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  • My favorite group I have ever DMd for was at a convention, it was 2am, and nobody had ever met before except the two couples in the mix of 9. I just ran part of a campaign I was working on for a different group.

    I barely had to interact with them for RP stuff unless it was to drive the plot, or play a character they convinced to join them.

    It was great seeing a large muscular guy dressed like a Dwarven blacksmith role play a halfling, and the smallest person there was playing as a half-orc barbarian from the plains of icewind dale.

    And of course since it was a convention, and some of them had LARP gear with them, a friendly competitive sword fight broke out during a rest and instead of rolling, they just went ahead and used foam swords and stepped away from the tables. And borrowed dialogue from the princess bride.

    Most groups definitely prefer combat, and to be honest so do I unless I'm running the game. Maybe I just haven't played with the right group or character, or more likely I just suck at it. Either way...

    I think everyone has "that one group" they wish they could play with forever and never have scheduling conflicts...

  • I've played a lot of different rpgs, and I've noticed that combat drags the most in games that care the most about tactical combat. Interestingly, the game I've played that dragged the least in combat was GURPS, despite each round lasting for 1 second of game time. I think this is because the tight time window on your turn means you get to do exactly one thing on your turn, and if you are doing something intensive like casting a spell you might be spending several turns doing nothing but the occasional step or defense roll. Contrastingly, Shadowrun 5e had a 2 second turn, and combat slowed to a fucking crawl whenever someone wanted to do something more complex than moving and hitting due to the amount of dice being rolled and decision fatigue; we even banned grenades at one point because the chunky salsa technique was just too tempting to exploit.

  • I love Classic Deadlands.

    Oh my God does combat drag like hell. Everyone can have multiple actions each round, up to five, and everyone draws from the same deck except the gm, so if you have a lot of people, you are drawing like half the deck each turn so chance for that black joker goes up.

    But the setting? The roleplay??? Where's the heart eyes emoji. That shit is my jam. I miss you, Jewish Blessed trying to track down a golem he made. You were a good character.

46 comments