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Showing posts from July, 2023

Og: Unearthed Play Report.

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It's summertime and my friends at uni were bored and wanted to play some TTRPG, so I stepped up to DM Og today. It was probably some of the most fun I've ever had, for about 90 minutes (It being good only for slapstick comedy oneshots seems to be the common consensus). In Og, you play as caveman. Og rightly recognizes that playing as a caveman is an inherently silly thing to make a game about, so it doesn't take itself seriously. The main mechanics are: You know about 5 words, from a list of 18. You must only use these words to communicate. You may also grunt, gesture, point, and draw stick figures, if you're feeling fancy. The simple d6 system includes critical failures: "On a roll of 1, the GM thinks of the most disastrous, humiliating result (short of outright killing you) of your sudden lapse into utter stupidity, and then describes it to you." Og Character Sheet What happened, basically (Italics is DM speak). My players took less than 10 minutes to all...

Domain-Level play, Reasons for adventuring, and Crack Cocaine.

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Roughly 1 in 4 PCs die in the campaigns I run. I'm a kind DM however, so to save the players the emotional trauma of losing their beloved PC, I just have everyone who rolls a 1 on a d4 rip up their sheet and make a new one.   Of course I don't actually do that, but the 1 in 4 death rate is actually accurate, and not just for adventurers- The same mortality rate applied to crack dealers in 90s Chicago. This might lead you to think that this line of work would be unpopular, and the few in this profession would be compensated highly. Surprisingly, that was not the case. Selling crack was actually so popular that there were more dealers than there were street corners for them to stand on. 25,000 people were betting their lives on this career, despite most of them earning just 3.30$/hour. If you're running DCC, the odds of dying are more like 3 in 4.   You might be wondering then, why was crack dealing so popular? "Well, for the same reason that a pretty Wisconsin farm girl...