Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Tabletop Simulation Stimulation

It is hard to keep up with this stuff, man. To summarize the past few months: I got hit by a hurricane, blew a tire, and played like 100 games of Eldritch Horror. I started NaNoWriMo earlier today, and I thought I would post in the small window I've allowed myself during the World Series. There's nothing more satisfying than seeing a pitcher leave your team and then give up 5 runs in 2 innings during the most important game of the year.

I've been playing the Star Wars RPG. The wonky dice are not that bad (and I would imagine you've heard that a lot), and it does capture Star Wars pretty well. I'll be running the Force and Destiny starter box this weekend, but this is mainly to bide time while I plan my next Into the Odd campaign. I'm going through this phase where I feel like eschewing all modern conveniences and doing everything on paper like our forefathers. Despite this, I keep making shit for Tabletop Simulator.


I've made character cards, and blank cards for tracking Arcana/Oddities and other things. These can be stacked in a deck to essentially create random tables. I'm thinking of making a card for all the monsters in the main book, as well as stuff from the ItO blog assuming Chris is cool with it. I also made a much bigger character sheet, but its giant and ugly albeit probably easier to read. I like the cards better, and I think they fit the game's aesthetic a lot more.

 The next campaign will probably be a hex-crawl. This might seem ridiculous, but every time I've run a hex-crawl I never gave the players a map. I assumed it was like with dungeons, where you can map as they go. As a result, they never had any idea where they were in relationship to anything else. I think I'll provide a map with sparse details and giant obviously visible landmarks and let them fill in the rest as they go. I think this is how it works? I have a lot of reading to do, anyway.



 I have this image for a setting but I always hang up when it comes to guns. The Napoleon nerd and American in me want lots of guns, while the Tolkien nerd in me wants short swords and round shields. I recently posted up another thread and HP values were brought up. I prefer lower HP, and I'm thinking of having armor add hit points ala Black Hack (I think?) instead of reducing damage. I would probably have it so a chain shirt adds HP, a shield does as well (at the cost of a free hand), and heavy armor would probably have some kind of bizarre drawback like you have to drink 5 gallons of milk a day or shrink.