h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Amazing how important three little keys can be, isn't it?

OK, here's how I see it. While the chat room sounds like fun, it may be a little impratical - simply because we are in different time-zones... The e-mail sounds interesting, although it does put a crimp on initiative... Hmmm... How 'bout this - at least for combats:

The situation is presented. Players role their initiative and tell the GM what it is, along with their first action. The GM takes the initiatives and put the actions into order, then emails the results back to the players. This goes on until the combat is over. For other situations - negotiation, role-playing and the like - we can just have the players send their reactions to the GM and once again, he/she will send the results back to all players. How does that work for everyone?

Finally, thanks kats-eyes! I'd be more than happy to run Shadowrun, if that's what everyone wants. I'll start work on my entry tonight, so that everyone can see what its like and start characters - if that is what they want to do.

Your scheme for playing sounds ok with me. But I don't KNOW Shadowrun.

Ok, then here it is


After our venture into the temple, we stayed the night on top of it and took a nap... until we were woken up by noises from inside. We went back in to investigate, and found a man in a room that had been empty before: Fate was the name, and he played a game!

The rules were very simple: wish for something, speak your wish, and Fate (a D100 roll) will decide whether your wish comes true or is reversed, and if it comes true, what (if any) side-effects there might be. Some of the choices were: increase your stats, increase wealth, increase magic, such kind of things...
You remember the wise guy? Hehehe, he did it again... he started gambling (whenever there was an opportunity to gamble, this silly ape always WOULD ).

The Munk wished wealth and we got it, we ended up with much more gold than we could carry, because he kept at it for at least 10 turns without losing!
I wished for better stats two times, and my Strength went up to 20, while my Intelligence reached 19 (normally I had 18/65 and 17), but I lost some Charisma and Wisdom over it (that's not real bad for an Elven Fighter-Mage, is it? Strength and Intelligence were my primaries, and they were awsome!).
The Fighter wanted better stats, and got Strength 20 without ill side-effects.
The Munk went for money again, and he vanished.
I wanted him back, and Fate decided that I switched places with him (I found myself in HELL).
The Fighter didn't want to play anymore...
The Munk wanted more money again, and he lost life a second time. Now two of us were dead because his greed.
Then our Fighter, normally quite stupid, did the best wish ever, and was lucky: He wished we had never met Fate, the cards ended up in his favor without too much side-effects...

We found ourselves outside the temple, waking up in a sandstorm which had covered up the treasures we had found before our encounter with Fate (the rest was lost ofcourse), and needed to dig for them again. Our stats were as before... after all, we never met Fate

The Munks gambling habit has brought trouble on us many times after that... believe me, he would never learn, but at least he played his role consistenly, and he was real fun to play with

Later I was really happy that we didn't get away with all the wishes, fun is lost when players become too powerful too soon. We already had been traveling a long time, and the things we found in the temple were the first real big treat at that time. so they were well-earned. But Fate was a bit too much...

I *like* the idea of a Fate character! That's even better than a Deck of Many Things - one of my favorite artifacts. and it sounds like the fighter ended up making the best wish possible, given the situation. The loss of the gold is regrettable, but not too much so, for you wouldn't have been able to carry it anyway. Hmmm... Interesting concept...

As for not knowing Shadowrun, I'll start my entry shortly, so that you can see if you like it. If not, then D&D is always a choice as well. I'm not picky!

Well, personally, I'm all for AD&D. It's always been my favorite, anyway. I'm okay with an E-Mail game, but like I said: I don't check it that often.

Skeleton: Primary stats above 16, and you don't like it when characters get powerful too early? Isn't that a little contradictory? Just curious... Most of the games I've played, stats were rolled 3d6 seven times, drop the lowest stat. Yeah, some of us had 16 or 17 strengths, or wisdoms, or whatever, but mostly we had 12's and 13's and such, if not lower. What's up with that?

I've DM'd a couple of times, and I wouldn't mind doing it again, but not on a regular basis. Gw7en, if this turns into an all out campaign, do you think I could run a couple of games? (That is, if you're going to DM.)

If I do get chosen, then yes, Gildor, you can guest DM. In fact, if I get chosen *anyone who wants to* can guest DM. (Every once in a while the writer's block sets in and it would be *wonderful* to be able to turn the reins over occassionally!)

Well, that's one solid vote for Shadowrun, tied with one solid vote for D&D. At this time, I will remain silent, seeing as I am willing to run or play in either one. Any other votes?

Now that you mention it... the Deck of Many Things was the artifact Fate actually used! I forgot about that detail completely. Anyway, our GM must have changed some things to his liking, as GM's go

Yeah, Wilco (who played the Fighter) did actually do best at that moment, he played only twice, and with his second wish he undid all the harm the Munk had been causing us by just wishing Fate away at all. I admired his clear thinking at that particular moment, because if he had worded his wish a bit wrong, things could have gone very poorly

I'll await you announcement on the Shadowrun entry eagerly.

Hi Gildor!

About the Primary stats: with 3d6 these numbers CAN be made, as you may be aware. Such stats have nothing to do with experience, either.

There were only three of us, and the game was intended for a much larger party originally, so our GM allowed us a bit of freedom when rolling our stats. He allowed us to roll 6 times, and then assign the values to the requisites as we saw fit. You can expect that one is then to place the values such that the prime requisite for their favorite class is as high as possible, right? We also had 9's 10's and 11's in our stats, but not in our primaries. We wouldn't have survived the bunch of desert nomads on our first mission, if we were that weak...

And if you knew what we were up against most of the times, it wasn't all that unreasonable in the end. What I meant with too powerful was only the effect of what Fate brought us. If you have a Fighter of Strength 20 AND a Fighter-Mage of Strength 20 and Intelligence 19, they are already almost Godlike. That's a bit overboard when you're somewhere in your 5th level of experience.

If a player reaches the highest levels of experience, and then is granted such powers or gains them by way of some Awesome Feat of Heroism, yeah ok, that I can agree with... We just wanted to work hard, but not try the impossible

Normally we would already need to fight against awesome odds, since most of our opponents had armies to their disposal. We needed to use wits above all else and create our own strategies in order to divide the enemy into small groups that we would be able to handle. But even then, exhaustion and the occasional wound will in the end amount to death if you don't have something to compensate for the number of opponents to handle. And everytime we survived such a battle, our next opponent would be prepared for the scheme we used the last time.

We once had to fight an army of over 100 Barbarians (from the Oriental AD&D series), and they had two great Wizards in their midst. At that time we had the help of only 2 NPC's, so we were outnumbered 20:1 and no help on the way for us, because we were in a hostile country. I needed the 'silver Dragon-scale armour', the 'Bastard Sword of Dancing', the 'Night Cap' (a leather cap, especially crafted for me by my own specifications, which enabled me to cast Silence and Darkness like a 3rd level caster, with a total max of 3 castings a day) AND my good stats. And the same was true for my companions, who didn't get it easy either.

Oh, I know, to the eye of the average player we did indeed look like Gods, maybe... I would agree that we wouldn't fit in with most other parties anywhere around the world. But we've been in some tight spots too, where we lost all hopes of getting out.

At the moment I would vote AD&D as well, but I'm prepared to wait for the description of Shadowrun too.

Anyone ever played Changeling?

Well, I've got the start of the Shadowrun entry up. Its no where near complete, but it should give you an idea what the games like! Let me know what you think.

Skeleton:

I didn't mean to sound snotty or arrogant (which I do without realizing it sometimes...) but I've had some experience playing with people who make these "Too Cool Characters" all the time. It's a real pisser when the Fighter with 18/00 strength (of course, that's what all this player's Fighters have) drags off your Halfling Thief, saying "We're going this way." I know what game conditions you're talking about, though, and I understand. I had a DM who was running some players and I in a Giants campaign, where that's all we were facing: Giants. He ran the game so well, that even at 15th level he had to drop magical weapons for us. My Thief ended up with this short sword named "Backbiter." Among other attributes, it gave its wielder a multiplier _to their backstab multiplier_ of x2. A 15th level Thief normally has a x5 multiplier: now he had x10. A bit much in normal circumstances, but these were tough Giants!

Understand my incredulity, and forgive me?

I've not had the best of luck with White Wolf, personally. I have looked at Changeling, though, and it seems to be the best of the lot. Definitely something that I want to try, if only to say that I have...

Bought the first edition, didn't bother with the second edition. For one thing, even given the World of Darkness setting, the game concentrated mostly on the encroachment of banality and hopelessness, when in my opinion Changeling would have better been made into a game about preserving hope and laughter and childhood and innocence. Granted that I could have always run a game like that, It still turned me off and made me NOT want to play it. Secondly, White Wolf was just getting a little tired for me at that point.

I take it that you have played it. What did you think?

I know that I'm late in this. However I would love to play if you have an opening. I have been both a player and DM in AD&D and I have played Traveler and Paranoia.

The group I was playing with disbanded due to marriages and moves, and I have been longing to get back into it.

This sounds great!!!!!!

Courtesy

As far as I'm concerned, you're welcome to join us! I don't know whether the debate over which game we're going to play has ended yet, but when it does, I'm sureyou'll know!

A fellow Paranoia player, eh! I haven't played that game in a very long time, but I loved it! A friend of mine used to run it in college, and he killed off 87 clones in one evening. That's our record. What's yours?

Hi Gildor!

I didn't think of your message as snotty or arrogant at ANY point, believe me... You couldn't have known what we were up against at that time Therefor, you've done nothing that you need to be forgiven for

I agree, some players are never happy about their character, unless it has everything at maximum strength, and some DM's don't know how to handle that. Our DM however, knew beforehand that his game was too heavy for three standard characters, so he allowed us a bit of freedom... And he wasn't all too happy about us throwing so many high stats-rolls either... I had Str 18/65, Dex 18, Con 16, Int 16 (the 17 was an error), Wis 11, Cha 13. (I didn't put the second 18 at Int, but at Dex, as you can see, because I believed that to be more profitable )

We even went a bit further: we added the non-weapon skills into the game, and a learning system of our own, to allow for the party to learn some things that would otherwise have been impossible for us to do. Imagine: I could have learned mountaineering, and use it to climb SOME walls (not all), which normally only a thief could have climbed.
Not that I ever did it actually, but I could have, if I wanted to

We could also use Dual-weapon fighting. In fact, I was carrying three swords all the time: the Bastardsword of Dancing, a normal bastard sword, and a longsword. I would start a fight with the magical sword, and as soon as the first HIT was scored, it would break free of my hand and continue the fight against that same opponent all by itself (using MY values for hit and damage), and then I would draw both normal swords and attack a different character.

I really was a walking weaponry, especially because I also was quite proficient on most types of bows.

When our fighter-player left the game, our DM even altered the line of history a little bit to account for his disappearance. The fighter had been kidnapped during the night, but his equipment was left lying around. Then we hired an NPC, who could wear the giant-strength bracelet (It would have been too much, if I had worn that thing )

The game you played in would have been hard even for us We never reached 15th level, because gameplay halted when the DM moved out of town. At that time we were at skill-levels between 7 and 10, my own character as a 7th level Fighter, 8th level Mage.

Backstabbing would have had absolutely no effect against my character, because I was blessed with the posession of a "cloak of back-protection" which totally negated back-stabs, and gave a +1 bonus to armour and saving throws. And my armour already added a +1 to saves For that cloak I had to kill a 9th level Thief/Mage, when I was at 6th/7th myself

On the other hand: to gain new spells, I couldn't rely on gaining levels of experience only. I also had to fight stronger magicians and find their spellbooks. And then I had to hope that the spellbook was documented in a language that I could read, and contained spells of a realm that suited my character... if not: tough luck!

The wagon that I posessed, was a small library, containing over 40 books, only 3 of which were useful to me as a source for new spells. The others were mostly impossible for me to decipher (yet), but most of them possibly didn't even hold spells but were just written in different languages. There was no way for me to know for sure.
In the end I even owned 15 horses (all my own), which were used by the whole party (I could order 6 NPC's around)

Oops... this message has grown a bit too long I believe

Well, it seems to have quieted down around here. Hope that nothing's wrong.

I'm thinking that its looking like AD&D is the game of choice right now. I've got a bit of a campaign worked up that I think you guys will enjoy - if you're still up for having me run it. Perhaps we can do a one-shot Shadowrun at some point to see how everyone feels about it later. How does that sound?

I've set up a special e-mail box for the game and think that we might want to at least get started in coming up with characters. That way, those of you who will be away from your computers for the holidays can take the time to create characters and we can start playing sometime soon after the New Year begins. So, the first step as I see it is figuring out who is playing. If you are interested, please e-mail me at [email protected] from the e-mail address you'd like me to respond to. I'll send you my basic guidelines for creating characters - not much different than any others I've heard, and if you've got a way you prefer to use over mine,my feelings will not be hurt.

For the sake of getting this thing going, I'd like to get the e-mails from you as soon as possible. I know that this can be a rough time of year, but how 'bout this: I'd like to hear from the players by Dec. 31. I will check my e-mail at 19:00 MST (-7 GMT) every night, as well as various times during the day. Once you have created the characters, I'd like to have a look at thm. Please e-mail them to the same address above. I will provide you each with some information for your character - such as where they are from and some local mythos, just so you can get a good feel for the world. Once you have this information, you can create any character history that you want. I would, naturally, like to see this as well, just so I can understand you as both the player and the character better. After I have everyone's characters and history, we can start.

Let me know if this works for you, or if there are any questions that you have. I'm really excited about this opportunity and look forward to gaming with you soon! Thanks all!

I'm there... Oh, Hell yeah!

Lemme know if you have any problems with the e-mail address. I tested it this weekend, so it should work, but... You know how it is, I'm sure!