Hello there, Internet! Somewhat long time, and, uh. . . infinitely no see. One of these days we should do a webcam thing so that we can rectify that. UNTIL THEN, though, you will have to make due with our wondrous vocal patterns. Listen to these MP3s while looking at the spectral view. It’ll blow your mind, seriously.
Wow, that got off-topic fast. In any case, do we have some news for you:
First and foremost, the Sordid Dystopia Kickstarter is doing amazingly well. I applaud all of you who are backing us presently. I never expected us to reach our initial funding goal in under a day, or twice our funding goal in under a week, and I never expected us to be talking about reaching almost triple our funding goal before this project ended. Seriously, you guys are the best.
Second, Nate and I did a roundtable discussion of Monsters and Other Childish Things with one Ross Payton. He apparently does a roleplaying podcast too. We’re going to be in their 70th Episode “There’s Monsters in the School, Tom.” The episode isn’t yet out, but it should be out shortly after this episode goes live. I figured I just needed to get the word out on this Role Playing Public Radio show Ross and his friend Tom do.
Thirdly, Nate got us all into the Little Fears Nightmare Edition recently. We’ve played 8 sessions of a campaign composed of prefab adventures from the books, the Campfire Tales series, and things that we’ve written ourselves. It’s shaping up to be a pretty rad set of things and hopefully it’ll be totally awesome when it gets posted here eventually. What this means for your right now is that we have a whole bunch of Little Fears goodies for every one of our listeners:
- Nate recently wrote a scenario for a contest run by Little Fears superfan Jack O’Tears. The theme of the contest was Duality, and Nate wrote a whole adventure about a Monster and a child who complete each other. You can get the adventure here or go to the Little Fears Facebook Group and take it from there. It had to be fairly short, so be prepared to improv or write a couple things and make it your own for your group. He also ran a quick playtest of it and we will be posting the AP to our site somewhere in the next few weeks.
- I wrote up a complete dice roller for Little Fears’ Top 3 system. It automatically rolls, sorts, and totals your Top 3 results, calculates passing grades, accounts for penalties or bonuses, and even fits the conditional statements “It’s easy for me to. . . when. . .” and “It’s hard for me to. . . when. . .” You can check it out here and save it via right click and “Save As”
- Sam will be running a Call of Cthulu scenario, wherein the players are grad students checking out a strange trend in the South Carolina Marshes.
- Nate will be running a Little Fears Nightmare Edition scenario set in Mrs Frieda’s Halfway Home. The characters will be kids between the ages of 6 and 12 and do things that will be canon to the universe.
- I will be running a Monsters and Other Childish Things scenario that I am still planning out at this time.
- Charlie will be running Sordid Dystopia.
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You’ve provided literal days of entertainment for free. Road trip alone is 2 days 3 hours and 3 minutes long (from 0-18). The least I can do is give you a few buck for a project you’re working on.
What Lucek said. I don’t think I would have made it through some of these later engineering classes without you guys’ wacky, zany and slightly demented form of humor keeping me “sane.” Plus you guys came on the radio show, increasing our cool points, and giving it some internet cred. I figure the least I could do is give Nate a few bucks so his baby can get off the ground.
I can only agree with Lucek and Travis before me. It feels nice to be able to support someone´s work and hopefully play a small part in its success. So its a small way to say thanks.
After listening to the Sordid Dystopia sessions and reading about it as well, I have decided to pick up my old project of writing my own RPG. And following that I have a few questions for your next Newsies cast.
Nate, do you have any advice to someone writing an RPG?
When you started out with the ruleset, did you do any calculations on it? I sat the other day myself counting percentile chances of a success the other day in the system that I am working on and it can end up being an aweful lot of math. But I am fairly sure that I have something that could be interesting. It still requires alot of work but the basic way to roll a check is fairly set.
Have any of the rest of you thought of or worked on a game as well?
How important do you feel it is that the rules of a game match the setting? I personally feel that sometimes the rules seem to be more of an afterthought that got added once a setting had been written.
And for a final question. How do you all feel about rulesets that have a, lets say binary way of dealing with challenges. Either you succeed or you dont compared to one with more of a sliding scale? Hope that question made sense.
Best regard
Claes
I’ve worked on a game on and off for about a year now. A few things I’ve learned. Yes rules should be for the setting. The feel of a game is greatly influenced by rules. A good example is the difference between rolling 1D6, adding 2D6 together, and taking the better of 2D6. the first feels very heroic where crits are common, the next the player will fell more average, and the final one the player will feel super. Obviously sticking the third rolling mechanic in a setting where people are supposed to feel helpless or scared is counter productive.
Unless of course you’re running a system where you are trying to roll UNDER a target number. But then the players will call you mean names while they are making their third or fourth new character.
Wait I didn’t agree to run a session. And why are you playing Grad students.
I do Delta Green or 1920’s CoC not normal people stuff!!!
I mean come on I have to make a CoC session for you guys after I already put so much work into the one I sent you.
Also Nate…. If your Kickstarter went on for just 3more days I could guarantee $20 up to $50(Long story) Oh well I’ll just send you some candles shaped like bowling balls and fertilizer in a box with a car battery.
Anyways News.
Yes Math can be hard and high five for engineering degrees! (Technically Chemical Engineering but yeah)
I thought that good friend was going to be me for a second
I optimize numbers like a spider catches flies. Its natural even with flaws I make a character who is effectively a math equation to others
All your characters pout Nate
Nate is mentally healthier then most gamers…
Its a piece of her sword Nate that needs to be treated. One of my players had a blind girl in our 1session, and her monster gave her echolocation, sonar etc. No Nate your going to a deep end!
Time Travel is always a win win situation. I pick Leadbot cause I’d upgrade him with terminator kill systems
Cause Red blocks the wavelength of ghosts. And ghosts run off the internet and magic(To people that watch Phelous)
Nate loves his canon like a Power Ranger fan. Mask is a great game you guys should play it… I see Nate dieing 1session in
But but good friend. What about Sam what about me Nate, Sam, etc. I thought you guys loved me 🙁
Yeah wait Sam & Sam should totally Dm/Gm together! Think of what we can do! I bring the crazy you bring the horror and then we dine!
No it has to be canon so we can be like of lets go find the 1001things.
…Never mind I won that bet far earlier than I expected. It seems luck was on my side. So enjoy that money.
…Do we get to make are characters for the CoC session is my only question.
Because that influences who/what I pick
Wait, you mean we have to choose which games we want to be in? Gah! Excuse me while I’m wracked with indecision…
In the meantime, I haven’t asked any questions in a while! Here, have a few:
Okay so you talked about your favorite characters that you’ve played. Now what about the ones that didn’t work out so well? I’ve played a few characters that I was initially excited about, but then something just went wrong somewhere. Have you ever played a character that you got bored with or just realized that you weren’t clicking with the concept?
Have you ever been the perpetrator or victim of any variation of a “Henderson”? (explanation of the term in this link: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_Henderson_Scale_of_Plot_Derailment) tldr version is a player action causing the campaign to have to at best be altered forever, at worst it results in “rocks fall, everybody dies.”
Along those same lines…. Do you have any horrifying and/or hilarious “That Guy” stories? You know, a player whose actions trolled the game even if it was done unknowingly. Some of my experiences include a guy who was out to “win” D&D at all costs, and an M&M character who had the power to summon several thousand clones of fetish model Bianca Beauchamp at will, in a fairly serious campaign (yes the GM allowed this concept).
Thanks for being most excellent guys, looking forward to playing with you in the near future.
Playing with you…in a game that is… over skype… um, double entendres ftw.
I think that MaOCT’s session ran with my normal group would count as 1.25Hendersons.
Still can’t decide.
If that Monsters Session was canon I’d jump on it like… I got nothing.
But sadly not so I’m flip flopping between playing with Sam and Nate. To finally play Little Fears which I want or CoC and see what chaos, I mean comedic bouts of sociopath behavior may come about.
I was in a 2 Full Hendersons and not only was it the end of the plot and game it was the end of the group and one relationship. So I guess that’s actually a 2.25 or possibly a 2.5?
oh and $1,610. How then hell are you going to spend it all?
$2,165 (Drops jaw)
basic question again!
in the older sessions of Road Trip, in the Sucrose Park/Sunnyvale days, the kids encounter a bed and breakfast that had a shady man who was seemingly blown to shit by MIB’s. the kids took it at face value and left it alone, but I found some older recordings of the other Road Trip group (the one with the centipede, Bahamutt and the gentleman lion), and they seemed to run into the same guy
what’s the deal with that guy? was it a sidestory the PCs didn’t pursue so it was brushed aside? or a reference to something I didn’t recognize?