LotFP

Finally got my Lamentations of the Flame Princess rpg today.

I really wish I'd sprung for the priority shipping!

This is really good stuff, both production-wise and as a game. Sure, we've seen a lot of it before, but the stuff we haven't is really good, and the attitude that permeates it is astounding.

I honestly can't remember the last time I was this excited about a game!

Marking time...

At work right now, but I can already tell it'll be a slow day.

Then off at 6, home to grab some stuff and then it's off to CONvergence! Hope to do a bit of gaming (plus cruising through the dealer's room to see what cool stuff I can find).

I think I'll take OD&D and Risus with me. But I'm open to new experiences, I guess...

Are any of my local friends going to be there?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I gotta say -- I'm pretty much through with ten sided dice.

I don't have any problem with dice that produce a 1-10 result, I just don't like the pointy little non-platonic bastards that keep stabbing me in the hand.

That's why I bought a set of these:


Twenty siders, numbered from 0-9 twice. Found 'em on ebay. These are the style of dice you used to get back in the day, but made of modern materials (i.e.; they won't start wearing away immediately).

They just feel better. They probably don't roll any more randomly, but I don't care. I'm happy with them and that's what matters to me.

One potential drawback for the uninitiated would be using them as percent dice. But once again, I remember from back in the day: The colored die is the tens digit and the white die is the ones digit. It's a simple as that. (The Top Secret rule book said so, in so many words.)

(I knew one guy who would call which die was the tens die while they were in the air. Sometimes even after they landed. And what he called might be the tens or it might be the ones. No consistency whatsoever, and perilously close to cheating in my book. Drove me up the wall.)


And, in other news, Fight On! number 9 is out. But you knew that already, right? Thought so.

Traveller

(I still refuse to call it Classic Traveller; the later versions are revisionist heresy in my book...)

Ahem.

Anyway, if you have any interest in Traveller at all, you could do worse than go to RPGNow and downloading the Starter Set for free.

I'll say that again: FREE.

Here's the link.

You'll thank me.

Wow, two years already?

Fight On! Quarterly magazine number 8. Lulu print-on-demand or pdf.

Cover by the legendary Erol Otus, and an interview with him by Jeff Rients of Jeff's Gameblog.

Plus the usual great stuff from the usual crew.

Regarding failure in the game

So, we finally ran up against plain old orcs in my AD&D game the other night. I've wanted orcs for awhile now -- they crunch really nicely, aren't that hard to hit, and won't wipe out the party.

Uh, except that none of us were rolling at all well, to hit wise.

This got annoying.

Then frustrating.

And finally, it was just plain funny.

We did finally take out the orcs and move on with the rest of the game, but for a while there we thought we were going to have another TPK. One guy rolled five separate 1's, but he was playing his character and the other fighter in the group whose player couldn't be there so it's not like one character had that bad of luck.

We didn't lose any player characters, either. Nobody even got seriously wounded.

But we did have an awful lot of fun. We laugh quite a bit in this game. Obscure puns abounded, as they usually do. For example:

DM: "You hear a rustling sound."

Me: "What, like Bill Cosby's kid brother?" (Bill's brother's name is Russell.)

DM: "I knew somebody would get that!"


Nobody else on the planet might find that funny, but I laughed. I guess you had to be there.


Now, look, there are things about this game that bother me. But there are a tableful of good people hanging around, and we have a hell of a good time. And that so far outweighs my petty quibbles that they're not even worth mentioning.

So I won't.

I'm in a damn good game, the occasional failure notwithstanding, and I'm happy about that.


And happy Saint Patrick's Day to you all!

(oops, this was supposed to be a reply to my last post. Sorry.)


Thanks, everybody, for your responses.

Joethelawyer:

"Question then--how did you determine who did what in which order within the group? Do you group actions according to missile/melee/spell with actions needing to be announced before initiative is rolled?"

It depended on the individual DM. We pretty much went around the table: What do you do, Bob? What do you do, Frank (and, often, would go around the other way the next time). Other guys would go: Okay, any movement? Andy missiles? Any magic? Okay, melee. (I think that was the order). So a little of both, really, but nobody felt left out or passed over. We each got to do something when it was the group's turn so it worked out.

But we all moved at the same time, so it was pretty easy for a few of us to gang up on whatever bad guy needed it most. Or whatever. I recall that a round would go pretty fast, even with a 6-10 players, each having 1-3 characters and henchmen.

Shimrod:

"It's more simulationist..."

You say that like it's a good thing.

"Your example of play is an example of bad/incompetent play."

See, now this is an example of busting on my example without giving one of your own. And I specifically asked you not to do that. Please give an example of good play, instead of just criticizing an example I made up while waiting after work for my ride to get there so I could go home. (Which is why I asked for a counterexample in the first place.)