ssjmarx

Taken from Dethklok | The Gears

howdy, it's me again

So I've been watching Star Trek lately, and I've read a lot of good things about Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius Entertainment, and so I want to check out the quick start scenario for that game.

This will be a one-shot with pregenned characters, run off my Foundry RPG server, next weekend (26th-28th). If you're interested please drop a post here and/or DM me on Discord (SSJMarx#1619) and I'll put a channel together to talk about it. Also download the quick start guide linked above and skim the rules and characters - but please DON'T read Chapter 2: Away Mission: Signals since that's the scenario we'll be playing lmao.

You don't need to know anything about Star Trek to play - in fact it would probably be better if you come in without much knowledge of that universe's canon, since I only have a modest familiarity with it myself. All you have to know is that the Federation are Big Space Communists even if the writers of the TV shows are too liberal to admit it.

The scenario starts in media res, with the players as an Away Team investigating a missing Starfleet ship. Here's the introduction:

CAPTAIN’S LOG

STARDATE 48311.3

We’ve received a message from Narendra Station that a runabout called the Susquehanna has gone missing in the Carina Nebula, deep within the Shackleton Expanse. The Susquehanna was investigating an unusual alien signal that originated from the nebula when all contact was lost. We have been ordered to enter the nebula, find the runabout, and determine the origin and cause of the alien signal. Starfleet has also advised that Romulan and Ferengi ships have been sighted in the region, so we should exercise caution since they may well have detected the alien signal as well.

Using a program like Tabletop Simulator or one of the alternatives.

I'm thinking 40k because the 10th edition is right around the corner and I'm interested in using that as a jumping on point, but I'm open to playing anything - Age of Sigmar, Battletech, Warmachine/Hordes all come to mind as alternatives, but I haven't been active in the hobby for a long time so I'm sure there are hundreds of newer games out there that are great too.

My big thing is I really want to play a narrative campaign of something, not just match up with randoms to play one-off battles where we barely talk. All of the games I mentioned have rules for that, with stuff like your units becoming veterans over time and your characters being consistent.

Since it's online there would be no expectations of buying anything (or participating in the irl hobby at all) to participate. We could coordinate over Discord and do things like have multiple games going at once, change games in between campaigns, spectate battles and chat, etc.

I love this concept. Zee spends a lot of time apologizing for it not being balanced, but balance isn't the chief concern of TTRPGs it's just a consideration and sacrificing a bit of balance on the altar of fun worldbuilding and intricate tactics is totally worth it as long as you don't go completely off the deep end.

jfc this is the most boring fucking game I've ever played in my life. It's not fun getting one-shotted by something that you don't know about until after its killed you at least once. There's nothing interesting about worldbuilding that's all made up of intentionally vague YoU hAvE tO fIlL iN tHe BlAnKs YoUrSeLf nonsense. There's nothing noteworthy about weapon upgrades that require you to look up a guide to see what's worth investing materials in and what's not.

And already some of you have doubtlessly gone down to comment "lmao git gud". Motherfucker it's not about difficulty. You know what was a difficult fucking game? Sekiro. That game is hard as balls and I absolutely love it, precisely because its designed in a such a way that it fixes everything about Dark Souls that sucks.

In Dark Souls, every single time you rock up to an enemy, you know exactly how you're going to defeat it. You're going to learn the patterns of its attacks, dodge at the appropriate time, and hit it in the intervals between. This is interesting once, but doing it over and over again for fifteen bosses is boring, repetitive bullshit.

In Sekiro they fixed this. Instead of literally just dodging every single attack, you have a dozen different defensive options that you have to learn and apply to different attacks. Instead of knowing how every single enemy encounter is going to go down, you have a bunch of different ninja tools that have different effects that you can experiment with.

And yet the geniuses of the gaming sphere all bashed their head cavities together and decided that SEKIRO was the bad one. The best game in the whole fucking genre, now sidelined because these morons confused a repetitive grind for difficulty. And as a result Elden Ring, which was supposed to be the masterpiece of the whole thing, is just another bland endurance test.

Watched the Starfield gameplay, when Todd Howard pulled out his space laser to mine iron ore it was like my soul left my body and i watched the rest of the trailer in a dissociative state.

I like Minecraft. It's a good time. I also really like Satisfactory. But every single other game that has resource mining would be better off without it. It's like hacking and lockpicking minigames, the only thing it can possibly offer to the player is a minute of annoyance - but with mining it's often hours of annoyance.

nostalgia for the "kidz bop" version before the incident(s)