Binge-watching Titansgrave: Wil Wheaton's new live RPG show

Thanks. Sounds reasonable, then. I’ll show it to them.

military-intelligence

I think this is the real reason for Cory’s move to LA. He’s angling for a spot on next year’s campaign.

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I’d watch that. But shouldn’t they get @beschizza in to play an elf?


I’m enjoying this, but (as someone who hasn’t played this sort of game), I feel like some of the stats/mechanics are being hidden. I’d like to see more numbers for the characters/monsters - or is that sort of stuff deliberately hidden to keep it out of the narrative? I notice bits about the monsters surrounding particular characters etc, how is that tracked? (just in Wheaton’s head?)

It varies from GM (game master) to GM and system to system. For example, some of the recent D&D editions have seemed to me to be fairly map-heavy, with map being anywhere from a detailed model o of the environment down to just a simple hex (I believe) grid of the combat area, and using either miniatures or little tokens marking out positions, where people had specific abilities that depended on how many hexes away, etc. You probably COULD do without it, but it would require more work-arounds. Prior to that, it was certainly an option to play it that way, but it was more loosey-goosey, and a lot of games were I played in were just tracked in the heads of people involved. (And before THAT, it started as an all miniatures game that got roleplaying elements added on). I don’t know about the system TItansgrave uses, or indeed what D&D’s official stance is now.

And this is generally speaking only in combat scenarios (and sometimes dungeon crawls) where this is a factor, everything else is just imagined, and combat begins usually the with GM setting up the initial situation, and a map if one is used, with whatever’s most dramatically appropriate (he chooses the monsters and such to begin with to challenge the players, so it’s not really an additional unfairness to give him the power to say “before you notice, they’ve surrounded you,” because that’s also an additional challenge). With most good GMs, the rule of good drama outweighs things like absolute accuracy of map positions (and indeed, following game mechanics to letter… most games explicitly allow the GM to throw them out or alter them if they’re not working for a specific situation).

In Critical Role, mentioned earlier in the thread, you can see some of the combat-map style of gameplay when they go into battle scenes, the view sometimes switches to a top-down view to the map in the middle of the table, where you see where people are in relation to everyone else, and the characters own individual abilities and everyone’s positions all interact.

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Used to play RPGs way back in the day, and then somewhat back in the day, but not in recent days for various reasons. Having left my wayward 30s for the more wizened landscape of the 40s–is there a D&D group for me in Baltimore? I’ve done a few searches for groups in the area with no luck.

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http://www.rpggamefind.com

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