzle instead of combat, which was disappointing.  The disappointment was exacerbated by other players wanting to try out a pet theory and solving the puzzle in a couple minutes while the two of us who had never seen it never got a chance to provide input.

There’s something about human nature and the desire for glory.  Meanwhile, I’m embracing failure more and more with TD.  Success has far too often had nothing to do with me, it’s only failure where I get to actually matter.  There are no me-a heroes, I suppose.

Saturday morning, we have four players, so we decide to do a restricted Epic run.  Restriction?  Minimum AC40.  Yup, AC, the best thing ever in TD.  I call it the Tank Platoon Run, but others have used “Armored” and whatever to term it something else.  Of course, TPR has to be exactly four, where Armored Whatever could be any number of AC40+ers.  I was playing paladin and I guarded bard … AC40 bard.  We did not come close to winning combats in rooms 5 and 7.  Something about not having massive damage combined with insane Epic stats for monsters’ defenses.  We were further away from killing room 7 monster when time was called than a Nightmare party starts that fight at.

Sunday morning, Sticks & Rocks, Double Down where can only smite things with sticklike or rocklike weapons.  Barely got any notice when I surrounded my woodie +1 Quarter Staff with legendary weapons I wasn’t playing.  This was funny as barbarian had AC32 and my fighter had ACs of 14 and 15.  Paladin guarded fighter!!  Fighter smashed for more damage than barbarian!!  I hardly ever missed as I metaed for lots of offense with tech to bypass the saves requirements in the run.  We crushed.

Sunday midday, we got one more player, so we did an Elf Illusionist run just to cater to my sense of aesthetics.  Monk, barbarian, rogue, ranger filled out team Elf-Cabal-Polymorph-Illusionist.  Yes, I got to cast two spells a round some rounds where half the spells did nothing.  I got to polymorph … as an Elf Wizard … and deal damage.  And, I got to Color Spray nearly every room.  I did kind of cheapen the experience by Spell Swapping Improved Invisibility into Magic Missile on my last turn of room 7.  Also, we got wrecked in room 6 combat because somebody, who shall remain named Potter, was all like “No heals, combat all of the time!” where we didn’t even win room 6 through combat.  One of my spells that causes a monster Will save actually succeeded.  I guess there are Elf Cabal Polymorph Illusionist heroes.

All of the runs went well for me.  Amusement was had.  I got to say I played Epic even if we didn’t win at it.  I got to tech the dream in the last run.

Well, I could talk about my new HoR4 character, but, hey, there are plenty of posts for that.  So much for you to look forward to.

Ghostbusted

Past weekend played two RPG sessions.

Saturday, HoR4 mod that people like more than most.

It had contests.  The rewards for winning those contests had zero impact on my character sheet.  Blah blah blah, covered the problem of contests, whined about not winning any contests in another mod where prizes were awesome.

But, this gets into the importance of character sheets in particular campaigns.  In this campaign, because it had no character sheet impact, there’s no story that comes out of winning those events.  Just rolling dice to roll dice with zero narrative impact.  That’s a bad thing.  Now, in a different campaign, the character sheet wouldn’t be driving whether a story occurs, as the campaign would mold itself around PC achievement (one hopes, otherwise just rolling dice to roll dice).

I was thinking not long ago that there’s something inherently flawed about the idea of home campaign play for games where character sheets matter.  Thinking that the character sheet is fighting against telling a story.  Thinking that one reason I’m so much more into what is going on in convention one-shots is that I don’t care what my character sheet is.  By that, I mean that I didn’t have any input into the stats of my character, so my character is whatever it is and I focus on how those stats apply to the story rather than having those stats have meaning in and of themselves.  Mechanical advancement crowds out story advancement.

But, then, I got reminded by … my own experiences.  Princess Police, Conan, Feng Shui – my triumvirate of most impactful home play campaigns – all saw a balance between advancement (though Feng Shui advancement didn’t matter a lot) and a campaign narrative.  Especially the first two were longer campaigns, which is why I prefer longer campaigns as it gives time for the mechanics to inform the narrative.  Keep running away from scary stuff and get lumped in with “Cowardly Rald”.

But, for whatever reason, so much of my RPG play ends up driven by character sheets rather than character sheets driven by story.

I was really irritated by the earlier mod for not winning cool rewards.  This mod that is probably better than many and that one of my friends thought highly of wasn’t that great of an experience because no cool rewards.  Well, that plus we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do even though we knew what was going on the whole time in the mod.

Sunday, end of Witch Doctors Ghosts.

I have played with timid groups before.  I don’t know if the GM will ever have another party as timid as ours.  We did so much to go out of the way to avoid confrontation to where there was one combat I was involved in in seven sessions, and the only combat in the last session was one pushed on to a single PC.  We never confronted the main villain.  We left cleaning up the mess to NPCs.  One PC bought a gun on stage, involving an IC conversation, after I had a conversation with the saleswoman about buying a gun, and … it was never used.

I’m sure we could all agree, and certainly the GM and I agreed, that we set ourselves up for dragging things out by creating unnecessary setting features.  We decided for no good reason to set the Mystery during Christmas on a weekend, so stuff that only made sense to do on a regular weekday had to be delayed and we didn’t just timeskip to Monday.  Our big combat was actually on Sunday.

One of my main takeaways is that I don’t like the Demiurge in the setting.  It’s not just because it’s kind of World of Darknessesque in having prominent NPC organizations that steal importance from PCs.  It’s that the way it comes across, it should steal spotlight in many Mysteries.  Why would independent randos deal with cleaning up messes (or even investigating messes) when there’s an organization that should care about doing so and has way more resources/power?

Another takeaway is that I’m more interested in my PC now, after the Mystery is done, because of that gun shopping scene where I didn’t buy a gun, because of the scene where we talked to the NPCs who resolved the mess.  I’m not sure I’m that interested in another Mystery any time soon, but I’m more interested in “What’s a day in the life of Mark Cain?”  Not even “Here are all of the things I want my character to do.” but really just “Here are things that my character does.”  Does that make sense?  I want to explore the mundane, rather than the supernatural.  What does existence mean in a soap operaesque way and not in a “this is a PC” way?

Put another way, not looking for any actual challenges.  A lot of my fictions are my characters just sort of observing events and just interacting with the world in very low stress ways.  It occurs to me that I like that.  I like exploring RPG worlds without getting into fighting evil or rescuing hotties or doing anything “adventurous” just living and breathing another life.

My two Witch Doctors experiences have been so different that I’m curious about a third.

As for the system, we avoided using the system about as much as a group probably could.  I only recall the other two PCs using their magickal abilities once each, at least once each in some way that mattered.  I used my powers far more often, but both times in the last session it wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t done so.  My only two rolls in the final session were using those powers.  I should check the average, but the mode and median on number of rolls per session would both be tiny.  That’s not a criticism.  It’s a feature.

I’m often confused by RPG players who only seem to understand one style of play.  Do they not try different RPGs at cons?  So many players seem utterly lost if the game doesn’t involve rolling dice to accomplish things and/or a focus on combat.  This style of play was immersive, what is your character doing in a mostly real world setting where you also have superpowers, and narrative.  Even my L5R play tends to be far more tactical wargame, roll to determine almost everything, and where are you spending XP before next session.

I’m inclined to believe I want something in between for L5R play, where I like the mechanics a lot.  But, for something else, a heavily storytelling style sounds perfectly fine as that’s closer to how I play convention one-shots, which I will yet again note tend to be more enjoyable than home campaign play.

Because I kept rambling on about L5R to the WD GM, I’ve offered to run an intro to L5R.  I can see if there’s anyone else to run an intro for, but one reason not to is that I’m inclined to try to run L5R very differently than I have in the past or have played in.  Focus on the storytelling and the immersion and deemphasize the dice-rolling to resolve challenges.

Well, I feel like I left words on the table about other takeaways from the weekend, but this seems heavy enough for now.