Grim_

Since we're all sharing details like that, all I'm going to say is that I went to a LARP. You should try it some time.

Name: Joseph Rader Date of Birth: 1960 Nationality: American Home Country: America Where are you: Generic low cost hotel in london waiting to do an add pitch for a high profile client. Why you are where you are: Joe is, to put it bluntly a professional liar; or in more favorable terms an add man. He works at generic firm as a partner in the business and is the highest ranking member of the away team, that is to say the people who pitch adds to clients in different countries. He rose through the ranks of the firm through a solid mixture of talent and subterfuge (of which little is suspected) and is one of the few great examples of a self made man (he attended night school for a couple of years rather than a full on university education) and has a gift for telling people exactly what they want to hear, regardless of its veracity.

I am Grim; I am or was one of the resident GMs of the tavern and I probably have the largest collection of game systems. I am willing and capable of running the following systems (well, if and when I have the time): Pathfinder rpg (think bog standard DnD), Dark Heresy (horror game in the 41st millenium) and most FATE based systems (damned near any setting with a heavy narrative twist), though my preference would be against Pathfinder. I am also the only member of the tavern who partakes in tabletop wargaming at all, and I run a blood angels warhammer 40k army. When I GM I wield the machine gun of overwhelming force loaded with bullets of Gm [bleep]ery to ensure encounters are handled in ways different than "I run screaming towards the enemy". If you need most any rpg book, I will either have it uploaded already, be willing to upload it from my collection or can find it and then upload it.

Have you actually read through any of the rule books? If you attempt to do the impossible you will fail. The impossible obviously changes in relation towards your power level. I will agree that the experience and skills system in the later additions of DnD are flawed, however your example is hardly much better, in general you will learn something faster, more efficiently and more completely with some sort of guidance. In dungeoneering the GM could do whatever the hell they wanted within the framework of the rules because the rules set was never shown to the players (at least to my knowledge there wasn't one) and it ran on the GM's total whim. At least with an existing and known ruleset you have some insulation towards GM [bleep]ery (not total, that much I can guarantee). EDIT: Another option would be to go the classic gygaxian murder-hobo adventurer route and create a mildly homogeneous party of mercs who can't stand an honest days work.

You are not you and neither are you some divine will guiding your character, the whole point of role playing is to put yourself in the position of the character, who will generally have some rather large differences from you (Ex Juan the Gangster wizard, Salvador Malvora psychic vampire, KROMGOL barbarian, etc.). You don't see rules for most of those things in DnD (which incidentally probably shouldn't be the gold standard) because you don't need rules for everything. That and sculpting cities takes a fairly large amount of power (if you're not going to use slave labor, but that's a whole different ball game).

And I would suppose dungeoneering and the like (which as I recall you participated in without complaint) are so much better? If you're pissed off at the lack of soft roleplaying games out here in the tavern I have a simple solution for you; run one yourself, or stop complaining.

There's the spirit of the century srd, which is fairly similar to the ruleset that I am most familiar with, that is to say the dresden files rpg (also FATE based). http://www.faterpg.com/dl/ (The various spirit of the century srds are under FATE 3.0).

It's most of the system. There's generally a list of skills/powers/stunts (though stunts/powers can be homebrewed) and you can do a couple more things with aspects that I didn't fully cover. The magic system that I'm familiar with is also slightly more complex, but that's the gist of the system. It's not so much GM driven as collaborative and that will depend upon the GM in question's style.

Hell this whole discussion is one of the reasons why I seriously prefer FATE based games. Retech, you talk about customization in Pathfinder/3.X, but with a bit of creativity you can make damned near any type of character under the sun simply by changing your aspects a bit. In FATE you have four categories of things that are important to your character and they are: Refresh: You have a number of points that can be spent on either stunts or powers. These also can be used to get automatic FATE points at the start of every session. Your refresh may not drop below one. Stunts/powers: These allow for bonuses in regards to one type of skill or using one skill instead of another in certain situations (in the case of stunts) or allow for powers (like spellcasting, supernatural strength, shapeshift, etc.) Skills: Skills cover everything from combat (guns, weapons, fists, might), to social encounters (discipline, presence, rapport, deceit), to magic (your discipline, lore and conviction) and everything else under the sun (investigation, burglary, driving, etc.) Aspects: Your aspects are what makes your character your character. You have a set number of them (in most systems at least) and they reflect who your character is. Rather than saying my character Juan the wizard has contacts and resources 4 so he should be able to call upon those gangsters for help, you would say my character has the aspect "In roads with every gangster in the city" and I'm going to pay a FATE point to invoke it. You can invoke your aspects at the cost of a FATE point to gain a +2 bonus on a roll (this doesn't seem like much, but keep in mind that the maximum bonus you can get with the dice used is +4 off of your skill, and that's highly unlikely), or to get a reroll. Your aspects may also be compelled by the GM (or yourself) to make you do something in keeping with the aspect (Like having Juan be unable to deny knowing a gangster that committed murder) and if you accept the compel you gain FATE point. You may also spend a FATE point to resist the compel if you so desire. Players can also invoke aspects that are not of their character (like say an NPC has the aspect "quick to anger" you could spend a FATE point gain a +2 bonus at an intimidation test and piss him off at you) or on the area itself (like invoking the aspect "flickering shadows" to gain a +2 bonus on a stealth roll). That is the gist of the system.

Seeing as I have slightly more free time than anticipated (and have my gming duties taken care of currently) I would be willing to try to restart the pathfinder dungeon a week thing. However, if I do so, I will be channeling gygax so to speak.

These are the only two pictures of this girl (who goes by the name of marcelo de Chirico iirc) that I could find, tineye didn't turn up too much for the name either.

Dark Heresy, its one of the 40k rpgs, I run sessions twice a week (part of a deal with another GM in my group who is running the Dresden Files rpg) and am currently putting various teams of acolytes through the vetting process, which means that I try to make tpks (or very close to that) every session, with a new set of characters next session. After enough characters have survived to make a team of acolytes they then will go on to the more social aspect of the game. The mission I was talking about was when a team of acolytes was sent to investigate the disappearance of a ship, which was taken over, in one form or another, by a Nurgle worshiping cult (I had them dead of apathy [a skill check showed that their hearts had simply stopped beating] long before the acolytes came aboard the ship). They had a servitor guide that lead them around, and finally to a "new xeno that we are studying" which was locked behind a grate (all the players could see was several yellow green eyes, the servitor then proceded to start to open the gate and released the beast, which chased the players slowly for a fair bit of the session (in a true nurglesque fashion) before eventually having its head blown apart by a crit (damn it). Then a bit more tracking and they came to the bridge, where they found the caged and warped bridge crew/captain of the ship, as well as the data slate. At this point they triggered a trap that released strange green spores into the air and reanimated all of the corpses as plague zombies, oh and the cages were retracted. For some reason, they grabbed the data slate on the table before getting the hell out of there. After a long chase (and most of them being killed) the sole surviving member managed to escape on the shuttle they came in on. This all resulted in the ship being blown the [bleep] up by the Inquisition.

Pfft, that's decent villain diary material, after the PCs have raided the villains workshop filled with misshapen horrors, they find a data slate with a diary like that, bonus points if the corpses left behind slowly start reanimating into plague zombies, hell even more if a couple of the "creations" are still alive and assault/burst into explosions of highly virulent pus; I think I've been running DH a bit too much.

You. Okay, that was uncalled for. Possibly, but she A) walked right into that one, and B ) kind of deserved that for that comment.

Aside from being too lazy to make your writing moderately easy to comprehend to a reader. I believe we have had this argument before with earth, it's not that hard to use a damned spell check (hell most every browser has one built in) and it really does help with making you look vaguely intelligent. Also with repetition you will learn the correct spelling of various words that crop up regularly in daily writing, thus speeding up your writing speed. All in all, it's simply about how much effort you're willing to put into your writing to make it easy to understand, you don't have a spelling problem, you have a problem of not putting any damned effort into making yourself understood.

I have this stuck in my head, and now so will you.

Theoretically I would dump the body (weighted of course) into international waters, a less than ideal idea would be to theoretically dismember the body and then theoretically either feed it to dogs (or whatever other animals you might have on hand) or simply put them in baggies filled with a lye or similarly caustic solution and bury them separately. That, or make hamburgers. On a completely unrelated note, find out where you stand on the political spectrum (it's slightly more legal than murder!) with THE POLITICAL COMPASS ! It's slightly more accurate than a drunken polygraph test, or Chinese water torture (used as an interrogation method, keep your sick fetishes out of this)! Find out if you're a commie bastard or a randian sociopath only concerned about your appetites! You can see which historical figures you are most like! And here's an example of a completed test.

Now about that liquor store down the street...

The French authorities in Avignon are horrified at the proposition of the so called muslim empire who would think to play god, that they would think that they knew better than the almighty, that they would think, in their nigh upon infinite folly that they could create heaven. Cloning may be fair in man's eyes, but know that in the eyes of god you are judged upon a different set of scales. -Pope Gregory XVI (whee that was fun, I see why some people like to make arguments like that).

Just an interesting note to nex, there's call of cthulhu d20 as well as the percentile dice system (which might be what you're looking for, I don't know ) though they might be a bit more brutal (as in Dark Heresy, an online character generator is a plus) than what the tavern as a whole is used to, and people who make self inserts only to have them sacrificed to the black goat with a thousand young might not take it that well, but hey, that's horror for you; after all it wouldn't be horror if you couldn't die.

Well, for one thing it allows you to spend your .5 tech pp on something other than space (like, say production which will help offset the cash penalties) or space to get a large advantage in that regard, while still staying competitive overall; as for the cash situation, I have no sympathy for you (whee -.8 bonus, really -.7 but I digress)

Ehh, I personally don't like d20 too much and much prefer some other alternatives; like a bell curve system (found in FATE, certain d6 games and the like), percentile dice (found in Call of Cthulhu, the 40k/Fantasy rpgs and certain others) and dicepools (to a degree, the amount of dice you can use in shadowrun seems a bit excessive to me). All I'm saying is, there's options out there other than generic d20.

If you want a decent horror game I suggest Call of Cthulhu or some such game (don't rest your head is awesome, google it).

Right, posting National Idea: les étoiles sont français (the stars are french) +.3 space tech pp The Nation of France recruits three brigades of infantry and starts le societé nationale de l'espace (The national Space Society) which is given 10 cash and 1500 manpower a turn for the next ten turns. Research is to be done as follows: 75 into space research (dedicated space research) 100 into production research (dedicated production research) 100 more into production research (free to use tech) 7 into space research 25 into space research Totals into 107/200 into space research 200/200 into production Cash: 10 Manpower: 116,000

Since no one else is going, it looks like I'll go next.