Posts made by 2mspris

@Woragarten Great video, thank you for that!

There are a few differences between our set-up for gaming (in the library) and the FNGS mentioned in the video, most of these kids already knew one another so the concept that everyone at the table is on the same side and works together wasn't even actually one that had to be covered moving into D&D. They want to work together, even when they break off into pairs to accomplish something they have yet to even look too closely at "You don't really have the dice for this so you can't help me." that I've seen on occasion with adults.

Of the kids, two of them had a vague awareness of what RPGs were (One of them is my youngest son, so he knew from being present in our house when gaming was happening what it was, but he had never played.) but for the rest of them this was entirely new for them and their parents. In all of those cases I also had to give the parents a very basic primer for it and have them sign a permission slip acknowledging that "Yes, my kids has permission to play D&D." so that there are no pitchfork waving bible beaters coming into the library.

I've found that the best tips I've accumulated so far are:

1. Keep the sessions on the short side. 2 hours at a table "in character" is a pretty long stretch for a kid's attention span outside of school.
2. Provide snacks! (But not a bunch of sugar, because once they start going wild it's hard to reel them back in.)
3. With this # of kids, have 2 GMs. The head GM runs the story, but with the kids there are questions that can be answered to keep things running smoothly and the assistant also has a quick review with each kid individually before their turn in initiative that starts with "What do you think you would like to do?" and looks at their sheet with them to see what they can do. It's helped build that notion of planning what you are going to do before your actual turn happens, to keep things happening at a good pace.

Perhaps less "baby gamers" so much as a new generation of tabletop roleplayers.

My life has become pretty intensely mixed with stress and responsibility of late, but in the midst of it I've found something that I'm really enjoying and thought I would share for the entertainment of it as well as because I'm curious if any other folks have really spent time sharing roleplaying games with a new generation?

We've started up a kids roleplay club out of the library where I work, specifically for kids in 4th - 6th grade where we had been playing more specifically "kid friendly" RPGs, such as Hero Kids and Little Wizards. About a month ago, a handful of those kids talked us into running a D&D (5th edition) game for them through the summer. There is a table of 7 kids who have met once a week to play, just for a couple of hours - which always goes over just a little bit, and they are really-really getting into roleplaying. Things are being kept pretty simple and straight forward, following pre-planned adventures, but the notion of being in-character and interacting with one another (and using "voices" and playing characters that possess character quirks), it is all coming very easily to these kids.

As an example, this afternoon's game ended with the group going into a large town to an inn and the course of RPing between themselves and the GM towards the goal of getting rooms was hindered by the fact that one of the people in the party has a very low charisma. He's decided this is because he smells bad and is known to eat and smoke weird things. This hindrance was overcome by another of his party choosing to cast "Charm Person" on him to convince him to take a bath which he was refusing to take. He failed his saving throw and got a bath and the party got their rooms. And all of those kids were laughing and having a great time.

That's a pretty good feeling.

Perhaps something like:

xp/spend Prime=4, 8 XP/12 AXP

Designating a shorthand for Arcane XP (AXP)

Then if just using Arcane XP have it

xp/spend Prime=4, 24 AXP

@Coin said in MSB MU*?:

I learned Mage that way, too. @Fortunae was crazy good at explaining it, if you gave him time. Man does like to talk.

Like water is wet.

I feel the need to scream about this but that's not really an offline/real world option for me, in part because I have family & friends that I'm trying to give support to without piling more Feels upon them. (Insert various things about Adulting and responsibility.) So I'm going to vent instead in the hopes that this will serve as my screaming over the recent revelation of how one of my best friends (and a fellow gamer) turned out to be someone getting his kicks out of child pornography online and hanging out in chat rooms with others who roleplayed fantasies of sexually abusing children, potentially for the last year if not longer.

We had been friends for a little over 20 years. (He'd been friends with my husband since they were in 4th grade. Best friends even.) He was part of our TT (and one upon a time LARPing, and MUSHing) group, he was someone who would hang out with us regularly. Someone who helped us with home improvement projects. He & his ex wife (who is a close friend to us as well) would go on vacation with us sometimes. There's a lot of history there. We thought we knew him. And he knew us better than anyone, he knew that when I was a little girl I had been molested and my husband's job as a police officer is catching child predators online. He had also recently gotten engaged to a woman who has a teenage daughter. (Thankfully it's been determined he hadn't laid a hand on her.)

The evidence against him is significant at this point, and he'd admitted that he had the stuff and that he "had a problem" and didn't know how to ask for help. He has a hearing coming up in the coming week and it will be a question of how he chooses to plead. In the mean time I have been juggling a daily yoyo of anger and mourning.

I accept that I probably fall into the minority here of people who actually enjoyed the hell out of Iron Fist from start to finish. Because I honestly did. (Though I was honestly hoping that we'd see Harold Meachum go more beast-mode bad guy than we did. David Wenham as a badie, awww.... ) I enjoyed the details and the tie-ins to all the various storylines through-out this corner of the Marvel Universe. For example, I thought that the exploration of Harold's resurrections was interesting because we're bound to see Elektra return thanks to The Hand. (And it confirmed what Stick told Daredevil in the previous series, the only way to actually kill these people is by removing their head.) I found Danny to be appropriately "stumbling through the real world" as someone who is a bit out of touch since he'd been away from it for over a decade and then his experience was limited to the perspective of a child and clearly harboring some serious PTSD issues, my only big issue with him was how single-minded he was with "Gao killed my parents", but we never want to see the worst in the people standing right in front of us, in his case the Meachums.

I still like the fact that is wasn't so overwhelmingly depressing as the other Defenders were - Daredevil was an emotional yoyo, Jessica Jones hit a new level of "I might need therapy after I watch this that I hadn't experienced since I watched Torchwood: Children of Earth" and Luke Cage started out depressing for me post-Jessica Jones and honestly was my least favorite. (That's the series for me that I enjoyed the first half of the season perfectly well, but struggled to even make myself watch the rest of it.)

Since we're full of spoilers, I'll tell you that right now I strongly suspect that Gao is the actual Crane Mother, which if so would be pretty awesome. That she's pulling Davos' strings (and he's already the Steel Serpent) backing him up to charm Joy the rest of the way into the dark side (She's just as bat shit as her brother in that series, she just hid hers better all along. She's the full canister of bat shit in the comics, where there was no brother - Ward Meachum was her uncle in the comics.) and since Joy Meachum and the Steel Serpent partnered up all the time and were 2 of Iron Fist's major antagonists that's just set up for them to be the thorn in his side if Iron Fist gets a season 2.

I found the divisions within The Hand to be interesting, especially since some of the repercussions of The Incident are what created those opportunities and I do enjoy when all the corners of the MU line up together. My 2 cents, anyway.

I'll relay that to him. He tends to presume no one notices when he's not around, though he's been told otherwise often.

@7Wonders He doesn't really log in here and look at the boards but I can get a message to him. You're welcome to message if you don't want to post it to board.

Do/did you play in a tabletop game now or in the past?
I've played in tabletop games pretty regularly since 1986, when I was 12. Tabletop games for me, initially, were entirely family time. My mother remarried, my stepfather was a former Navy Seal who learned to play TT games in the Navy. We played TT twice a week, he & my mom, an uncle and as many of my siblings who wanted to play.

What games(s) do/did you play as tabletop?
AD&D
D&D (1 - 3.5 edition & 5th ed.)
Ravenloft
Greyhawk
Star Trek RPG (2nd Edition)
Call of Cthulhu
Castles & Crusades
Original WoD (1st & 2nd ed)
D20 System
Dangerous Journeys
Warhammer 40K
FATE
Warhammer Fantasy
Fantasy Craft
Rifts
Shadow Run
GURPS
nWoD
Star Wars D20
Lord of the Rings RPG
Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game
Pathfinder
(And at least half a dozen other systems that I'm not remembering right now.)

Are/were you the GM/ST/DM at your tabletop?
I have been in the past but primarily I play.

Would you tabletop if you had the opportunity?
If it is with people I want to game with, yes.

Do you have the opportunity but choose NOT to tabletop?
Not really, no.

Misc:
We do online TT, in large part because the TT groups that I have been actively a part of - most of the people involved in it have moved out of state or taken up jobs where scheduling a several hours long block of time would have been almost impossible. Our primary online TT meets everyone 2 weeks, using a combination of Skype and Fantasy Grounds (which is a great programe for online TT).

I think it might be down again, just FYI.

@Coin That sucks & I'm sorry that happened. (I'd lend you a bike, but I'm pretty sure distance getting it to you would be an issue.)

In the case of the challenge I did, if you accumulated so many steps you got your name into a drawing for prizes X-amount of times. I was pretty pleased with how many steps I did get, but yeah, I figured out a while ago that the amount of time/walking necessary to get way up there on steps. (And I try to avoid running, it tends to screw up one of my ankles if I get too ambitious which just makes it impossible for me to be active while I wait for it to recover.) I mostly just focus on the "Get 10,000 steps.", it's a bit of a competitive thing trying to keep up with my youngest brother (who had been in an ER residency so he was on his feet for 8+ hours a day). It is, at least, motivating to keep active for that alone generally.

Sadly I did not win any cool prizes for the Fitbit challenge at GenCon. I did, however, manage to walk between 13,000-15,000 steps a day for that 5 day stretch though, so at least I wasn't slacking.

Fitbit challenge for GenCon 2015 underway! If I'm lucky I'll win prizes by the end of it.

They put that out in time for GenCon, instead of one of the things I wanted to be put out... No thanks!

We had a pretty great routine down for exercise/eating well/getting enough sleep & then the SO went to 3rd shift which is playing havoc with pretty much everything. All things out the window as we try to figure out a new routine that's going to work. It's frustrating. Especially knowing that this routine is likely only going to last another 5 months, with our luck, and then find him switched to another shift.

He claims that he's not one of the clowns (with an "Or am I?!" to immediately follow), but I've seen makeup test shots of him all clowned up so there's no telling.

I'm really not, personally, but I have a friend who besides being an incredibly talented TT GM (He's done the Iron GM competition a couple times at GenCon.) and an overall awesome guy has an acting part in a film that's being promoted. He spent a chunk of time doing stunt work and low budget stuff, this is his "big break". Andrew Staton is his name, the movie is Clowntown and I'm supporting a fellow gamer in the pursuit of his RL passion: http://www.horror-movies.ca/2015/07/first-photos-details-clowntown/#.VahKv95kIKo.facebook

@Gingerlily said:

But I am on vacation, so Target, put the pencils BACK until August. Nobody wants to see that. Nobody wants a backpack or a schoolbox. LEAVE US BE.

We go back to school on August 5th. We're on what they refer to as an "extended year calendar" where the public schools here start the first part of August and go through the first few days of June. And since I have to budget all the stuff needed for return to school into other costs of summer (Almost $400 spent towards summer marching band! Plus the pending $300 book fees I'll have coming.) this is the month I start having to buy that stuff to get ready.

@BallisticOrange safeharbor.mooo.com port 9100