The Role Playing Game Thread: Shiny Dice Roll Better!

[Zardnaar]

My very first book was Caverns of Kalte. I even had the good fortune to meet Joe Dever in 2005 or so and he signed a few of my books for me.

Jelly. I think the art on the 90s ones have aged well.

80s ones look kinda 80s lol.

 

[Arakhor]

Presumably those are the UK versions, not the badly edited US versions?

 

[Zardnaar]

Presumably those are the UK versions, not the badly edited US versions?

AFAIK yes. Found some spares locally for a couple of bucks book 23 and 22iirc.

One went on eBay to the USA for $88 bucks 15 years ago.

 

[Arakhor]

Here's a photograph of my hardback collector's editions. (My ageing softbacks are on a different shelf!)

 

[Zardnaar]

Nice can you still get them? If so how much?

 

[Arakhor]

This is the official site, run by Joe's son, Ben. Mantikore-Verlag published a few as well, before the rights reverted to Joe Dever before his death, so you could try there. Otherwise, you'll have to try the usual price-gouging places.

 

[Zardnaar]

This is the official site, run by Joe's son, Ben. Mantikore-Verlag published a few as well, before the rights reverted to Joe Dever before his death, so you could try there. Otherwise, you'll have to try the usual price-gouging places.

Those prices are crazy. Something like $120 NZD a book.

Wonder if I can pay in toilet paper.

 

[Arakhor]

The German site is overpricing what stock they have left, yes, but the official store is much more reasonable (though very much limited in what they have).

Incidentally, I just ran across the poor webcam photo I shared with CFC some years back of my autographed copy of The Caverns of Kalte. I thought you might be interested in seeing it.

Spoiler :

 

[Zardnaar]

The German site is overpricing what stock they have left, yes, but the official store is much more reasonable (though very much limited in what they have).

Incidentally, I just ran across the poor webcam photo I shared with CFC some years back of my autographed copy of The Caverns of Kalte. I thought you might be interested in seeing it.

Spoiler :

View attachment 549315

Nice. I played a few of the Gamebooks again a few years ago.

 

[AmazonQueen]

My gaming group is discussing playing online, probably using the Roll20 site

 

[AmazonQueen]

Just d/l the Runequest Coloring Book which is a free PDF from https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/...nequest-the-coloring-book-as-a-free-download/
and might be good if you or your children want to colour in some fantasy art.

 

[Arakhor]

Oh, what fun. I might well have been able over that 30 years ago.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Due to play 1st online session of Call of Cthulhu using Roll20 and Skype on Monday (assuming I can get the tech to work correctly)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Personally I don't like rule systems in general. All they do is constrain you and ruin the fun. But D&D is the worst by far. The others though aren't that much better for me. Really, what I like about roleplaying is creativity. And all systems do is constrain and ruin that turning what should be a creative writing exercise into a mechanical grind fest.

The only reason why I even posted here is because the thread brought back memories from back in the day. You see, I used to have a decent group of people online for freeform play (no rules, just creative writing with the understanding nobody will godmod too much). But they all went their separate ways and I have failed to find a single game since. And it's been almost a decade since I had a good game.

And to rub salt in the wound every site I look at all people are playing is D&D. Makes me want to scream.

My view is that the rule books and modules are guides, not some hard and fast thing you absolutely must follow. As long as the DM keeps things balanced and doesn't play favorites and has a coherent plan for the campaign (as well as Plan B-Z for when the players take the action in another direction), it should work.

After all, when you really think about it, whatever setting you're in has to be able to function normally when you and your party aren't there. I once designed a campaign that used two or three completely unrelated modules and made up a backstory that would make them make sense. Then I really studied the blueprints for the castle setting and ended up redrawing about a quarter of it because it made absolutely no sense. Sure, in the time when the castle and its inhabitants are in the situation the party has to save them from, it might make sense that a trap door is the only link between the kitchen and dining room. But in the normal life of that castle, it makes zero sense. So I redid part of the map and relocated certain rooms. I kept the trap door to the kitchen, but made it more of a pantry and the real kitchen was in a more sensible place.

I came here to CFC from a forum where the freeform play you describe was something some of us did every day. At first it wasn't confined to a single area of the forum, but carried on anywhere that wasn't in the dedicated RPG forums. It helped when TPTB there created a dedicated writing forum so we could put our long stories there. People would write a paragraph or a few to build off of what the previous person had written and leave a hook for the next person. Our own personas on this forum were the characters, along with the characters used in the publications this forum was actually promoting, and while we made the effort not to include anyone who didn't want to be, someone figured the forum owners and admins were fair game... so they became NPC characters. Godmodding was not permitted.

I actually did write a post here a few weeks back in the style of the sort of thing we did back then, that involved watermelon cream pies lobbed from dragonback...

I'm no longer part of that other forum (forum politics ruined a good thing). I haven't forgotten how much fun it was, though.

You come across as hating D&D because it's popular.
. Alot of the smaller RPGs only exist online.

How small is small?

I've never been a fan of D&D.
There are some games that are much more focused on storytelling. Anything by White Wolf like Vampire the Masquerade or by Chaosium like HeroQuest or Pendragon.
They still have rules but less restrictive than D&D. Much smaller playerbases though.

Fighting Fantasy was my first introduction to RPGs. Yes, it's mainly a solo player gamebook series, but they did expand the rules for multiplayer capability later. It's still much less complicated than D&D.

There is no point in suggesting systems to me because I no longer have anyone to play with.

Then look for people.
Find out if there are any games clubs in your area or attend gaming conventions.

It's going to be awhile before anything like those will be running again. It was just around the beginning of March, before I went into "stay home" mode, that I was running an errand downtown and passed a gaming store I hadn't noticed before. They had tables where people could play, and if the place hadn't been closed at that hour, I'd have gone in to check it out.

Sadly, small places like that will probably not survive as it's hard to keep small businesses running if there can't be any customers.

In other words absolutely nothing. As I would rather do nothing than do something I find boring at best and outright torcherous at worst.


Everyone I know off only enjoys dice heavy borefest systems. There is nobody around for the one and only type of play I enjoy which is no dice freeform.

I appreciate you guys want to help and offer advice. But I have already resigned my self to newer enjoying the hobby again simply because there are no people out there that enjoy what I do and I refuse to torture my self with D&D. I really posted here mostly to just vent my frustration at that immutable fact.

There's no reason something can't be started here.

Throwing dice is a big part of the experience. What you're describing is more larping.

LARP is live-action, not writing an interactive story.

Actually what I am describing is a bunch of people on the internet doing creative writing on a joined story with everyone contributing toward a common end goal collaboratively as opposed to people playing a "game" vs an adversarial DM.

Some DMs are adversarial. Those are not the good ones. A good DM is a host who presents the setting and offers neutral guidance, explaining what's going on and what the consequences are if the PCs take certain actions (or not).

Well, yes, just like a lot of players are bad people too. The key is to find people you can tolerate.

Yep. Our group included someone who had basically swallowed a bunch of rules books and argued every damn thing. He wanted to do a bunch of things that absolutely did not fit into the campaign and tried to take advantage of a rookie DM (a friend of mine whose goal was the story, rather than the stats). And he had a habit of doing "pre-rolls" and claiming that those were the ones that counted, rather than the ones he rolled when told to. That was really annoying; pre-rolls are more useful online, when you don't want to wait extra time while waiting for everyone to get their results from the online dice roller.

After about three weeks of this (we played every Friday night), we got exasperated with him for his lack of courtesy, he got bored because the game was too tame for his tastes, and he left. The thing about that particular situation was that most of us were also part of the local SCA group and all of us were part of the Star Trek club we'd started. The guys who weren't in the SCA weren't into the actual role-playing, though one of them quickly adapted. The one who left had no clue at all about how to play the character as a character rather than a set of stats.

Spoiler Hmmmnnn :

View attachment 549186

I graduated from Gamebooks to D&D.

Same here, but I never left gamebooks. I still get the new Fighting Fantasy ones as soon as I know they're available. I belong to a Fighting Fantasy forum; it's not very active now, unfortunately, but there are some amateur games posted there, and I've received a bit of encouragement for my own writing efforts.

(For those who don't know, the first main NaNoWriMo event I won in 2016 was for a novelization of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Caverns of the Snow Witch; I decided to continue the story by linking that book with Forest of Doom and left off with my main character visiting a friend in the city of Stonebridge before going off on a quest to find a magical warhammer)

I just wish someone on the forum had answered my question of whether or not anyone had made a map of the city of Stonebridge, since I could really use one... It's looking like I'm going to have to make it up myself, which is going to be a lot of work.

It's not about the role of the gm. It's about the kind of game people want to play and the expectations they come in with along side with what the system you are using forces you to do. Dice based systems force you into essentially a wargaming mentality. And systems such as D&D where you have classes and skills and all sorts of things to drive you into playing a role instead of a character further restrict your creativity. In the end you end up not doing creative writing which I love but wargaming with some impromptu theater on the side which if find boring at best.

It is entirely possible to design a campaign that isn't about killing people or monsters.

Book 6 Sacrifice at Ruanon I bought with my 1st paycheck. Right before 14th birthday in 1992.

Cost $13 iirc, pay was $22 a day. About $12 USD back then days pay.

Didn't buy book 24 back then should have. Never saw 25+.

Hm. I belong to a Yahoo group of people who are into gamebooks. Would you like the link? It's not strictly a Yahoo group now since Yahoo shut the groups down, but it's migrated to a new host. Someone there might know where you could find what you're looking for.

 

[Zardnaar]

My view is that the rule books and modules are guides, not some hard and fast thing you absolutely must follow. As long as the DM keeps things balanced and doesn't play favorites and has a coherent plan for the campaign (as well as Plan B-Z for when the players take the action in another direction), it should work.

After all, when you really think about it, whatever setting you're in has to be able to function normally when you and your party aren't there. I once designed a campaign that used two or three completely unrelated modules and made up a backstory that would make them make sense. Then I really studied the blueprints for the castle setting and ended up redrawing about a quarter of it because it made absolutely no sense. Sure, in the time when the castle and its inhabitants are in the situation the party has to save them from, it might make sense that a trap door is the only link between the kitchen and dining room. But in the normal life of that castle, it makes zero sense. So I redid part of the map and relocated certain rooms. I kept the trap door to the kitchen, but made it more of a pantry and the real kitchen was in a more sensible place.

I came here to CFC from a forum where the freeform play you describe was something some of us did every day. At first it wasn't confined to a single area of the forum, but carried on anywhere that wasn't in the dedicated RPG forums. It helped when TPTB there created a dedicated writing forum so we could put our long stories there. People would write a paragraph or a few to build off of what the previous person had written and leave a hook for the next person. Our own personas on this forum were the characters, along with the characters used in the publications this forum was actually promoting, and while we made the effort not to include anyone who didn't want to be, someone figured the forum owners and admins were fair game... so they became NPC characters. Godmodding was not permitted.

I actually did write a post here a few weeks back in the style of the sort of thing we did back then, that involved watermelon cream pies lobbed from dragonback...

I'm no longer part of that other forum (forum politics ruined a good thing). I haven't forgotten how much fun it was, though.


How small is small?


Fighting Fantasy was my first introduction to RPGs. Yes, it's mainly a solo player gamebook series, but they did expand the rules for multiplayer capability later. It's still much less complicated than D&D.


It's going to be awhile before anything like those will be running again. It was just around the beginning of March, before I went into "stay home" mode, that I was running an errand downtown and passed a gaming store I hadn't noticed before. They had tables where people could play, and if the place hadn't been closed at that hour, I'd have gone in to check it out.

Sadly, small places like that will probably not survive as it's hard to keep small businesses running if there can't be any customers.


There's no reason something can't be started here.


LARP is live-action, not writing an interactive story.


Some DMs are adversarial. Those are not the good ones. A good DM is a host who presents the setting and offers neutral guidance, explaining what's going on and what the consequences are if the PCs take certain actions (or not).


Yep. Our group included someone who had basically swallowed a bunch of rules books and argued every damn thing. He wanted to do a bunch of things that absolutely did not fit into the campaign and tried to take advantage of a rookie DM (a friend of mine whose goal was the story, rather than the stats). And he had a habit of doing "pre-rolls" and claiming that those were the ones that counted, rather than the ones he rolled when told to. That was really annoying; pre-rolls are more useful online, when you don't want to wait extra time while waiting for everyone to get their results from the online dice roller.

After about three weeks of this (we played every Friday night), we got exasperated with him for his lack of courtesy, he got bored because the game was too tame for his tastes, and he left. The thing about that particular situation was that most of us were also part of the local SCA group and all of us were part of the Star Trek club we'd started. The guys who weren't in the SCA weren't into the actual role-playing, though one of them quickly adapted. The one who left had no clue at all about how to play the character as a character rather than a set of stats.


Same here, but I never left gamebooks. I still get the new Fighting Fantasy ones as soon as I know they're available. I belong to a Fighting Fantasy forum; it's not very active now, unfortunately, but there are some amateur games posted there, and I've received a bit of encouragement for my own writing efforts.

(For those who don't know, the first main NaNoWriMo event I won in 2016 was for a novelization of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Caverns of the Snow Witch; I decided to continue the story by linking that book with Forest of Doom and left off with my main character visiting a friend in the city of Stonebridge before going off on a quest to find a magical warhammer)

I just wish someone on the forum had answered my question of whether or not anyone had made a map of the city of Stonebridge, since I could really use one... It's looking like I'm going to have to make it up myself, which is going to be a lot of work.


It is entirely possible to design a campaign that isn't about killing people or monsters.


Hm. I belong to a Yahoo group of people who are into gamebooks. Would you like the link? It's not strictly a Yahoo group now since Yahoo shut the groups down, but it's migrated to a new host. Someone there might know where you could find what you're looking for.

Not really into them now although I break out LW on occasion.

Earlier question about small RPGs. Anything that's not on the top 5 RPG list.

It's probably even more than that. Anything that's not D&D, Pathfinder or Star Wars. The Star Wars game is also dying on it's way out.

Pathfinder is more or less D&D or a cousin at least for PF2.

5E D&D has been a big hit, PF2 isn't doing as well as PF1.

D&D is something like 4 or 5 times bigger than all the other RPGs put togather going by market size/Amazon sales.

Always has been with the exceptions of D&D falling over, mid 90s and when 4E put Pathfinder on top.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

I came here to CFC from a forum where the freeform play you describe was something some of us did every day. At first it wasn't confined to a single area of the forum, but carried on anywhere that wasn't in the dedicated RPG forums. It helped when TPTB there created a dedicated writing forum so we could put our long stories there. People would write a paragraph or a few to build off of what the previous person had written and leave a hook for the next person. Our own personas on this forum were the characters, along with the characters used in the publications this forum was actually promoting, and while we made the effort not to include anyone who didn't want to be, someone figured the forum owners and admins were fair game... so they became NPC characters. Godmodding was not permitted.

I actually did write a post here a few weeks back in the style of the sort of thing we did back then, that involved watermelon cream pies lobbed from dragonback...

I'm no longer part of that other forum (forum politics ruined a good thing). I haven't forgotten how much fun it was, though.

Than you know exactly what I am talking about. I think that ultimately for me it's simply that the experience is NOT about playing a game but about having a venue to explore creative writing and have other people read it and respond in kind in a friendly collaborative environment. A sort of writers club. And thus traditional roleplaying systems simply don't work for me because they are explicitly about being a game that you play.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Than you know exactly what I am talking about. I think that ultimately for me it's simply that the experience is NOT about playing a game but about having a venue to explore creative writing and have other people read it and respond in kind in a friendly collaborative environment. A sort of writers club. And thus traditional roleplaying systems simply don't work for me because they are explicitly about being a game that you play.

If you want to explore creative writing, come on down to the Arts & Entertainment forum. We have a couple of current writing threads going - one for general writing and one for the current NaNoWriMo competition going on this month.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

If you want to explore creative writing, come on down to the Arts & Entertainment forum. We have a couple of current writing threads going - one for general writing and one for the current NaNoWriMo competition going on this month.

Thing is whilst I am decent at writing I am not really good at sitting down and writing a whole story start to finish on my own. And it's not really that fun for me either. The part I really enjoyed was that there would be a whole bunch of us all contributing to the same thread and thus whilst we all had the same general idea about what we wanted to happen we would be playing off one another constantly bouncing back and forth and on one hand reacting to one another and on another trying to outdo the other. It was really a community back and forth thing that you don't get from writing a story and posting it for people to read.

As a tangent the most fun I always had was back when each player would create a nation and than we'd agree on the general trends (who is at war with who, organizing an UN style summit etc.) but we'd leave the rest to each player. And each player would go about describing what his side was doing through the eyes of characters.So for example if we had a battle you'd end up with something like a WWE match where who wins is determined in advance but the stuff in the middle is improvised. That way I was free to create characters, write minor plots, do character development, worldbuild and do all that fun stuff but did not have to spend time thinking about stuff like an overarching plot because that would organically evolve from all of us chatting and playing.


Plus honestly I don't think you people would welcome me.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Thing is whilst I am decent at writing I am not really good at sitting down and writing a whole story start to finish on my own. And it's not really that fun for me either. The part I really enjoyed was that there would be a whole bunch of us all contributing to the same thread and thus whilst we all had the same general idea about what we wanted to happen we would be playing off one another constantly bouncing back and forth and on one hand reacting to one another and on another trying to outdo the other. It was really a community back and forth thing that you don't get from writing a story and posting it for people to read.

As a tangent the most fun I always had was back when each player would create a nation and than we'd agree on the general trends (who is at war with who, organizing an UN style summit etc.) but we'd leave the rest to each player. And each player would go about describing what his side was doing through the eyes of characters.So for example if we had a battle you'd end up with something like a WWE match where who wins is determined in advance but the stuff in the middle is improvised. That way I was free to create characters, write minor plots, do character development, worldbuild and do all that fun stuff but did not have to spend time thinking about stuff like an overarching plot because that would organically evolve from all of us chatting and playing.

It sounds like you're talking about the NES/IOT activities, which is located in the Other Games forum. I can't give any meaningful advice or suggestions about that, since while I've been invited to participate, I haven't actually done so.

But if you just want to get a story going and see where people take it, an interactive story can be a blast. I remember in the Star Trek club I belonged to years ago, we got one of these going... and when we left off, it was about a sentient bowl of porridge, its pet cat, and they'd somehow found themselves on board the Enterprise E in Worf's quarters. If you've ever watched TNG, you might recall how much Worf really doesn't like cats... This isn't anything close to where I thought the story would go when we started, but it just took off in unexpectedly weird directions. I have no idea where it could have gone if the club had stayed active, but I'm sure it would have been fun.

Plus honestly I don't think you people would welcome me.

You and I have had a couple of rough patches, but I don't extend insincere invitations.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

It sounds like you're talking about the NES/IOT activities, which is located in the Other Games forum. I can't give any meaningful advice or suggestions about that, since while I've been invited to participate, I haven't actually done so.

I shall have to look into those.

But if you just want to get a story going and see where people take it, an interactive story can be a blast. I remember in the Star Trek club I belonged to years ago, we got one of these going... and when we left off, it was about a sentient bowl of porridge, its pet cat, and they'd somehow found themselves on board the Enterprise E in Worf's quarters. If you've ever watched TNG, you might recall how much Worf really doesn't like cats... This isn't anything close to where I thought the story would go when we started, but it just took off in unexpectedly weird directions. I have no idea where it could have gone if the club had stayed active, but I'm sure it would have been fun.

I remember doing stuff like that ages ago. Those were the fun days. And than they went away and I died on the inside.