Claincy

My mistborn campaign is an altered reality setting where a small number of crucial details changed ( and then naturally I added a lot of details and other bits). The point being; a lot of the book characters are still kicking around and sometime they make appearances in the game. In the session today one of the players (the only one at the table who hadn't read at least the first book) decided to approach a member of house Venture about something at a ball. So I decided, what the heck, why not Elend? So this character, a young half-breed allomancer posing as a noble who had been doing an excellent job so far in the session of using her charm and rioting to great effect, was trying to talk to Elend while he was reading, and failing completely. The other players at the table were finding the whole situation hilarious and it was a lot of fun to do, brief as it was

I haven't seen the finale yet as it won't air in AU for another week, but as for the rest of the season... I thought the first half was reasonably good. Not the best that SHIELD has ever been but still reasonably good. I felt that the second half of the season started badly, they had some decent ideas but it just didn't come together. Too much plot convenience and obvious "twists" for me and in general I don't think the script was very good. Fortunately it improved as time went on and I was properly enjoying it again by the final few episodes.

Hm, she did see Slingshot's necklace (or one just like it) floating next to the body. I wouldn't be at all shocked if that was deliberate misdirection though.

Gotta love the fan art community. So much good art Spoilers ep 49

Oddly, I actually found Uni significantly easier than high school. I guess I just found that the Comp Sci stuff clicked way easier for me than a lot of the units at High School. :/ Anyway, as others are saying. Take a break or lower your load if you need to to make it work. I dropped from a full 4 unit load to 3 units a little over halfway through.

Yeah, extremely risky maneuver but it paid off in spades.

Heck of an episode After episode 51 was the first time since way back in the fight with K'varn where I thought they were in serious, serious danger of losing PCs. (Not that that danger doesn't always exist, but often it's more a combination of bad luck and a mistake or two.) Course by the time I watched this I knew full well if anyone died or not, but oh well, still really intense. So many nat 20s in that fight 0_o Ep 53 should be pretty interesting too.

I was largely in agreement with the first article you linked to till I got to this: That seems a rather large assumption to me. Seeker roles are certainly very dangerous to the eliminators but acting in a consistent and predictable way will get them killed even faster. In this particular example if the eliminators were to do that they would be essentially feeding the villagers information. Each time they killed someone who wasn't the seeker they would (generally) be telling the villagers another role or two that the seeker didn't already know. This would also narrow the search field for the seeker, making it easier for them to ping eliminators. Broadly speaking killing a mixture of players who are on the right track and ones who aren't makes it much much harder for the villagers to get any useful information from your kills. The more chaos you can sow and the more you can confuse the villagers the easier it is to kill whoever you please

Heh, close enough

Fair enough I think I viewed 17s as a pseudo-eliminator faction.

If only there were a couple more hours in the day (LG4 doesn't count as a faction game? )

I'd recommend 3-4 players (+yourself as the GM). 5 works pretty well too buy more than 5 and less than 3 is doable, but harder so not ideal for your first time. Pathfinder is a good system, but it isn't the first thing I'd recommend in this case as the rules are relatively complicated. I'd personally recommend 5th edition as it's a little simpler and easier to get into. You can get most of the rules (certainly all you need for a while) in the SRD which you can download for free. The SRD doesn't contain all of the options for character progression but it does contain a lot and by the time you start really wanting those options (if that happens) you should have a good idea of whether it's worth it to you to invest more easily into the system. Given it's your first time playing/running I suggest using a prebuilt adventure so you don't have to try to design one while simultaneously learning the system and how to Game Master. There should be some free and/or cheap community created adventures you could download from the DMs Guild though I haven't played any of the ones there so I can't recommend any in particular. If you can spare $15-$20 I highly recommend the D&D 5th edition starter set. It has a set of dice, a rulebook that has all the rules you'll need, 5 pregenerated characters if you don't want to take the time for everyone to make their own and most importantly it has a short campaign that is actually very good. The opening to the campain makes a good one shot but if you continue with it the whole campaign could easily take you 6-12 sessions, depending on the length of your sessions and how quickly the players progress. It doesn't include some rules like those for creating characters but you can get that from the SRD anyway. A good place to go for some general Game MStering tips is Matthew Mercer's GM tips videos. It might also be worth watching a video or two of a group playing whichever system you choose as seeing it in action can be enormously helpful. A few general tips: You're going to make mistakes and mess up rules. It's inevitable so don't worry about it. If you look around the table and see everyone having fun you're doing a good job The rules are in service of the fun and story, if a rule gets in the way feel free to ignore it or make up your own. Say "Yes", whenever possible. Your players are going to try some crazy/nutty things and they will definitely surprise you. If they come up with a cool idea let them try it, it may not work and it may be difficult but they can certainly try. Rule of cool trumps the actual rules every time. That said, this doesn't protect the players from unforseen in consequences of their actions. "Yes, but..." Is a very useful phrase Keep the descriptions interesting. "I got a 17" "You hit, roll for damage." "6" "You deal 6 damage to the goblin and it dies." That gets old really fast. "Xharo dashes forward and places himself between the goblin and his injured friend. He let's out a bellow as he brings his sword down and the goblin's eyes widen in fear as the mighty blow cleaves through his chest and he falls to the ground." So.ething like that is a lot more engaging. Whether you describe the action in third person like that or in second person (you rush forwards and...) is personal preference and you can use mixture of the two. Having a creative and interesting description is good, but getting the players involved in that description is even better. Ask them to describe how they attempt (or accomplish) an action, when they land the blow that kills the boss ask them how they want to do it. It keeps the players much more excited and engaged Feel free to ask me/others any questions you have, so far in my experience most roleplayers who talk about it online are happy to help Edit: Added some links now I'm back on my PC. Also, a couple more tips Game Mastering is a full on activity, but you can have a good time doing it Don't forget to have fun. Seriously, hard work as it sometimes can be Game Mastering can be an incredibly fun and rewarding experience. Take a break half way through. You'll need it and it'll be good for your players too. If, after the first session, people want to keep playing, ask them what they liked most and what they didn't like about the session. Players can be quite different from eachother and it helps to know what you're group particularly likes and how you can improve

Another Mutant story from today. A couple of pieces of information you'll need for this to make sense: -In Mutant the vast majority of player characters are illiterate (including mine) -In Mutant you roll a number of d6's based on stats/skills/gear/circumstances for skill checks, attacks, etc -A 6 is a success, the more the better but 1 is usually enough, 1's are sometimes very bad I was trying to work out how to use a control panel in a car factory so I rolled a comprehend roll. I have a wits of 3 and a comprehend skill of 1 so I rolled 4 dice. I rolled 6's on all of them. That's a 1 in 1,296 chance. The Game Master decided that such a fantastic roll required a truly spectacular success, so, my character became literate From all the text he'd seen in his life and the meanings he'd heard for it something just..clicked

Ah what the heck. This is what I sound like. Warning: Singing included Unfortunately my phone is the best recording device I have so the quality isn't as good as it could be. I don't think it's capable of handling my full range/volume without failing/buzzing/etc so I went for something a bit lighter than any of my main pieces. (I'm going to stop making excuses now, it's certainly not my best but it's not that bad ) I don't tend to think too much about what people sound like when reading posts, but I'm generally a little surprised when I do hear someone's voice. Maybe I just subconsciously expect everyone to sound a bit more Australian Tis indeed a good joke Edit: Listening to a recording of my own singing always makes me feel a little sad in some ways because when you're singing there's this extra warmth and reverberation that you can feel but isn't audible to anyone else. And it just never sounds as good without that

Critical Role is a weekly D&D stream by a group of voice actors on Geek & Sundry's twitch channel. The episodes are uploaded to youtube the next week (though you need to go through Geek and Sundry's site to access the most recent ones). It's really really good, the characters are all very interesting and they play them well. Matthew Mercer (the DM) is kind of amazingly good Hmm, difficult choice. Favourite PCs: Vax and Keyleth Guests: I really liked Zhara and Kash the second time they showed up (I liked them the first too but moreso after the second). Gern was kind of awesome too. NPCS: Not sure honestly. Victor was kind of amazing of course though he's probably best in small doses

As others have said a bunch of Tamora Pierce's female characters are really good. Beka Cooper is my favourite but that series is significantly more adult than her others and not really appropriate for young children I think. Astrid from how to train your dragon (movies and series) is pretty kick-chull. Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde) from the xmen comics is also pretty good. Vex, Pike and Keyleth from critical role are really good/strong female characters. Some of the NPC's like Allura and Kima are very good too.

We had the next session of our Mutant Year Zero campaign today. (It's a post apocalyptic rpg where, shockingly, you play as mutants.) Near the end of the session we got into a fight with 2 automatons, both of which were very strong and able to dish out and take a lot of damage. Either one would have been a serious threat to the group, though one we certainly could have dealt with. Combined there was a very real chance of us all dying (death happens a lot in that game). I'm playing a dog handler who has a mutation that replaced his legs with frog legs, allowing him to jump a long way. I ended up fighting one of the automatons with the aid of a lizard creature/mount we had acquired earlier while the other 3 players mostly fought the other one. I basically kept taking a shot with my scrap rifle, then using my frog legs to leap back to relative safety as it pursued me (carrying my hound Byron with me and costing me a mutation point each time). This worked pretty well actually, especially as it was distracted for a bit by the lizard creature. Unfortunately I only had 3 bullets. By the time I ran out of bullets the automaton I was fighting was badly damaged and the other robot had been destroyed by a combination of one of the players using all of their (many) mutation points on their acid spit ability and a fortunate hit from another player. Unfortunately by this point the lizard was also dead and 2 out of the 4 members of our party were down, the other guy who was still standing was injured. The Robot's turn was after mine and he would almost certainly have killed one of the downed players in that turn. I could have simply run away (automatically successfully) using my frog legs at any point and it was very tempting to do so when the automatons first appeared. I could also have used my frog legs to get back to the other party members and "borrow" a couple of their bullets so I could keep firing, though I'd taken some fatigue damage so I wouldn't be as effective now. But doing that would give the automaton a chance to kill one of the other party members (or potentially take me down depending on what I did and if that happened we might all be goners.) There was one other option. One of the main features of Dog Handlers is the "sic a dog" ability, basically using an action to instruct my hound to attack for me and my hound was a fighting hound (an upgrade) and so had +2 dice. We were a little far away from the automaton for that though. So I used my frog legs to jump towards and over the automaton and dropped Byron onto it, telling him to attack it. Loyal as ever Byron did so and successfully tore off the automatons already damaged head. But as Byron attacked the automaton chose to use it's own action to fight back and swung it's fist into Byron, killing him So Byron died flying through the air, tearing the head off a large automaton and saving another PC's life (quite possibly more than one). As death's go, that's not bad. He was a good boy.

Yeah, looking forward to seeing the Pike/Grog interaction in the most recent episode

Huh. When I've tried in the past I've found the opposite. It might have changed since then though. I might try again soon.

Not quite. I wait till the youtube vids go up on the geek and sundry website because twitch replays load remarkably slowly here. Generally it seems to take about 3 times as long to load something as it does to play and that's just too frustrating to deal with. So I'm 1 behind at the moment, I tend to get a bunch of spoilers through twitter each week but it doesn't really matter.

Yep, tis awesome I can't really watch it live unfortunately as it clashes with the weekly session I play in

My order of dwarven forge terrain arrived, and it is awesome. Here's a gif of the first major build my brother and I made. (It's 28mm scale.)

In a fairly recent D&D session we were on something of a mysterious island with a mountain at the centre. At the same time every year there was a strange colourful light show up the top of the mountain, nobody knew what it was though, said lightshow was due to happen the next night and we'd just learned that the whole mountain/island had been known to vanish and reappear in different locations, decades or centuries apart. But wherever it was there was always warfare, though whether it caused it or was drawn to it we didn't know. As a DM it's always really hard to predict player actions and our DM hadn't considered that of course we were going to climb the mountain to investigate the shiny lights up close. It occured to me once we had reached the top and were waiting for the lightshow that it would be truly hilarious if the mountain was a volcano (I was pretty sure that wasn't the case and it wasn't, but our DM later told me that he had considered that possibility at one point when originally designing the campaign. What actually happened was after the normal light show the sky turned red and a horde of demons attacked the town, while we sat on top of the mountain and watched the exciting event we were supposed to be involved in There is still plenty for us to do, the town is occupied by demons after all, but it made the initial attack rather different for us

Ah didn't realise that's what you meant, then no, not to my knowledge, just the letter assignments.