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Posts Tagged ‘online gaming’

Collaborative Storytelling and the Ballad of Pork Swords

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 4, 2012| 11 Comments »

I don’t think I am the best DM. Don’t get me wrong I think I run an enjoyable game that people seem to like but there are some limitations or gaps in my toolkit if you will. I have never been that guy that can create an immersive homebrew setting filled with a rich tapestry of culture, people, and Machiavellian plots. Given my extensive nerd studies, consisting of pouring over tomes and tomes of fantasy literature, I am really better at world pilfering than world building. My games are also not super serious, although I try and get a mix of the serious and humor. I think this is, in part, a reflection of how I shuffle through this world with a sardonic glint in my eye and a fondness for dick and fart jokes.

What I have done since I got back into RPG’s and running games has been to exercise some of these weaker DM muscles, sort of like nerd pumping iron. In my 4th edition games I am trying to be more flexible and encouraging of the players to narrate actions and do interesting things irregardless of the rule system. Often I don’t’ even ask for a skill check or roll and just try and get them to describe what happens. This also expands into story aspects as well, with more sand boxy elements and brief forays into collaborative story telling. With the latter it’s kind of funny how jarring it can be to the players if they are not used to it and can make for some unpredictable and hilarious moments like what led to the title of this post.

It’s the second session of the Dark Sun game and I needed to introduce a character that was absent from the first session. He is playing a Tarek (aka a Half-Orc) hiring himself out for jobs that target the Sorcerer Kings infrastructure. We decided to have him apprehended and sold into slavery after torturing and gutting a Templar for secret information desired by his veiled alliance employers.  So the party was able to spring Targ-Ugu and squire him back to Iman Fasile (ex-gladiator, tapas joint operator, and veiled alliance contact) with only minor bumps and bruises  🙂 then the moment of truth came, Iman, in his gravelly voice asks “so what was the message?”. At which point there was dead silence, followed by some humming and hawing, and then a voice chirped up over skype “Pork Swords”. I was like Pork Swords, really like WTF, but good old Iman didn’t miss a beat, he was all “holy shit that sounds terrible…this is bad news bears….this sounds petty bad, what do you think it means?…It sounds terrible, that’s gotta be some kind of code right?

Did I mention my fondness for dick and fart jokes? Well I guess you do reap what you sow sometimes. So now I gotta figure out how to work “Pork Swords” into some kind of grand Templar scheme…any ideas?

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Train Wreck

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 26, 2012| 11 Comments »

Betcha thought this post was going to be about D&D Next…not yet it’s too soon, my thoughts are a maelstrom, I need to center myself. Until then please refer to this post by Mr. Morrison over at The Rhetorical Gamer as he appears to be some kind of thought thief, slipping into my bedroom as I lay sleeping  and dancing away with my thoughts and feelings.

I have finally settled on a game to run online and so I thought I would natter about it for a bit. I going all Dark Sun as there is just something about that setting that draws me to it. I recently finished Robert Schwalb’s Death Mark (it was excellent by the way –spoiler- someone gets their cock eaten by a Halfling) and downloaded the old Prism Pentad series by Troy Denning to my Kobo (kindle equivalent for you non-canucks out there) as primers.

I am structuring (a nicer way to say restricting) the game a little to keep with that Dark Sun goodness.  Playable races are limited to Human, Elf, Dwarf, Mull, Thri-Kreen, Eladrin, Goliath, Half-Elf, Halfling, Dragonborn, and Tiefling. I really hummed and hawed about the last two but given the way class and race interact in 4th edition not having them seemed a little overly punitive. Inherent bonuses are in and should cut down a little on the redonk twink factor. I am implementing a House Rule on rituals designed most excellently by Mr. Neuroglyph in order to encourage their use and give a little old school flavor.

I also codified a social contract for the game that will be passed out with the player materials:

“The single most important goal of the game is for it to be fun for everyone. All game decisions will be based on this goal. To quote Spock “the needs of the many out way the needs of the few, or the one….  I have been and ever shall be your friend”…..well mostly the first part. So if something becomes unfun for group we will strive to correct that. By all means bring your twinked up badass but if something becomes an issue and creates unfun then we will need to address it, after of course celebrating your mastery of the game and ability to reduce me to tears. This contact goes both ways, as if my DM’ing is so atrocious and oppressive that I need to be replaced in a bloody coup then so be it.”

I am also going to push myself a little on the DM side of things as I am going to try and wing it a little bit (once again slightly influenced by Mr. Rhetorical Gamer). I have been trying to jot down some NPC’s and anticipatory ideas, sort of how I might react to certain things, but I am going to try and work with what the players come up with..sort of…well as best I can given my meager skills and online medium. I am not going to lie to you It could end up being quite a train wreck.

I am about to start recruitment so if any of you out there in the interwebs want to throw some bones or just enjoy train wrecks let me know.

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Afterglow

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 15, 2012| 4 Comments »

Well the MCAT is in the bag and I am ready to rise from the ashes of my rpg semi-sabbatical like a nerd phoenix. Hopefully I hit my targets and need not revisit the test but we’ll see. Whatever happens I feel a great sense of accomplishment in just “rolling the dice” and whatever happens happens, que sera sera and all. There was a young cat at the testing centre that I had taken the MCAT prep course with and we sort of sweated it out together. He was a little tense and I told him that there were greater disappointments to be had in this world than not getting into medical school. Life, death, love, family these are the big deals I said.

I know it is easy for me to say since I already have a doctorate and a career but it’s the truth none the less. I have seen a lot of people over the years that have “made it” so to speak and still weren’t happy and kind of hated what they were doing, me included. I came to realize how important having passion for what you do is. I understand that not everyone can chase their dreams or flights of fancy as sometimes you gotta put food on the table, but to those people I would encourage them to find something they are passionate about and do it balls deep. Freud wrote that the love and work are the two pillars of mental health; I would add hobbies as a third.

I recently read Kevin Smiths latest book “tough Shit: Life advice from a fat, lazy slob who did good” and I had to chuckle at the thematic similarities between our lives as he reflects on being a filmmaker and his decision to transition out of it and chase passion again. I have become a big fan of his over the years and I encourage anyone to check out not only his movies but his books, Q&A’s, and Podcasting Empire.

In the meantime the gaming world is my oyster so to speak and I am ready to jack things up or off or whatever.  Although I have to admit with such limitless options I am a little paralyzed with indecision. I think I am going to start up an online game again but what game/system or what setting? Should it be more 4E or pathfinder or Castle and Crusades or Star Wars or a supers game, see I just don’t know. Part of me is thinking about a game in Dark Sun as I just started reading Rob Schwalb’s new novel in that setting.

I am going to jack things back up in my home game as well. Just this evening I finished detailing some NPC’s and potential plot hooks in the wake of the last adventure arc. I also had this idea to sort of spice things up not only for the players benefit but for mine as well since we have been going at it with the same cast for the better part of 2 years. The players have some henchmen mostly consisting of gladiators they freed from slavery. So for a change of pace I am going to roll up some of these cats and have them play through side adventures as their henchmen doing stuff that the pc’s are far too important to waste time doing. This will give my players a chance to try different classes out. I was even toying with the idea of playing the henchmen with the Castles and Crusades rule set and running them through some of the classic 1st edition adventures like Hommlet or the slavers series. Alternatively I might put them through the 4th edition Village of Hommlet and have the henchmen uncover the rise of the cult of elemental evil which then the players main characters might need to go and curb stomp out.

So decisions, decisions, decisions…any thoughts?

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You, Me and the VTT

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 30, 2011| 2 Comments »

I have really been swamped lately and not by the things I should be swamped with like work, career development, and family (although the lack of sleep is beginning to cause brain damage me thinks) but by prepping for a new campaign in a new system. I pulled the chute on my Revenge of the Giants game and am gearing up to run the Kingmaker adventure path for the Pathfinder rpg. For those of you keeping score at home we have DM’ing my 4th edition home game, DM’ing Pathfinder bi-weekly over skype, and playing in a bi-weekly 4th edition Dark Sun game over skype. So you know…not nearly enough gaming but you gotta take what you can get I guess. I know what you’re thinking, why the hell are you running both the D&D’s at the same time? The answer: pure masochism.

With the demise of my Revenge of the Giants game I thought I might give a brief review of my experience with Wizards of the Coast’s virtual tabletop (VTT). Keep in mind that the VTT is still in beta and my thoughts are filtered through that lens and not what the end product will likely be.  Overall, I really like what I see in the VTT despite its beta limitations and the fact that some of those limitations pushed me to drop my campaign. What I found awesome about the VTT is the built in community and the ability to play “pick-up” D&D at the drop of a hat. On more than one occasion after the kids where in bed and mustering enough energy to do more than mindlessly watch images flicker across the TV screen, I was able to jump on and play in a one-shot or delve.

The way the VTT is set up now allows for a pretty flawless sync with the character builder and monster builder, as the files are translated into mini-character sheets and stat blocks on the right side of the screen complete with integrated macros. When I run on maptools I tend to be a little more old school in that while my players have macros for their characters I handle monsters, initiative, and damage manually with dice, pen and paper. I find that, for me, this is quicker than using a framework and having to point and click the shit out of everything.

The biggest drawbacks of the VTT at this time center on the voice chat and mapping capabilities. I don’t know what the deal is with the voice chat but it is definitely not like using skype. There is often a lot of interference, static, and weird sounds ringing through your headset. So much so that in all the games I have played in you have to set your microphone to off and have it linked to a key to open, almost like an intercom system. This makes for a bit of an unsettling experience, as it is sort of like playing D&D in an airlock. You have complete silence punctuated by crackling and overly loud or quiet voices popping in an out. I found that this contributed to a lot less role-playing (in the case of the giants game pretty much none) and little chatter and bullshitting. I found that this made the interaction a little awkward and stunted, so hopefully they will clean this up a bit before the official release.

Overall, I liked the mapping function as it reminded me of pymapper. The only issue for me was the relative dearth of tiles to use in creating maps. I ended up having to use the drawing mechanic to make a lot of the maps for my game, which is never a good thing as I have a hard enough time drawing a straight line with a ruler let alone using a computer. It also added significantly to my prep time. At this point there is no function that would allow you to just upload a map like in maptools. This for sure is due to the VTT being in beta and will likely change in the future, hopefully with access to the entire dungeon tile sets or even being able to upload maps from existing modules (edit-I just checked back and they have added more tiles, it looks like most of the tiles from the 3 master dungeon tile sets).

I can really see the potential in the VTT but I am left wondering how they will integrate this with their other digital offerings in terms of pricing and access.  For example will this just be a part of the regular DDI subscription or will it cost extra? It would be hard for me to find a reason to pay extra for the VTT, particularly when there are excellent free alternatives available. I can also see them going for a micro-transaction system where access to the VTT comes with your subscription but you have to pay to unlock certain features and contents like modules or map packs.  I think I am going to stick with running my games off of maptools for now until the beta shakes out a little more. I find that using skype allows for more contact with the people I am playing with out of session which in turn fosters familiarity and camaraderie that makes for a more consistent and entertaining game.

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Ode to the Striker

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 22, 2011| 3 Comments »

I know I can give the striker’s a bit of a hard time now and then. How they just strut around the battlefield in their flimsy outfits and glass jaws, dropping all those sparkling damage dice and acting every inch the glitterati of the D&D world. While the real men in plate are having their faces kicked in, holding the line and standing firm ..but I digress. I think I might have had a slight change of heart. Perhaps it is the cognitive dissonance talking as I have been playing a rogue for the last little while, but more likely it might have something to do with witnessing a combat encounter without any strikers and it made me want to gouge my eyes out with a d4.

The encounter in question occurred in my Revenge of the Giants game playing out over Wotc’s virtual tabletop. We had 4 of the 6 players show up for the session with 2 strikers being the no-shows. The party consisted of a wizard, ardent, warden, and paladin (built to be a secondary healer). They were up against a re-skinned red dragon acting as a Behir, earth giant minion and an earth archon. Before the game started I casually suggested that I would be okay if anyone wanted to play perhaps the bow ranger that was sitting idly on the screen, macros just waiting to rain down unholy death on my poor monsters, but the players declined as none felt they could play more than one character effectively. I don’t blame them as this the paragon tier and going over your character sheet can be like pouring over the planes for a nuclear warhead.

So the throw down starts as the heroes leap into the fray attempting to push back the giants assault and prevent the penetration of the main gate.  Good lord was the battle painful; as it wore on it was like watching a documentary on paint drying. You could see them gradually loosing the battle of attrition through some incredibly painful grind. They were slowly exhausting their healing capabilities (which were not insignificant) but not doing enough damage to the monsters to be victories before they eventually would just run out of hit points. I had prepared for this the instant I saw we had no strikers. My initial plan was to have the Behir flee when it was bloodied leaving the earth archon alone and vulnerable to some good-ole gang shanking by the pc’s. I had to adjust this strategy on the fly as well because after multiple rounds they were nowhere even close to bloodying the Behir. So I dropped its hit points by 100 and voila bloodied. This is perhaps my favorite part, as I have the Behir eat opportunity attacks left and right beating a hasty exit he runs out of movement while still on the map. The Ardent is up next and says “looks like he is trying to get away, we can’t have that happen” and then proceeds to hit it with a power that allows him to slide the Behir back into melee. I almost started to cry, you could audibly hear the silent “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO” that reverberated in my mind. On the Behir’s next turn I had it run into the magical wards protecting the city and explode into meat chunks. The earth archon dropped the same round and mercifully it was over.

I have seen a lot of party compositions over the last 2 years.  I have played in games with no leaders, no controllers, and sometimes no defenders all of which have been generally successful. But I gotta tell you I don’t think you can play this game without the strikers or strikery builds, at least not in the paragon tier.

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Campaign Post-Mortem

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 10, 2011| 6 Comments »

My online campaign imploded the other week faster than Charlie Sheen’s career, so I thought I would give a bit of a post-mortem. The game was running fairly smoothly as the party had just curb stomped Lareth The Beautiful’s face all over the moat house and were about to be paid a visit from some assassins sent by the Temple of Elemental Evil. What eventually killed the campaign was player turnover. I had managed to maintain at least 4 constant players, while occasionally adding a fifth for brief periods of time, but last week I lost 2 players, one to military deployment and the other to system fatigue. Over the 9 months the campaign ran I had 9 players, with 2 of them there from the start to implosion. I could have easily kept adding players but when I sat back and reflected it didn’t feel right adding a bulk of new players to an ongoing campaign in the middle of a story line that none of them had really shared. It just seemed too forced. So it was time to pull the shoot.

What have I learned from this little foray into the ether?

1. If you are willing to be the DM and run a game online you will never have a problem getting players, keeping them maybe, but getting them no. All you need to do is put out a “call to arms” on whatever message board you like and they will flock to you like children to the Pied Piper.

2. Unless you are playing with people you know in the real world expect player turnover. You will get no shows for sessions without a heads-up and people dropping out with less courtesy than you would expect from a four year-old child.

3. Wargames is a fucking douche

4. It is a little more difficult to run an open-ended /less structured game given the nature of the medium and tactical nature of 4th edition. I tried to combat this by making generic maps that I could load if needed. As the DM, rolling dice instead of using a framework made this easier as I could make monsters up on the fly or just open one of the monster books and go from there rather than be beholden to inputting the monster statistics into an online token.

5. You have to work at the game to prevent it from just becoming a tactical skirmishing video game. Role playing is very doable, but you have to put some effort into it, and it can be more difficult to foster and maintain than in a face to face game given the inherent nature of the medium. What I struggled with was the lack of eye contact, facial expression, and body language to communicate with and the sense of detachment that can occur.

6. Despite its shortcomings, online gaming is still pretty awesome for what it offers. The ease with which you can find a game and play almost any system you can imagine is simply fantastic. I cannot overstate the convenience and flexibility online gaming offers, particularly for people that live in isolated areas or that can’t find a local game or if you are like me are saddled with young children. Being able to schedule a game after my kids are in bed and not having to travel or leave my house really allows me to play more regularly than would otherwise be possible and with way less wife aggro.

7. I want to kick my own ass for taking the campaign off the rails and making myself write adventures for this game. This is only an issue because I am already doing this for my face to face game and so the added workload was like a self-induced cock-punch. I also found running a weekly game a bit of a grind at times and think that perhaps every other week would be more in my Goldilocks zone.

So where do we go from here? Well I signed up to run Revenge of the Giants on Wizard’s Virtual Table Top on a bi-monthly basis. I did this for 2 reasons, one I wanted to fully test out the Wizard’s VTT and secondly I want to get a sense of play in the Paragon Tier. I put out the “call to arms” and already have a waitlist (see number 1 and 2). It also looks like I will get to play as well which is pretty sweet as one of the players in now defunct campaign is going to run something until the one cat gets back from deployment, at which time I will pick back up DM’ing something new. I also think that, aside from my face to face game, I am done with trying for the full money shot campaign and will stick to more mini-campaigns.

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Fourthcore Weekly Grind

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 30, 2011| 2 Comments »

The D&D gods must be smiling at me as I have been fortunate enough to actually play for change.  When Wizards started their open beta for the virtual tabletop I was able to snag an invite with some gentle prodding/ harassment. The VT is actually pretty slick and seems to integrate seamlessly with both the character builder and monster builder. The VT has its own forums with one sub-forum dedicated to helping people connect and play everything from ongoing campaigns to one shot delves to pickup games if you have some free time to kill.

It took a while to find something that fit with my schedule, you know after the kids are in bed and not too long or frequent to generate significant wife aggro. I’m pretty sure even Drax would be scared to tank my wife. What I latched onto was something akin to D&D encounters but all roided up called Fourthcore Weekly Grind. This is an amalgamation of a few things. Fourthcore is a design concept in response to a feeling that 4th edition seemed to lack the difficulty level, challenge and lethality of the older editions.  The Weekly Grind 4E: Vault of the Wailing Prince is a Fourthcore adaptation of the Pathfinder Weekly Grind series, designed and currently run by Jason Bulmahn the lead designer of Pathfinder. It is essentially a weekly dungeon delving campaign where teams of players move through one deadly room at a time, collecting treasure, scoring points and competing against the other teams.

I have to say that I am enjoying this play experience despite having my face kicked in weekly. We are on the fifth week and I am already on my second character. I started out with a pacifist laser cleric who got nuked in the first encounter because we failed to figure out a number puzzle required to open the door to the next room. When we triggered the trap my poor cleric was shot by an acid dart that instantly disintegrated him. I thought that was a little lame as where was my save or die; it was more like just die. That’s okay it gave me the opportunity to bring in a new character to fill some of the holes we had in party makeup, such as traversing and Uber deadly dungeon with no one that could pick a lock or disarm a trap. Thus enter one Bruce Leroy, centered breath monk, on a personal quest to find the glow even if he has to travel to the pits of the abyss itself.

Each room or encounter has had a specific resolution goal that is not limited to laying some heavy smack on the monsters.  The difficulty is amped up through various techniques such as environmental hazards and traps, debilitating conditions, time limits, and pouring on the damage through ongoing effects, auras, and my personal favourite, automatic damage for hitting a monster. It has definitely made us paranoid of everything just like the old days. There have also been a lot of puzzles to solve which our party has largely sucked at. This has been in part because no one speaks abyssal (which I don’t think is even possible at second level or at least highly unlikely) and partly due to the inherent detachment of playing over the Internet. I personally have found it difficult to process and integrate the information needed to solve the puzzles due to the stunted and disjointed verbal communication that can happen when playing online.  I really need to be able to dive in and grapple with the visual clues while being able to hash things out in a give-and-take with the other players.

Overall, I am pretty jazzed about the experience so far. The only thing that I am missing is a little bit of role-playing as it is fairly tactics orientated, but beggars can’t be choosers can they? Perhaps someday I will get the chance to play in a more traditional campaign, although at this point it seems like the only way that is going to happen is if the universe  spontaneously creates an eighth day in the week or if I somehow stumble upon a pocket dimension were time flows much faster than in our world.

 

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Old School

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 20, 2011| 5 Comments »

….and then it happened; I sent the campaign off the rails. At this point I am not really sure why I did this. Aside from the obvious masochism in increasing my prep time, I guess I was a little dissatisfied with the status quo of the adventure path we were on. I am referring to my online game where I had planned on running them through the only published module series that Wizard’s put out in support of 4th edition. We were in the middle of H2 Thuderspire Labyrinth when I started dropping alternate plot hooks. It might have been the nostalgia goggles (a second cousin of beer goggles who I dated regularly in my youth) amplifying my sense of dissatisfaction with the current module, which is actually a pretty solid adventure, as I began to think back on some of the more classic modules from 1stedition D&D with a growing desire to tell those stories in

Come get a taste

4thedition while maintaining a little bit of that old school feel.

Some of this push might be coming from a DM pit trap I stumbled into. When I looked in the mirror I was beginning to see the reflection of a dick DM who was trying to curb stomp the crap out of his player’s faces. I think, in part, I was butting heads with the mechanics of combat in 4th edition interacting with character optimization. I had this feeling that if combat wasn’t challenging then I wasn’t doing a good job. This is complicated by the fact that even an easy combat in 4thedition can sometimes take like forever. I found myself setting up most encounters as set piece battles of at least level +2,  like some diabolical DM concoction (add 8 parts minion, 4 parts brute, a dash of artillery, with a smidgen of skirmisher, and then bake in a pre-heated environmental  hazard until ready to fuck up your players). It was fatiguing, frustrating for everyone, and getting in the way of telling more of a story.

So when the party was stumbling through the Underdark they came upon a bunch of cultists summoning a fire elemental out of a lava pit while dropping numerous references to a place called Hommlet. This had the party quickly abandoning the slaves they were trying to rescue to a life of toiling at the feet of the Duergar of Clan Grimmerzhul and off to the Welcoming Wench. I am running them through a modified Village of Hommlet (the 4th edition version) while I work on a loose conversion of the 1st edition Temple of Elemental Evil. Part of the old school feel I have been jonesing for is a little more exploration and openness that I think fosters more role-playing. I am also looking at smaller encounters at party level or even lower, intermixed with the more set piece battles (think of a slow bleed with occasional cock punches). I am even contemplating adding some random encounters, as I have previously shied away from utilizing them due to the length of 4e combats and a desire to keep the story moving within the limited available game time. Now least you think I am getting soft as I decompose my way through middle-age, last game session I hit them with a Level +4 encounter as I knew it would be the only one in the adventuring day. I had Rufus and Burne be the hidden agents of the Temple of Elemental evil instead of the merchants, and had them lure the players into the druid grove by falsely implicating Ashstaff as being in league with the bandits plaguing the village. It was beautiful as the party never saw it coming.

I am interested to see how this little “old school” experiment works out as I am also thinking of loosely converting either I3 or I5 with my home campaign given they are in the desert now. I have also received a request from some of my online players to blog more about their exploits as I think they are kind of feeling like the red headed step child of my campaigns.

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Vioces in the Ether

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 26, 2010| 11 Comments »

A while back I mentioned that I was going to explore playing in an online D&D game as a way to cram more gaming into my life, particularly after my doctor told me my nerdosterone levels were dangerously low due to my home game only running every 3 to 4 weeks. I also thought I might be able to be a player for a change instead of having to DM, plus I could do all this without having to leave my house, after my kid went to bed and with as little clothing as I so desired, which seemed like an epic win to me.

So I answered a post on one of the WoTC forums looking for players to start up a game set in Eberron. This felt a little awkward, not unlike what I imagine answering a personal add in the paper might be like….SSME (single straight male elf) with a fondness for archery seeking MHDM (Monty Haul dungeon master) who likes long delves through trap infested tombs and is open to “group” expereinces. Before you know it I had downloaded skype and was talking with people from all over North America, as characters were generated and posted online at Iplay4e.com and a game time was set.

It was at this point things sort of went off the rails as we had trouble setting up the virtual game table, which was then followed by the DM dropping half of the players from the game because he kind of didn’t like them (the people dropped were a package deal and had been playing together in another campaign). This “restructuring” occurred while we were all online and talking through skype, I got a message from him to end the conversation and switch to a new one, and bikkety bam that was that. what followed was a continuous series of setbacks and red flags that consisted of the DM not showing online for several first sessions (due to what appears to be plausible excuses), his decision to run a DMPC which he then seemed to focus more on getting his “build” perfected than getting the campaign organized, which then resulted in the other players pulling the chute. It became apparent that the DM was not that interested in actually DMng and more interested in playing his “build”, so in an attempt to salvage something from this massive cluster fuck I took the reins and talked to the other players and agreed to the run the game. The real kick in the nads is that I was really excited to play for a change, poor Solton Griss my little Half-Orc Ranger and first-mate of the Shattered Dream had to sheath his twin bastard swords. What’s that saying, “always a bridesmaid never a bride”?

We had our first session the other night and it went reasonably well, with only some minor snafus with maptools. I decided to run a published module just for the sake of my own sanity (all the maps are published and easily loaded into the online tabletop) now that I am apparently running two friggin games, and this one is weekly, but I  will talk more about the game in future posts. One thing about this whole skype and on-line thing that is a little surreal and somewhat disquieting is the quasi-relationships and pseudo-intimacy you build with people you have never met and the ease of with which that relationship can be severed or disconnected through the click of a button, like the one-time member of the party who I only remember as the revenant dominatrix/warlock who’s background was that she was gang raped and killed by a group of men (like really wtf?).

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