So this week, I find out one of my role playing friends, Mark Topic, native of the South Side of Chicago, passed on Sunday and services will be held on Wednesday. Mark was a min-maxer to the extreme and I was looking forward to seeing what he was going to do with 5th edition. Alas it was not meant to be. I and several of my friends will be there to pay our respects to the family.
A few of our other players knew Mark better and thought that the services were yesterday so were even later and were not pleased to have been so misinformed. They also missed last week, although their absence wasn't illness related.
Due to three of us missing, there was a ton of idle chatter and it took a while to get into the game. One of the amigos tried to steer us into the gaming because he's a sleep deprived bastich and worries that if the game isn't moving forward he's going to pass out.
It didn't help that I brought some chicharones, huge slabs of them freshly made in our local Mexican grocery store, as well as some of the dreaded Nutty Buddies, some real habanero hot sauce, and a host of other junk food. Normally I skip on the junk food and bring booze but gout.
Warhammer continues to be an interesting game. With the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons out, one of the things I hate about it, is random rolling for stats and hit points. The standard array and point buy systems don't seem up to the potential of a point buy and don't have any variety in them, it's one flat level.
I mention this because in Warhammer, I don't mind the random rolling for stats. Mind you though, you also randomly roll what you career WAS when you start playing. This can force you into more situations than just randomly rolling stats and hit points. For me, the difference is that if you want to play a fighter in Dungeons and Dragons and your stats are crap and you roll poorly on your hit points, it's not fun. If you want to play a fighter in Warhammer, even if you don't start as one, you'll get there and the stats are much lower to begin with so it's not as great a difference.
Mind you I haven't played yet, and I've seen people argue that due to the Dungeons and Dragons hard limit of 20 on stats that high stats aren't as important but at the same time, there's going to be a sweet spot in the game, and if one guy starts with a 20 in his prime stat and you start with a 14...
I have the starter set and well, looks like the guys I game with want me to give running Champions aka Hero 6th edition a shot. And of course Hero itself is out of print but the Champions book isn't outrageous. I think everyone's going PDF on this one though so we'll see how it goes.
Anyway, another thing that's funny in Warhammer is how the scenarios can sometimes be written. For example, in the basement of an abandonded building, we saw a seen of such bloodshed, that we had to make a save versus fear. I failed and due to seeing a bloody mess, fled the scene into an ambush. A giant slayer flees from blood? But it's one of the reasons you have rules for those things right?
In disgust, my character cut his orange mohawk off until he's shown that he's recovered his courage!
Another problem is that the ambush? Mutants who infected me with some weird disease so my stats keep dropping by 5% when I miss my Toughness roll. Down to -10% so far!
Also suffering a few more Insanity Points due to wounds and some horrific scenes that we've witnessed. As I think I'm now past six IP, I have to make a roll on the crazy table!
I'm also finding myself interested in how much information the group doesn't find. One of the things we found was a human with some weird plague beetle attached to his back. We killed him in like one round and the GM was showing us walls of text that could have been revealed to us. Mind you, during our exploration of a manor, we managed to find numerous books, journals, and other player hand out bits that revealed a lot of information, but it makes me wonder what ELSE we could learn by being more careful. Good thing my character is a 'humble' Giant Slayer though so I don't worry about those things.
Hopefully next week goes better in both real world and game time usage.
For those who don't game as often as they like, do you have any particular methods of madness to keep your fellow players focused on the game? I find that I'm pretty bad, as a player, at keeping things focused and on track. When I'm a GM though... man, the ruler comes down! I'm too busy playing catch up on everything and keep trying to focus on the game and what's been happening with people I only see at the game.
I suppose the solution is to hang out with the amigos more or get to the game before the game starts but that can be difficult too. Curse you real world!
Ah well...
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