It was suggested that I should do something positive with my 1000th post, so here goes.

The way this thread works is this: for a roleplaying campaign you are currently playing or GMing, name three things you love about it (more, if you really don't want to leave anything out). If you can't think of three things, start questioning why you're still playing.

My current REIGN campaign is a blast to GM. Here's what I'm enjoying:

- The mix of players and characters we have. The PCs mesh well together whilst still having distinct personalities and agendas, and the players are all great company.

- The system, especially the Company rules. It lets me have NPCs actions resolving in the background out of sight of the player characters, and lets me roll to see how those pan out. It also means that I can have NPC factions opposed to the PCs really give it their all, and I don't feel like I'm necessarily being unfair to the players.

- The wiki. Using one of these was a brilliant idea, it's made organising all the campaign notes and planning sessions much easier.

Iron Heroes: (the campaign just wrapped up last Sunday)

- I love this system!  It's not less complicated than D&D3.5, but it structures the complexity in a way that I like: strong inherent character abilities rather than strong external item abilities (a dressed up way of saying IH doesn't rely on magic items).  It makes excellent use of the skills and while there are a lot of feats to choose from, it's the skills that are front and center of the characters.  And I'd be hard pressed to see a better implementation of the Thief/Rogue class in any other D&D3.5 game.

- We had a wiki for this game as well and I agree, it is a wonderful tool!

- The folks I game with are a great bunch.  After moving to the sticks of Illinois from Minneapolis, MN, I couldn't have found a more generous and inviting group of people to play with.

Orcs in the Graveyard - file under 'zombie war movie'

We've been playing thru a set of linked scenarios we based on 'ORCS' by Stan Nicholls (pulpy fantasy trilogy*), using Forward to Adventure!. It felt like a condensed campaign, nothing dragged out.

- we each got to prep and GM a scenario, the guys wanted something brutal, all blood and snot. We're the 8 survivors (2 per player) of a defeated army lost behind enemy lines and eventually driven into the catacombs of the city of the dead by a kobold warband aided by a human wizard. Two characters were killed and replaced by stragglers we came across. Each scenario lasted two sessions (2-3 hours each) - the overground travel thru the broken hills and refugee camps, the city of the dead, the catacombs and the escape to allied lines via subterranean canals (encountering deep ones and mermen on opposing sides of war) had a different atmosphere and drew on all the characters' skills.

- the system was a perfect fit, the guys got to do neat stunts in combat and work as a squad rather than prima donnas. In the end, two of the surviving characters were 4th level Orcs (fighter and assassin), one was a 2nd level Half-merman wizard (Cold/Water/Illusion), one was 1st level Orc (archer)- but the collaborative combat means that the two at lower levels felt they were doing their bit, they're not left out (yeah, the wizard had to brawl at one point). The dungeon generator was great fun. We levelled up after each part of the adventure just for the hell of it.

- but most of all, the fellas are easy company, got into their characters and had a laugh . They read the trilogy, fleshed out their characters with differing agendas, alignments, etc and thought out a few tactics. It was good dumb fun - especially the spell fumbles - yikes !

(*yeah, it ain't Proust but WTF)

The campaign I'm playing in and is being run by Melan, a forum regular here:

- Weird, trippy, evocative, original places.

- "Shades of grey" morality provides a good ol' sword'n'sorcery feel.

- Long sessions sometimes lasting 6-8 hours.

- Focused, no real distraction... like SOME PEOPLE WATCHING AMERICAN FOOTBALL ON TELLY! (See below.)


The other campaign I'm playing in and occasionally DMing:

- Black and white morality and a largely good-aligned party means characters work together as a reliable team, not screwing over each other.

- Weekly game, with only one cancelled session since the start (bit over two months ago).

- I get to DM roughly about half the time.

- Casual atmosphere lets me unwind and relax. Would be perfect if only some people stopped watching American Football.

The current episodic round-robin-GMing BD&D game has come around to my turn to DM.

--It's my first time DMing D&D in decades, not to mention I haven't GMed much either for a while, and surprisingly, it's like the metaphor about riding a bike. (Hmm, it's like a metaphor...something's weird about that.)

--Designing the dungeon was, if not a breeze, quite a bit of fun once I got started. Tip o' the hat to the adventure funnel for helping put me in the right frame of mind. (The key: don't get hung up on details, you can always go back and revise.)

--We've got a good combination of S&S feel with just a bit (actually more than a bit) of Leiberesque/Vancian self-parody in characterization and situation, and still room for bits of horror and terror.

There are THREE women players in my group. That makes the games more interesting.


'nuff said.



- Ed C.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_zMU2tX5n8

Iron Heroes:

I love the little tweaks and changes from 3.x that make the game run more smoothly, balance certain tactical options, and make character creation more fun. I find the system really intellectually appealing, and since this is my first RL Iron Heroes game, I'm having a lot of fun discovering the system with my group.

I love the cool fights we're having. The DM is the guy in our group who's the best tactician, and he sets up really cool fights. Last game, we fought regenerating mud giants in the middle of a shallow lake sprinkled with dead trees and small islands, then held a semi-fortified position at night in the ruins of a temple while giant dogs came charging in to drag individual PCs off into the darkness. The session before, we had a firefight in canoes with dozens of orcs, and other sessions have included attacking a fortress, shooting down circling valkyries and fending off swarms of glowing octopuses.

I love that I am currently playing the most evil character in the group, and yet he's well-integrated into it and even a key mover in the plot (We're trying to bring the Norse gods back to life after Ragnarok, and I'm the religious Viking who's pushing everyone along to do it).

I'm currently running a Scion game that's in the prequel stage (that is, we started as mortals ).

1) "Gunther, spiritual emergency: we gotta teach the kids to read." I know you had to be there, but this was one PC's response to Paris Hilton wanting to take old Style and E! magazines to the library because she'd heard that there were children in Africa that couldn't read. It's the first time in a while I've given out bonus xp for making me choke on my laughter.

2) The game has more concurrently active NPCs than any game I've run before, but because I know who they are and have a voice set aside for them, I can switch between them easily.

3) This is also the first campaign where the PCs have split up a lot. For most of the last session and a half no two PCs were ever in the same room at the same time. But because each had their own drive and I'd done some good prepwork it came out pretty well IMO.

Bonus) Two of the PCs found their Scion status in the heart of Africa while engaged in a pit fight against leopards. I dug the way the scene played out. The first wrestled some with the great cat and got mauled left and right, but finally won. The second had been trying to fashion a spear for the other to use, but ended up using it himself and winning with little effort or injury. Tiger was pleased, and may be even more pleased if one of them chooses to be adopted.

Well, I'm more running "one offs" than "a campaign" in meatspace, so I'll just talk about my off-beat PbP that will be starting tonight.

What's cool about it:

• Tiring of finding a meatspace group that would warm up to my wierd planar game, I opted for a PbP to get folks from a wider variety of players. It looks like it's coming together and I finally get to run all these wierd ideas in my head (and on my bookshelf)
• The PCs are coming together nicely. I asked them for a few pertinent pieces of info to help get them into the game, and they actually responded nicely. One PC has a thing for dangerous women (you better bet I'm gonna run with that one), another has no idea about his past, another is a redeemed soul hunted by the cult he used to be part of (and did a good job of tying himself to the amnesiac mage). The final player is more powergamey, but it's nice to have that as the exception and not the norm (aside from which, I little productive reading revealed about a dozen ways to keep a lid on that PC so the other PCs can have fun.)
• Well, this probably isn't a positive, but as is the norm for PbPs, a bunch of the applicants dropped. But after the applicants dropped, the remaining characters are a psion, a transmuter, a beguiler, and a favored soul. All spellcasters. If things go forward an nobody signs up to be a brute or a rogue, the game looks like it's going to have this "wizard war" vibe, which I think could prove interesting.

My next regular campaign isn't until Dec 31st, but I'm looking forward to a few things:

Rolemaster (FRP):  Our homebrew of Irrin:

-Playing Sunday nights at my house!  Our group is all "grown-ups", and with work, families, etc, we finally hit upon Sunday nights as a free time for everyone in the group.  Some of us also have Mondays off, and for those of us that don't, Monday would suck anyways.  So I'm excited for this to get going!

-MARATHON SESSION!:  I miss the days of 10-12 hour sessions--but our first session is going to be a marathon, starting Dec 31st, and ending at some point New Year's Day.  Part of this is because the system is Rolemaster, and we're doing group chargen. :deflated:  But a good, long first session sounds amazing!  We're also going to try to arrange at least two of these a year, I think.

-PROPS! I've really stepped up prop production.  I have bank drafts, complete with official seals, royal pardons, yellowing pages of import ripped from old tomes, keys that open unknown doorways, and I'm working on some scrolls to boot.  There'll also be a few puzzles and whatnot, but I'm not that far yet.

I'm currently running Vampire the Requiem (with a small break to run The Dead). The three things I love about it best?

• All of my players are female and they only allow new gamers to be female. I'm the only male. It's like being the Hugh Hefner of gaming. In other words: boobies.
• Another aspect of that is how different the dynamics of party/coterie/group relationships are when females are present and no males are. It's true, women play different, especially when the only male is the GM. They're very much into story and seem more willing to take a few "hits" for the sake of plot than most males are. They're also much more bloodthirsty. Christ they scare me. Mommy?
• I started them out freshly embraced but abandoned, so their ignorance of the setting as Players translates well into their ignorance of the world as characters. Watching them discover who and what they are through trial and error is amazing; they didn't even know what Disciplines they had, nor what Covenant they'd be. The game really is a lot of fun.

We're going back to Warhammer FRP soon, so this list will change slightly.

-=Grim=-

My campaign hasn't begun in earnest yet (week after Thanksgiving is the target start), but so far I'm happy that:

* it will involve my old gaming buddies even though we're scattered across the globe (we're using a professional web conferencing site)

* it will be unabashedly nostalgic, dungeon-bashing, hack-n-slashing goodness using the ruleset we all started with (Moldvay Basic D&D)

* I'll get to use all those weird ideas that never quite fit in my past games because they were just a bit too bizarre

Aw yea, two Albany NY posts in a row. *throws a pathetic attempt at gang sign up* Represent. Uh... G.

-=Grim=-

Quote from: GrimJestaAw yea, two Albany NY posts in a row. *throws a pathetic attempt at gang sign up* Represent. Uh... G.

-=Grim=-

Ha!  I hadn't noticed...

Ummm...I'm in Guilderland, so...

WEST SAI-EED!