The Gaming Den

Haven't been playing any games but been helping others write settings.

How bout you fine folks

I got to take my broken as fuck minitrog into a game of Shadowrun 4E, and he turned out to be everything I hoped he would be. 5' nothing neotenous troll, ghouled (gaki), mystic adept, good dice pools for summoning, spellcasting, and automatics, Improved Reflexes 2, some Mystic Armor, and Sustenance. Rolling 30+ dice on soaks, he cannot be stopped, and is great at drawing attention to make use of the soak while more specialized team members do their specialties at people. I also got to make use of his dual-nature pretty early on, when we were investigating potential toxics in the Barrens, and giant ork popped up and popped my trog in the chest with a sledgehammer, which he took... 1 stun damage from. The only thing to do damage to him to date.

Anyways, we beat down the ork, knock him senseless, then this spoopy spirit pops out, a F8 Spirit, that proceeds to terrify the team except my trog... who tosses down his assault rifle and goes ghoulclaw-a-spirito while his F7 Beast Spirit is hamstringing it, both bypassing its Immunity to Normal Weapons, unarmed combating it to fragging nothing and blocking its retaliatory unarmed strikes (when it really should have been using its Elemental Attack) . It's at that point I decided... let's dikote these bitches and invest some karma into Unarmed Combat.

Worked out a plan with the GM to Dikote the ghoulclaws. Gonna have to pony up a couple hundred thousand nuyen to get a Possession Tradition Magician to get a high-force Spirit to possess him so he can survive the dikoting process, which involves running plasma over the surface of the object and depositing diamond in its wake.

Later, in the same series of missions, we've traveled to Hong Kong FEZ, and hooked up with some Triad to get some information on this Johnson what double-crossed us into killing babies (long story), to, in my trog's words, extract the extra 50% he owes us for wetwork. To prove we're not moles or something like that, they tell us to take a bag of 10,000 credsticks, each with 1 nuyen each on them, and make an example of a guy who owes 10,000 nuyen. While the team subvocally argues over it, my minitrog barrels off to the address, kicks in the door, and beats the man to death. With the bag of credsticks. Leaving his head a gory stain on the floor and dropping the bag of credsticks onto it. Long story short, we proved we ain't no pigs.

Though, I will say with this group, there's this one fucking player. He's playing a Free Spirit, which is concerning enough. But said Free Spirit is linked to a Weapon Focus Katana which we had to retrieve from a Buddhist Temple on a frozen-ass mountaintop (it was this guy's introductory mission to introduce his character to the group). Apparently it's a centuries-old spirit, blah blah blah, whatever. Well during the Triad thing, said spirit is actively trying to fight the Triads and get us involved in it. It's come up a few more times as we deal with "criminals". I swear, if he keeps this shit up when we get back to gaming, my trog is just going to claw the spirit to death and be fucking done with it, because it's starting to piss my character off instead of just me. It's like, yes, hello spirit, we reawakened you, we're fucking criminals, could you stop trying to GOAD OUR FUCKING EMPLOYERS INTO A FIGHT.

Other than that, a lackluster Pathfinder game I only half-heartedly joined that eventually wound up clashing with my work schedule so I had to drop it. What I wouldn't give for more Shadowrun and D&D 3.5. Sigh.

Err, Dikote in SR4? O.o
Did i miss something ?

Did a fun 3-person Sunless Citadel run. Lasted right up until we got TPK'd by a couple of shadows. Had a lot of fun taking down Calcryx.

I ran two games this year that I can actually remember, one was D&D in a setting I made based on horror fiction, and that was pretty fun to write and run, and the other is a pure dungeoncrawl in the vein of Tomb of Horrors and that sort of super hard dungeon, except it actually follows the fucking rules of the game.

It's amazing to have a dungeon that's just a bunch of death traps and weird puzzles with only the barest context.

Stahlseele wrote:Err, Dikote in SR4? O.o
Did i miss something ?

The fact that most items are assumed to be dikoted in SR4 due to its popularity in earlier editions? Just because it's not a book-legal option doesn't mean it can't get applied to stuff that obviously isn't dikoted. We're not playing SRM.

Ah, okay!

Furthermore, the only RPG Attempt i had this whole year was my buddies trying to convince me that the Mechwarrior/A Time of War RPG was good to play . .

Only for me to build a character that just beat all of their characters in everything and beat them up and took their stuff, which lead to two things:
A) them agreeing that the game is bad.
B) me rightfully being called a dick for the way i chose to show them that.

My ongoing primary campaign, this being the second year of it, that's a mash up of two different APs Hell's Rebels/Vengeance). Though it looks like that game may be winding down now that the subtle hostility between the two leading PCs finally broke out into open and violent hostility. We were all waiting for it to happen.

The other games this year run by others haven't lasted long enough to write home about but they've been entertaining enough.

My current V5 games.

Seeing the table's gangrel engage in social combat with a lupine for claim of a territory was priceless.

This was a rough year for me and gaming was not the ample cornucopia it's been in the past.

That said highlights include the leg of my Delta Green campaign I ran over the summer, where in general players were wonderfully good sports about having their characters suddenly killed off in horrible, gruesome, shocking ways, horror movie style (Den being the Den and fixated on player agency as it understandably is, I should clarify that most of these deaths were highly avoidable, i.e. maybe you shouldn't have gone traipsing through those woods at night alone when you KNOW there to be a Dark Young in the area). One player had his character actually

savagely raped and then "marked" (i.e. pissed on) by the Dark Young, with the highly dubious benefit of surviving the encounter with a few scraps of sanity left and the player was again a terrifically good sport about it.

Everybody knew going in that this is not a game about being empowered and winning, this is a game about doing you best you can to rage against the dying of the light before dying and/or going insane, and all being on the same page there really helped.

As a PC, my last game of Pathfinder (DMed by the victim of the attack in spoilers above) was a blast, most fun I've had playing D&D in years (I generally refer to Pathfinder as D&D, I refuse to acknowledge it as a conceptually separate game). The crowning moment of awesome was definitely when my Level 5 Catfolk Alchemist killed both a Suspiraedaemon and ("accidentally") a PC I found useless and annoying with a single well placed fire bomb. [/b][/spoiler]