Anyone playing D&D (or other RPGs) these days?

Everything else
1

Who’s got an ongoing tabletop RPG campaign going? Tell us about it and/or your character. D&D optional, any game will suffice.

I recently started a new 4.0 campaign with some local folks I’ve known since college. This is the second try I’ve had at 4.0 and I’ve been much happier with this campaign than the last one. 4.0 still feels a little scripted with regards to character development, but it is certainly a lot easier to work with than 3.5.

Anyway, I’ve got an Elven Avenger of the Raven Queen who is pretty much a glass cannon. I teleport all over the battlefield doing lots of damage to the squishy mages and big targets alike, but as soon as I get focussed on I drop pretty quickly. We just recently completed an adventure which culminated in a battle with an adult green dragon, who we intimidated into leaving its lair forever. It was cool.

So geek out with me. Who’s got stories?

2

I’ve got a regular 4e D&D game with the same guys I’ve played with weekly since the early 90s. We are on our third 4e campaign after a few attempts got abandoned and we are finally starting to appreciate the subtleties of 4e. The bitching and unfavorable comparisons with 3e have mostly stopped.

I just finished taking a ranger up to 13th level in an accelerated XP campaign which was giving me a level a week. It was a little fast as I was sometimes getting new powers and not even getting a chance to really play with them until the next level. Still it was fun to play around with a paragon character for the first time. I then got to play a 13th level sorcerer in a one-shot throwaway adventure and that was even more fun. Sorcs are silly with lots of unpredictable randomness that I really enjoyed.

3

We alternate weekly between Spirit of the Century and Star Wars Saga Edition. Before, we alternated between D&D 3.5 and Champions, and before that, between Shadowrun and Runequest.

4

I’d love to play some new D&D online via IRC with calculating programs or some kind of interface. I’m kinda itching to try out the new system. I don’t have any D&D friends near me so I don’t get to play anymore, and haven’t played since 3rd Ed in college.

5

I’m playing a 4e campaign with some friends. It’s my first D&D experience, and we’ve only played a handful of times so far. Very enjoyable thus far.

6

This makes me homesick for my old D&D home group, we used to drink tea, and play well into the night. Now that we’re all old and stuff we don’t play any more. I still miss it though, I wanted to get my paladin into a few more scenarios.

7

I’m running a game right now, with 5 players. Since we only have 3 hours to play every other week, our sessions are either all roleplay, 2 combats, or some roleplay and 1 combat. Combat takes too long in 4e, because there are too many combatants with too many options.

It really needs to be automated with a computer. Shuffling 20 papers, 4 books, piles of minis, drawing AoEs on the map, and tracking a dozen conditions with different expiration are so much work. I’ve delegated half the combat duties to my players, one guy tracks initiatives with delays and triggers, another tracks conditions, and another moves minis on the board for me so I don’t have to get up.

8

I run a bi-weekly D&D 4e game here in KC, as well as playing in Matt “the poster formerly known as Kid Socrates” Bowyer’s D20 Final Fantasy campaign over IRC.

The party in my D&D campaign is a fun bunch of tactically-minded guys who (surprisingly) manage to avoid min-maxing in favor of actual fun. They’ve just hit paragon tier, and are having a great time on their way to liberating a hobgoblin capital city from its storm giant oppressors.

Avengers are indeed glass cannons - our paladin of the Raven Queen took the avenger multiclass feat for the once-per-encounter Oath of Enmity ability that comes in rather handy when the chips are down. We joke that he’s basically Medieval Jack Bauer, and when he figured out how to use a Leomund’s Secret Chest ritual as his “portable Guantanamo”, I think he earned the title.

9

I play 3.5e and Pathfinder (which is basically 3.75e). We actually have the first game of our new campaign tomorrow night. I am really looking forward to it. I will probably write an AAR for the forums, as my character is the main character of the campaign.

10

It’s still better than 3e. My group has picked up speed in 4e overall. 3e encouraged readies and delays and playing games with the initiative. We had people who would to this every single round so they could get their trip or disarm or whatnot in at the most advantageous instant. In 4e there’s generally no incentive to do that crap unless something odd has happened, so most people just hit something on their turn and the play marches on.

Tracking all the effects and saves is a nuisance though.

11

Yeah, that’s me. I’ve been running a homebrew Final Fantasy d20 game since 2004 for four players. We went down to three when one went to law school, took a year and change off, and then got back into it last June. The game’s gone for almost 150 sessions, plus a lot of smaller solo sessions or smaller group stuff. While it started in-person, we shifted to IRC as schedules and life demands changed, and now we run with a dice-roller script, as well as background music (every FF game has music!) and generally fun is had by all.

The system itself started out as a smattering of 3.5 with Final Fantasy names grafted onto it, and then that changed and got more streamlined as time went on and I re-geared the game for my players, who aren’t the tactical battle type but are the flashy special effects type.

The music is fun – IRC lets you play music if everyone has the same track, so each week before we game I upload a zip file with the new music to Adrive.com and send an email to my players to get the music. We have character themes that play during limit breaks, city themes, villain themes, about 40 different battle themes, and a lot more – probably around 140 individual tracks at this point. I’ve started doing very limited remixing, syncing up tracks and having one flow into another for particular moments, as well as recording voiceovers for dramatic scenes to make up for the fact that I can’t do my silly villain voices in person anymore. Our current sidequest arc is a large tournament (there’s always a tournament) for which I’ve done one-minute introductions for each team/competitor, complete with professional wrestling-inspired announcer stylings.

Character class-wise, we have a heavy swordsman with Chaos-themed powers, a summoner/technology specialist, a light dual-wielding swordsman, a ranged debuffing gunman/conman, a dragoon with guardian-esque powers, and a battle summoner (what you get if you cross Tifa with a druid, with aeons). It’s probably not balanced but no one really minds. I built the classes largely from scratch, and used a 4E philosophy when I rebuilt them this summer but made up all the numbers and abilities myself, trying to pull from Final Fantasy as well as other interests each player had outside of the game.

The plot is deep and confusing enough that, when we relaunched it, I had to write about 100,000 words to sum up the plot and the 125+ NPCs. I couldn’t run it for anyone but these guys – everything’s built around them, it’s very character-focused. The player who left is still on the update mailing list and chimes in with comments to me when he has time to read the sheer amount of stuff I put out.

Oh, there are airship battles, too. Not that those work too well in my opinion, but they’re fun as hell thus far and I use them sparingly.

Whoa, word explosion. This is pretty much what I do with my free time. I plan gaming sessions and build systems. It’s incredibly satisfying, and -incredibly- geeky.

12

I’m trying to restart a Pathfinder game I had running via Maptool with my old D&D group. I would kill to have the time and a local group to play something like Mouseguard, Spirit of the Century or Houses of the Blooded though.

13

This. I miss Unicorn McGriddle’s old Soviet game that we tried. That was tons of fun for the two times we got to do anything.

14

Dude! You organized a 4E campaign among Qt3’ers, came to one session and bailed! We’ve been going ever since (with a hiatus for paternity leave), and have gone from a weekly weeknight that first summer to one Saturday a month. Rob O’Boston has been DMing for a year and a half, and just recently begged to play, so we’re starting a second campaign so he can play sometimes.

We’re up to 5th level, and it seems to be a pretty slow leveling curve, but that’s mostly because we’d have huge gaps of not playing. I’m the Eladrin wizard who’s usually the only one standing at the end of a battle. I don’t get near enough to anything to let them hit me, but even so, for most of the campaign I had a better AC than our fighter and cleric (that’s changed as they got better stuff).

Meanwhile I DM my 3.5 campaign that’s been going on for about 6 years. They’re all around 17th level and into the world shaking stuff. I’m running the first Adventure Path that Paizo published in the old Dungeon magazine. Over the years I’ve added a lot to it, and players have come and gone. We have two of the original four players and three new(er) players.

Great moments in that campaign:

Rogue is riding their pet Quetzlkoatl over lava when pyrochlastic dragon uses his disintegrate breath weapon on them both. Rogue makes his save, Quetzlkoatl doesn’t and disintegrates. Rogue has a Wile E. Coyote moment of hanging there in space saying, “Ulp!” before plunging into lava below.

Bard takes Leadership feat, and with his Charisma ends up attracting well over a hundred followers. The only problem is they’re all low-level bards. Since the bad guys have taken over the government of the city, the bard decides to wage a propaganda war and sends out his army of bards to all the inns of the city to sing about how corrupt the government is and foment rebellion. After a few nights of this, when the party is off adventuring elsewhere, the city guard (now comprised mostly of half-orc mercenaries) stage ambushes all over the city, killing every bard they can get their hands on, and burning the party’s home inn, The Tipped Tankard, to the ground. This becomes known as “The Night the Music Died.”

I’m also doing a 3.0 campaign via maptools on occasional weekday nights. That campaign has been going for 7 years, but two of the guys moved away so now we do it over the internet when we can. I’m playing a Ranger/Tempest there. We’re around level 15 and I’m a little bored with my character. I get 6 attacks/round in a full attack, and against my favored enemies I’m a force (I took down an orc leader in one round that the DM had finely crafted to go toe to toe with me while the spellcasters were occupied elsewhere), but if there’s anything that requires more nuance, I’ve generally got nothing to do.

15

Yeah, my bad. As soon as the campaign started I took a job that required me to work weeknights. If you guys are now on Saturdays, I could definitely return, if you all forgive me for earlier lameness. :-)

16

I’m playing at the moment in a light-hearted Call of Cthulu campaign. Yes. I know it makes no sense.

Every session my naive young soldier from the sticks of Britain ends up with more sanity than he started which is just wrong. I think I’m up in the 80s now.

It’s mostly light-hearted because we’re all total powergamers and so we just break the campaign at every turn, and our GM spends most of the session desperately trying to keep us on the “right” track. “NO, YOU MAY NOT KILL THAT NPC.”

17

I miss my D&D group. We played together for nearly two decades before I moved away and got married. I BS together on Skype as we watch 49ers games, and I’ve been wondering how we could use some online interface to replicate our old environment. We used miniatures, and I built dungeons and other environments out of Lego pieces.

18

I’ve been playing in two 4e campaigns, roughly monthly sessions depending on the usual scheduling logistics. The two groups play quite differently from different composition.

In the slightly longer-running game, the party’s at 6th level; my guy’s a cleric. There’s also a rogue, fighter, warlord, and paladin in the character mix; overall, it’s an extremely survivable group. Lowish on the damage output, but solid. The other group’s at level 5; my character’s a ranger with delusions of grandeur. More oddball mix of classes that lead to a more frail party overall, but with much more raw damage output in combat situations. Amusingly, only one character actually has a positive charisma modifier–it’s a pack of smelly lunatics, we’ve concluded.

On a rather more irregular schedule, I’m in a third group that primarily does one-shots of mostly “indie” and small-press rpgs–a spot of Primetime Adventures here, an Unknown Armies game there, some playtesting of homebrew bits, etc. It’s a good palate-cleanser to D&D.

19

I have a regular group. We play Cthulu and a few other games. We just started A Game of Thrones campaign. I haven’t read the books, but so far it seems interesting. We’re about to start a game called Grimm, in which you play kids entering fairy tale world. Looks exciting. We’re pretty light-hearted as a group, and we focus far more on roleplaying than power gaming.

20

I’ve just turned completely green with Envy. Those are all great games.

I run a Conan game irregularly, but that’s about all the RPGing I can get. Looks like we might also start up some Pathfinder too, but that could easily fall through. I can manage a weekly boardgame night with a few friends, but for some reason RPGs are much harder to organize. :-(

That was great fun, while it lasted.