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[Jimmy]

What's Absalom like this time of year?

The reason I'm asking is, there's this free entry, casual Pathfinder game happening in this town at the comic store today, that I was thinking of going to, and it's apparently based in this Absalom place.

Well, it's like a more mundane, softer-edged Sigil or Rock of Bral (in the sense that it's big and neutral and relatively open), but it's also got that labyrinth that turns you into a god in the middle.

If you're familiar with the Forgotten Realms, basically take Waterdeep, slap a new name on it and call it a day.

[scriver]

You're likely thinking of Traveller

Is Stars Without Numbers that game where you can die during character creation?

You're thinking of classic Traveler.

Is Stars Without Numbers that game where you can die during character creation?

Nah, that's Traveler. SWN takes a bit of inspiration from Traveler, but fortunately not its byzantine and hostile character creation process (even if you use the optional lifepath mechanics from Sandbox they're a lot friendlier than Traveler's own bits). You don't even need an auxiliary flowchart to figure out what you need to do!

Oh. I see.

There's something inherently attractive to me about a game where you can die before you even begin playing. Even if I know that would be annoying as fuck if I actually was making a character.

[Harry Baldman]

Oh. I see.

There's something inherently attractive to me about a game where you can die before you even begin playing. Even if I know that would be annoying as fuck if I actually was making a character.

You can have fun with Traveler's character creation in a way most systems don't support - I did a character for it in, I think, some kind of unreleased beta variant and he ended up being a college dance major dropout who became a secret operative with two tours of duty, the first earning him commendations and the second earning him a dismissal from field operations, followed by two tours in a desk job that broke him enough to drive him to adventuring again as a half-mad, tough but otherwise mostly useless adventurer.

The game then proceeded to not go anywhere at all before dying, but it was a novel if grueling bit of fun to get to that point to begin with.

SWN on the other hand is aimed to help you realize a character concept within about 15 minutes to half an hour and save the adventuring for the actual game, which is better for playability but skips out on some of the storytelling that Traveler's character creation attempts to offer in its random, cruel and arbitrary kind of way.

[Kadzar]

If you want, it's still possible to buy Classic Traveller (I actually picked the basic rules for free at one point, but it seems like that offer is no longer available).

If you want a free game where you can die, there's always deadEarth, though I make no guarantees about actually being able to play the character you make.

[MrRoboto75]

Later versions of Traveler nerfed character gen's deadliness.  In the mongoose Traveler copy I have worst that can happen is you get maimed and lose a limb or something, but not quite outright death.

[Neonivek]

Later versions of Traveler nerfed character gen's deadliness.  In the mongoose Traveler copy I have worst that can happen is you get maimed and lose a limb or something, but not quite outright death.

This is ignoring that there is a very good chance you will probably end up with a character you won't want

Makes me think the future is rather dystopian

[Tawa]

If you want, it's still possible to buy Classic Traveller (I actually picked the basic rules for free at one point, but it seems like that offer is no longer available).

If you want a free game where you can die, there's always deadEarth, though I make no guarantees about actually being able to play the character you make.

I rolled up 3 deadEarth characters once. I think one was a roboticist who had a 33% chance of dying daily due to the common cold, one died in some incredibly mundane way, and one was a middle-aged woman made of stone who hacked people to bits with dual swords.

I wonder if I'm still legally barred from rolling up more...

[MrRoboto75]

Later versions of Traveler nerfed character gen's deadliness.  In the mongoose Traveler copy I have worst that can happen is you get maimed and lose a limb or something, but not quite outright death.

This is ignoring that there is a very good chance you will probably end up with a character you won't want

Makes me think the future is rather dystopian

Random is random

[Dorsidwarf]

If you want, it's still possible to buy Classic Traveller (I actually picked the basic rules for free at one point, but it seems like that offer is no longer available).

If you want a free game where you can die, there's always deadEarth, though I make no guarantees about actually being able to play the character you make.

I rolled up 3 deadEarth characters once. I think one was a roboticist who had a 33% chance of dying daily due to the common cold, one died in some incredibly mundane way, and one was a middle-aged woman made of stone who hacked people to bits with dual swords.

I wonder if I'm still legally barred from rolling up more...

Don't worry, the original creator of deadEarth eventually showed up in the rpgnet thread and clarified that the three character limit is per campaign

[Neonivek]

Later versions of Traveler nerfed character gen's deadliness.  In the mongoose Traveler copy I have worst that can happen is you get maimed and lose a limb or something, but not quite outright death.

This is ignoring that there is a very good chance you will probably end up with a character you won't want

Makes me think the future is rather dystopian

Random is random

In all fairness I believe the rules weren't intended that you do one life and then use the result no matter what (though fully intending that, that is an option).

[Rolan7]

Hehe, yesterday's session was fun.
I was stone sober all night (emphasis on was) and our GM was unfortunately very ill ):  Turns out "day"-quil still makes you sleepy as hell...

We did get some decent business done, though.  Acquired the reward from the Invictus Prince.  It was vitae (vampire blood) enchanted with Invictus (fascist) magicks.  After a period of unsightly seizures, we awoke with enhanced mental capacities...  And thicker vitae.

The latter being a bit of a problem, as my character feeds on animals.  Mostly rats, emphasizing the "animalism" discipline of Ventrue to a strange degree.  My char-sheet is literally "CatLady".
And her vitae is now too thick to feed on animals.  ...That's fine, though.  A long time coming, perhaps.  Did I mention she has 2/10 humanity, and specializes in socializing with the beasts which dwell within vampires?

Anyway!  Before our GM fell asleep, my character did manage to prepare an "admissions application".  She collected a literal murder of crows to sing, as a box of 9 [nom] 8 kittens "sing"... her awful poetry.  The guild of vampiric animal-handlers will certainly be impressed~

My willful ghoul, who I taught Dominate 1 despite significant warnings, seemed very concerned about the kittens.  I got bored of her and left the room.  This is an (yet another) action with no downside nor chance of repercussion!

Meanwhile my fellow coterie members respectively practiced pugilism in the basement, and constructed a mind-boggling amount of intricately customized plastic explosives.  what could go wroooong?   (guess which used to be the wizard in our DND 3.5)

Then our GM conked out, and the pugilist-player took over for a ghoul sidestory.  I probably shouldn't go into too much detail, heh.  Imagine "Harold and Kumar go to McDonald's, Wendy's, McDonalds, Burger King NO WAIT McDonalds" except that they're also running codes for the Great Game and heavily dosed on Irrigo (Literally, we ran codes for groups we don't know at all, and they dosed our drugs with memory-erasing drugs).

Naturally, we rolled absurdly well for that side-venture.  We ended up remembering more of it than we should have, and carrying a suitcase stuffed full of Zimbabwe dollars.  Also a surprising amount of left over drugs.  (There was also elder vitae but we drank it all due to munchies)
This was declared canon BTW

[My Name is Immaterial]

Carrying a suitcase stuffed full of Zimbabwe dollars.

So about 50 bucks.

[Rolan7]

Yes
A nice thing about the "resource" system in World of Darkness is that we don't have to actually track currency, heh.  "Being able to afford things" is just another merit (like a DND feat, but ranked from 1 to 5), which is justified via downtime activities or general wealth.

The tradeoff is that someone with 1/5 "resources" could theoretically buy a billion flashlights, since they "cost" 1 (or 0?) resource dots.  But WoD kinda encourages the GM to exercise rule 0.  Really, it hasn't been a problem for our group...  With a lack of hard rules, we apparently default to roleplaying in this case.

Naturally we choose the best weapons and armor our resources can buy, but...  turns out one gun is almost as lethal as another, unless you get into the absurdly pricey range (and merit "dots" cost exponentially more XP).  And the fancy stuff requires story-justification, or Streetwise/contacts.

tldr;  It really doesn't matter that the guest GM gave our ghouls a bunch of cash.  It maybe could have justified us spending XP to upgrade their resources, if it wasn't Zimbabwe dollars

[milo christiansen]

Picking rocks is an excellent opportunity to plan your adventure. Hours of time ridding back and forth across a field with nothing to do but think? (and stop every little bit to pick up a rock of course, but that requires very little thought) You can get all kinds of planning done that way.

For example I planned the final encounter of the current dungeon in Plane of Elements yesterday, and I even got a really cool idea for an adventure to come 2-3 other adventures after that...

In related news: Play by post is really interesting in that you can run an adventure with only a tiny bit of prior planning. You need a basic direction so the story won't "get lost" but otherwise you can just make stuff up as you go, after all the players won't notice if you take a few hours to design a combat encounter right as they blunder into it instead of having it ready ahead of time... Lazy, but it works. Obviously I still need to have a rough plan ahead of time, or things could seem incoherent.

I've been reading some stuff about running games, and wow. I suck. Less now than before, but the first few encounters in Plane of Elements were really bad. Lots of poor/unclear descriptions among other things... Oh well.

[KingofstarrySkies]

I have been recently rather taken with a... thing in Fantasy in general, but D&D- Especially Forgotten Realms- is easily my favorite example of it; Drow.

Drow!

DROOOOWWWWWWW

Prettyboy charcoal-skinned evil(ish) elves with white hair and red eyes that KICK ASS