Anyway, I've been bringing over chips and dip to insure that I'm still bringing goods over. When you play at someone else's house, do you wind up bringing food for the group, or is it more of an every man for himself thing? The only thing I tend to hate is that sometimes, not with the group I'm with now mind you, is that you become known as "that guy" whose always bringing stuff and when you don't, it's expected that you should have. Screw that noise.
This week brought us back into the forest where we'd already encountered some beastmen and mutants in the past as a way inn. We were seeking out the birthplace for a specific individual and it was like a month away on foot.
In Dungeons and Dragons, I can't imagine something that that being put into an adventure. "The players will take a month of overland travel and have the following list of random encounters and set encounters." Perhaps there are instances of that long distance travel? I know that boats and back in the day, Spelljammers tended to take up the massive amounts of time but travel time was usually a day or a week or so tops.
During our trip we had a few encounters that made this one of the heaviest battle thick Warhammer FRPG's that I've been in for my buddy +Tom Wright game. We encountered a massive spider, very Lord of the Rings like, a group of 10 wolf riding goblins, many corpses strung up along the way in coves, and a few hunters from a nearby town.
Seems that they had some information so we agreed to check out their problems as apparently their village was suffering some malady and many of the descriptions sounded familiar to those of us who'd fought some Nurgle cultists prior to this.
Some investigation wound up with a few great role playing moments that I enjoyed. For example, there was a smithy who was just crushed with despair and I did some repair work on the armor and cast a quick dagger for the mage to use as a spell component. For me, that was solid because my dwarf's background, which only exists in my head mind you, is that he was a dwarf who got a little too greedy, sold some bad weapons to men of the Empire who turned around and sold them to dwarves who were able to track the work back to him, leading to his exile to protect the status of his wife and other family members from the shame, not of necessarily trying to make a buck, but of getting caught and costing dwarves their lives with those shoddy weapons, which were never meant for dwarven hands and bought second hand, to save money.
Another great role playing moment, took place with our halfling of doom. He's a dangerous slinger and is able to inflict horrific damage and is one of the most dangerous in the group and perhaps deals the most damage consistently. He's also from a hovel, literally, and is finance driven. To get him into the well for investigation purposes in the town, we assured him that there was probably gold and other treasures down there. He found the cause of plague but no money, so our local wizard threw a coin into the well for him to recover and that made him happy.
Further investigation revealed that there was a possible suspect and we picked up his cold trail through more luck than skill. It lead us into a corrupted part of the forest that lead into an underground cave where a giant was being transformed. Tom managed to pull together several previous threads in this fight as a Nurgle cultists was using a giant to pull forth disease and vileness.
In the fight I took wounds enough to bring me to -2, so hey, another insanity point there, but we did manage to win through. With the xp from this one, I had enough xp to move into giant slayer as a career.
The interesting thing, is I don't feel underpowered in terms of me being one of the last to get a second career. Due to the vulgarity of the initial random role, some starting careers are quick to drop and move into a new career. Others have a lot more potential options in terms of stat advancements and I can't speak for you, but in most cases, when I'm player Warhammer FRPG 1st or 2nd edition, I almost always buy out all my advances.
Because I started off as a troll slayer, that gave me a LOT of advances I could take, well over 1,000 xp worth. In the odd twelve weeks we've been playing, while I have been useful in combat, I've never been 'the guy', which would probably go to the halfling. But that's okay. I'm able to soak a lot of damage and with my great weapon and it's impact ability, allowing me to roll 2 dice for damage, I'm usually able to get an Ulric's Fury, allowing more dice to be rolled, pretty often. It's good stuff.
In terms of game play, man, we lack focus. We must've wasted an hour or so on small talk of various nature. My friends here were apparently unaware that the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons had a PDF of some rules out for free and no one went to Games Plus, the mainstream FLSG that we usually go to, in order to buy the basic set. So most of the conversations were just about BS.
In some ways, I love it. It's a big part of why I play. I work a little under 50 hours on a regular week due to being salary so I don't do a lot during the week. It's not necessarily that the number of hours is so vast, it's just that the 5:30 AM start time insure that if I want to maintain sanity, I go to bed fairly early so not a lot of outgoing parting and socializing going on in my life during the week.
On the other hand though, man, we are like cats or squirrels or some other short attentioned spanned animal and we apparently almost all love to talk. It's great in terms of having friends you can spew your nonsense out and have each feed off the other, but in terms of keeping the adventure moving forward? No, not too easy.
Anyone run into that in their own games? Strangely enough when I've played with strangers at Gen Con or various Chicago Game Days, the group understands that they have X amount of time and often are off at a bullet run to insure that they get the main parts of the rules down and what's the initial start point and BAM! They go.
Another... well, I don't want to say 'problem', but think I noticed, is that several of us have fairly good knowledge of the Warhammer FRPG either from reading the novels, painting the miniatures, or playing the game for decades. This tends to spill over into the characters a lot and I'm just as guilty of it as anyone else. On the other hand, dwarves are fairly long lived in Warhammer and my dwarf is actually older than the wood elf in the party. Anyone strickly enforce that "your character wouldn't know that"? If it's top secret knowledge, yeah, I can see it, but for a lot of the things we pinged on, it was like 'Herd Stones' I think they're called, where the beastmen gather and burn their offerings, the whole 'Ruinous Powers' thing where we pretty much know each of their names and who their servants are, etc... No "Oh, the hidden gods of law? Yeah, know all about them."
A solid game and next week will have me starting out as my new career with a few raises thanks to the XP given at the end of the session. Bad thing? While this week we missed one player due to the holiday, next week it'll be a minimum of two. Hope that GM is ready to go easy on us!
Hope everyone had a happy fourth and stayed safe!
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