/hob/ - Hobbies

>>65621
>It might even lift your energies
Hardly, friend. If you take the time to dignify with a response every derelict and slow-witted buffoon that wanders inside our /hob/ domain, this place will take a turn for the worse. Only those with wizardly words should fetch a wizard's response. It's how we keep the best board the best.

>>65626
I wouldn't play with a DM that's a redditor with kids and a wife. He is probably a failed normalfag or something.
>>65627
>Maybe if you assholes got online more,
Yes because wizards have nothing better to do than to be online and socialize with you so you don't feel alone playing with normalfags.
Back to reddit.

>>65619
Just had my first session after a very long time without playing rpgs. Going for an ADnD game was probably the right choice. People showed up at the game today, 3 guys, two characters each, a main and a backup, and not a single one of those characters had anime avatars, which is something you wouldn't think you need to take it for granted but there you go, these are the times we live in. I noticed for the past few years it's fairly common for at least one person to bring a really goofy anime avatar to the table. I don't mind manga and anime myself but that's like bringing a renaissance painting of St. George to your Dragonball game or whatever. It just doesn't fit, unless you're going for anime-specific type of thing. Showing up in a sword and sorcery or a high fantasy Tolkienesque game with Goku as an avatar is just a complete lack of common sense and basic courtesy to everybody else at the table. If you're playing with serious roleplayers at all worth their salt be warned, everybody is now wanting to murder your ass and then kick you out. Here we are wanting to meet Gandalf the Gray in a muddy, stormy night on The Prancing Pony and you show up as a fucking fairy with a Touhou avatar.

But that didn't happen, which I attribute in part for this being an ADnD game. People playing that tends to be older. This group in particular, by voice and some of the stuff I heard about they talking is probably a bunch of 40 yo olds, a couple of them maybe even older and showing up with anime stuff is usually something younger people do. Anyway, everybody had appropriate imagery, which is always a good sign, it means the group is more or less going for the same atmosphere. One of the guys (the noob player) had an elf that looked like from wow or something and that was the goofiest one at the table. Very acceptable. I have a couple of pictures from one of the splat-books. When in doubt, always go for the art of the book you're playing.

So we get to this small town and start to ask for any rumors, fishing for some plot hooks and the DM tries to have us in a bar fight. That was way too common so we backed off, talked around with locals and found out those ruffians were also committing petty crimes at such an such road. Basically some low level brigands. So we get lucky with a sleep spell, ambush and arrest them without having to kill anyone.

Then the paladin wanted to know if any of the criminals had wife and children and one of them had. So he dragged us to the dilapidated house where they live to inform the wife her husband would not be returning because we arrested him and then gave her some money to help with groceries lol Typical paladin shit, props to the player for knowing how to play one. It turned out this was some crazy bitch and as we were leaving stuck a crossbow outside the window and shot the paladin in the ass. We ended up arresting her too. The 16 yo son ran through the alleys behind the house and we couldn't find him. I'm sure that's going to be problem soon.

Then we had a 20 min discussion about horse speeds and caltrops. All in all an average, enjoyable game session. We'll be visiting the graveyard soon, there's a corpse there with a key we need.

>>65661
>People showed up at the game today, 3 guys, two characters each,
never knew people play as more than one character at the same time, cool

>>65662
The old modules can be brutal and we're probably playing one for 6 to 8 players. I'm guessing that's the reason for the DM to have us show up with 2 characters each. It was either that or waiting to find more people on roll20.

Our first adventure for the campaign is over. All in all I had fun. It's a little too combat-oriented for my taste but I can't really complain. The players were a somewhat flaky for the first couple of months but now everybody has been showing up consistently. It was a very run-of-the-mill adnd adventure, I can tell the DM just did a few tweaks here and there and based most of the thing in a published module. Again, I'm not complaining, that's the game. I lost my barbarian character out of sheer stupidity on my part but his death was cool (he was buffed by a couple of spells so I managed to kill two monsters at -2 HP before the char finally dropped, it was funny). We'll be exploring a more urban environment next adventure (I'm guessing it will be in and around the capital, we'll see).

As for my general mood towards tabletop gaming it's awkward, the night before and all the way up to the start of the session I feel like I don't want to play this shit anymore and I'm ready to quit and never talk to those guys ever again (they're fine btw, it's strictly gaming talk) but then, during the game and afterwards, I feel like this is really fun and I hope there will be more of it in the future. It's the eternal struggle between having to use a mic and deal with real people but also knowing tabletop gaming beats any type of game due to its virtually infinite possibilities and freedom of choice. Video games feel like connect the dots compared to it, even though I'm fond of several video games myself, it's hard not to see the difference when you play both.

The adventure ended very well btw, we beat the big bad, found the old treasure and returned safely to the duke's domain (the guy who hired us). Myself and two other players lost one character each and another guy lost 2. I felt like the DM might have pulled some punches in a couple of encounters in order to avoid a TPK but oh well, maybe he realized the fight was too hard a little too late and had to correct with some fudging. It happens.

We'll see how it goes from here.

>>66956
So two of the players quit today due to irl reasons, or so they say. Now it's only two players, myself and another guy, and the DM. I don't know what we'll be playing now but two players is not that great. Specially because me and the other guy are too comfort with silence, so we're running the risk of having one of those gaming sessions where nobody says anything and the thing keeps grinding to a halt. We need a third player but the DM said he prefers to adjust instead of risking fishing for another dude in roll20. I don't know, I would personally risk bringing in a new guy but fuck it.

Where do I even stand on tabletop games at this point. I've been enjoying a couple of video games as of late but deep down I can feel how empty they are and tabletop is the only type of game that still scratches that itch for fantasy. I might go back to reading books again and ditch video games, keeping the tabletop rpg as my only gaming outlet, we'll see. Also I've been posting pretty much alone itt for the past 3 years, is anybody even playing anything? Hard to believe I'm the only one.

>>67159
playing games with other people is too hard. i feel like the part of me that could imaginatively engage in play with other people died as a kid. the best i can do is watch other people playing

>>67160
If you have any interest at all for this hobby give it a shot. It's so much better than video games in a lot of ways. It's also a lot more fun than just watching other people doing it. I guarantee people posting their gaming sessions on YouTube doesn't make for an accurate picture of how things go in most groups. People on YouTube use cameras and generally know each other irl, so those groups are a lot more socially inclined and socially apt. Most times online RPG groups are made of introvert nerds and chances are there is always going to be 1 or 2 guys out of 5 that speaks maybe 10 words in a 3 hours session, so don't worry about having to talk much, or at all during most of the session.

All you have to do is show up on time and knowing what your character does. If you're playing for the first time make a fighter/barbarian and when it's your turn in combat simply attack the nearest foe. You just roll 1d20 to see if you hit and if you do roll damage. That's it. Keep hacking those monsters and the other players will be happy to have you.

It's really not hard at all. And if you don't like it for whatever reason just say you can't show up anymore due to irl stuff and quit, that's what everybody does.

So yesterday we continued going deeper into dungeon number 182347819234. One of the characters got stabbed in the eye. Another guy had his hair melted. We found another secret door, and then another one. Investigated a statue, then a chest. Then another statue. One of the corridors had a trap in it. We disarmed it. Dispatched some monsters, I think it was Goblins (we began a new campaign, everybody is lvl 1 and 2). None of them had anything of value. They tried to flee but we shot them. Gruesome. Etc, Etc, Etc, Etc, Etc.

Seems like I’ve grown fond of disdaining this game. I only like it halfway through a session when I manage to immerse myself in that absurd situation. A bunch of mercenaries going down a cave just because it’s there. A monster under a flagstone spits acid in your friend’s face. There’s a room you can only access from the ceiling, and it’s an abandoned butcher’s shop. There are human carcasses pinned to the walls. Sausages made of human flash in a box, everything is rotten. Nothing quite makes sense, it’s dream world, it’s the escape through the absurd.

I keep saying to myself I’ll quit next week but I don’t. The GM and the other player are pretty committed to the game, it’s amazing. They never show up late, they never cancel, they’re reliable. If I quit I’ll never find people like that ever again to play with. I’ve been around in online rpg communities for many, many years now. Those guys are the crème de la crème. Believe me, I know. I can’t just ditch the game. So I go on. Dungeon number 182347819235. Oh no, some corrupted abomination lurking around the corner. Corner number 239572539820395. Secret door. It’s the 234235235th one. We kill whatever it was, it’s dead now. Some treasure. The mage will carry it, he won’t get encumbered and he won’t die in the front line too far for the others to loot his body. The duke is impressed with our efforts. Or was it the captain of the guard? Or was it the king? Someone important. Plot guy number 239485. You can create millions of corridors with the click of a button. Millions, billions of corridors. Castles and dungeons and inns, sprawling by the billions, enough to fill the entire universe several times. We keep going. Another character gets stabbed in the eye. He’s blind now, we’ll need a new character. Let’s get some horses. And a torch bearer.

It’s the Gm’s birthday. He bought himself another old module from the 80s as a birthday gift. He’ll appropriate the maps and some of the monsters for his next adventure. Those corridors will show up eventually, indistinguishable from the other corridors. A copy of a copy of a copy. A secret door leads to a secret room. More treasure. One of the monsters fell into a trap and it’s starving inside a hole. We throw a morsel at it. The duke is very impressed with our efforts. No, it was a grand duke. A monster negotiates his life for the location of secret loot. There are more secret rooms than regular rooms in half these places. A bunch of rings. A hand still attached to them. Half of them cursed, we tried one anyway, for fun. Curse of never ending urination. The guy who lost his eye now has to cut his finger or he’ll dehydrate and die. We pocket the dead hand with the rings. The grand duke is pleased.

Me, the Gm and the other player keep it going. We meet once a week. Do they despise the game like myself but fail to quit? I don’t know, but we never miss a session, ever. Nobody is ever late. Slowburn dungeon crawl. Then a chase. More skeletons, more goblins, more dragons. Our imagination is a machine pumping out corridors for monsters to lurk in. Treasure inside a chest. There’s a trap, we disarm it. We almost never do small talk. When there’s small talk it’s about tabletop games. What the fuck normal people talk about? All I ever talk about with other humans seems to be about tabletop games. We talk about monsters. We talk about magic properties of made up weapons. We talk about other stuff, made up stuff, more stuff we read somewhere in a module nobody cares about anymore.

It’s mind numbing. Yet I can’t quit. Maybe it’s because it’s my only source of social interaction. I don’t want to disappoint my fellow players. They have put too much work into this. If I quit the game dies. GM said he’s creating a second pantheon. You know, for that parallel dimension from that game 8 months ago. Now that’s cool, I guess. I can’t kill his enthusiasm, so I help him organize an excel sheet with all that nonsense. Cool garbage.

Sometimes when I’m playing, I find myself in an intermediate state between sleep and awakeness. Running inside infinite corridors. Infinite monsters, the absolute and tyrannical rule of cheap imagination. Billions upon billions of magic swords. Another big bad croaks. A hundred more lines up. We roll new characters. 16 charisma!

End of game. Everybody is happy. ‘See you guys next week, take care!’ Yup, you too. The tyranny of cheap imagination continues. More corridors. Corridor number 239850236. Sure I had fun but it feels like we’re trapped inside a Kafka novel. We’re committed to playing this game because we have been playing so long. The fun diminishes but it never reaches zero. It can diminish forever without making us quit. It feels like we’re building towards something… then you actually look, there’s nothing there but millions of made up corridors, millions of made up dead. 3 guys building a communal fairy tale whose only goal is to churn out corpses and corridors. We’re far too deep into it. But then you look back, there was never anything but a surface. Fucking game. And there’s more next week. I won’t cancel it, nor will anybody else. And somewhere inside I know I’ll miss it when it ends.

>>67405
Wow anon, that's the kind of game I love most. Pure old-school dungeon crawl. I wish I could find people with that dedication.

>If I quit the game dies.
I wonder what you mean by this exactly. Because a game of this type is much easier to handle, both for GM and players, when it's played in an "open table" format, with a party leaving on expedition every week, composed of whoever is present. Instead of the typical format of "okay let's stop for today and continue from this point next week", which kinda forces the players to be present yet again next week.
In an open table format, you could skip sessions without problem for the rest of the group, since your characters would stay at the safe place from which all expeditions begin (the inn, your stronghold, whatever).

>>67900
Love? Well each person is different. To me it's a prison. I call it the 'prison of just enoughs'. Just enough fun to make you not quit. Just enough imagination required to make you dedicated. Just enough tactics to make you pay attention. Just enough for you to care. Just. And it has the odd property of eternally diminishing fun without ever reaching zero, again, just enough to make you show up session after session, month after month, year after year. To me it became this bizarre lingering experience, a looming haze perpetually distorting my days, folding my mind into moss infested corridors, lurking monsters and magic artifacts. I don't even consider quitting anymore because it's better than nothing, again, just enough to make it worth it.

What I mean by if I quit the game dies I mean exactly that. This group I'm in doesn't have the open table mindset and can't even consider bringing someone new in. They are extremely averse to change and newcomers. It's 3 people laser focused on churning fantasy dungeons, there's a rhythm, a comfort and a delicate dynamic we've built through countless hours of gaming together. A year ago when I tangentially suggested bringing in another player it was like I was asking them to commit murder, one of the guys even got offended, like I was trying to destroy a sacrosanct inner circle or something. I don't know, maybe I was. Fucking gamers. And so that's what it is. A prison of just 'enoughs' just for us 3 guys, which is fitting I suppose. Fucking gamers. Fucking troglodytes. Fucking dwarves and wizards and old relics. Next session is in a couple of days. I'll be there early to write the recap and organize the gear for the hirelings. One of them leveled up recently but lost a couple of fingers.

>>67910
A lovely prison. Thanks for the reply.
So 1 GM and 2 players… indeed, it would probably mean the end if either of you quit.
Well, I hope you have fun next session, and make it to name level one day, if you guys haven't already.

>>67913
NP, I was quite surprised someone decided to respond to this thread. And thanks, it's probably going to be fun. We have a party at name level working for a king but right now we're dungeon crawling with a thief focused chaotic party, little bit of an evil campaign of sorts.

>>67914
Hello anon,
I'd love to hear about this game again.
Any new development? Is it still going? Did your feelings towards the game change?

>>68418
Thank you for your interest. Last session we found a monster deep inside a crypt (yet another monster, yet another crypt, yet again, yet again…) but it turned out the monster was dead. Despite being dead, it was making a whistling noise, indicating there's a monster inside the monster's carcass (or something like that). This monster's carcass is located on top of a large stalagmite surrounded by open chasm (another chasm, chasm n. 100000th) and we spent the entirety of the last session hiring workers and gathering materials to build a bridge. Wood, nails, climbing equipment, scaffold parts and whatnot.That took about 4 hours to put together and the bridge will probably be ready for the upcoming session. Then we'll proceed to stab, shoot or befriend what we find there, carry the loot, if any, back to our base, and use it to support a rebellion that is trying to overthrown a particular duke that have accused us of egregious crimes we have accidentally committed. We killed an important individual during a rogue mission for someone else and he's very angry about. So, in order to clear our names, the duke must die. Currently, his army is after us, and we're trying to dismantle his political power through this rebel movement.

Yes, it's still ongoing. My feelings towards the game have not changed. I spend most of the week despising it. I find gaming a frivolous, intellectually and spiritually backward practice and I'm ashamed to be part and engage in it. It's a repetitive, vacuous, frivolous, execrable hobby. It's a bunch of adults who have handed their imagination to the lowest, childish form of distraction. These are not the elegant air castles of literature or the higher arts, it's a group of avatars living in a synthetic, crude world where cheap events are lined up and pushed through so primitive decision making and random chance gives us increasingly expected results. I have often considered that perhaps staring at the ceiling has more value than gaming. Excuse my self-loathing.

Then it's gaming night and all is forgiven. I have a great time, I get to talk with other human beings I don't actively despise, I get to build things out of thin air and exist vicariously in a world where pain, death and poverty are weak forces of superficial and even amusing consequence. We get to be strong, smart, cunning, capable forces in a world of high fantasy. The hours fly and for the rest of the night I can't wait for the next session so I can curb my real existence to engage in an imaginary one. Then it's the next day and nausea returns. As always, as usual. This is what my mental existence is reduced to; building imaginary corridors and imaginary monsters, and spending the next few days loathing them. And then going back in to do it all over again. It's a sort of mild insanity I don't quite know how to accept.

I'm interested in playing some tabletop rpg with you, wizards, but I only have a phone do you its possible

>>68630
Playing only with a phone is not ideal, but it's possible, depending on how the game is run.
Some people play in "theater-of-the-mind" mode, where the game master simply describes what happens, and the players respond. In that case a phone is enough.
Other people use things like virtual tabletop software where you can display maps to place character tokens on, roll dice and have character sheets with buttons for things. That would probably be tricky with a phone, depending on the level of detail. But it's always possible to have the game master click on things for you instead.

The way I usually run the game (old-school Dungeons & Dragons) is pretty barebone visually, but the players must draw their own map of the dungeon, based on my descriptions.
For example, "you enter a room stretching 20 feet north, 40 feet west, and there is one door on the west wall." Then one player draws the map on a grid on the virtual tabletop, which everyone can see.
Sometimes we place tokens for characters and monsters when positioning is important.

I wonder how >>68419 and his group are playing.

>>68639
thank you for answering
>Some people play in "theater-of-the-mind" mode, where the game master simply describes what happens, and the players respond. In that case a phone is enough.
this is the most ideal to me. may I suggest making and using a thread on /hob/ to play the game, mostly written stuff and oekaki/ image using. what do you think of it?
>I wonder how >>68419 and his group are playing
it looks intresting and want to play some

>>68640
>this is the most ideal to me. may I suggest making and using a thread on /hob/ to play the game, mostly written stuff and oekaki/ image using. what do you think of it?
Oh, then this would be "play-by-post", which exists also. I've thought about that before, running some kind of game on a wizchan thread, maybe I could prepare something simple.
Using /lounge/ would probably be better. It would be pretty slow, maybe one post a day, and I would do all the rolls to eliminate unnecessary back and forth. Players would only need to declare intentions.
I'll think about the details and post here again tomorrow. If anyone else is reading this and could be interested, let us know here.

>>68643
I'm in! I never played a tabletop rpg and want to try

>>68639
I found this group I'm playing with years ago using Roll20. Maps and dice are handled through Roll20 but we use Discord for audio. I'm not sure why they don't use the audio from Roll20, this group had this roll20/discord thing going before I arrived. I know ib users despise discord and perhaps with good reason, but considering purely the technical side of things, using discord for audio is very convenient. As for the game system, we switched around a couple of times but the most fast paced, easy to learn (because, really, there's almost nothing to learn, you roll a d20 for basically everything) is a game called Old-School Essentials which is a rewrite and cleaning up of D&D BX, a very straightforward, no nonsense system. I hope you guys get together to play some, it's a fascinating experience. In my case it became a prison and that's why I'm harsh about it, but you shouldn't pay too much attention to it, it's mostly self-loathing like I said in a previous post.

>>68643
>>68647
Well, I've thought about it, and I don't think it would work well on wizchan. It would be too slow to be enjoyable, and would require so much simplification that it would just be interactive storytelling.
I encourage you to look into play-by-post games, I'm sure you'll find an opportunity to try it, entirely over text. There are websites and forums dedicated to this.

[ 1d100 = 82 ]
If 88, we will start a Myfarog campaign (no succubus player characters)

>>68659
>Myfarog
based

>>68659
May God save us from paying for rentals like those subscription games, what a cuckery.

>they give you access
>you give them some money
>deal comes to and end
>they have the game and the money
>you have none of them anymore

foul!

The purple zombies are attacking! There are [ 1d100 = 41 ] of them!
Type 1d6 between brackets [ ] to retaliate.
Kill them all before Halloween, lest this thread be doomed forever!

>>70051
I suppose I'll be the first to pop off a magic missle! [ 1d6 = 4 ]

>>70051
I attack with archery [ 1d6 = 5 ]

>>70051


>The purple zombies are attacking! >There are 1d100[ 1d100 = 41 ] of them!
>Type 1d6 between brackets [ ] to retaliate.
>Kill them all before Halloween, >lest this thread be doomed forever!

Ahaha
☆☆☆☆☆
STARDUST REVERIE
☆☆☆☆☆
[ 1d6 = 6 ]

>>70051
c'mon

tbere's just dozenful of them left!

>>70051
*grabs staff*

Time to try oil!

NATURA SIBERICA!!!

[ 1d6 = 1 ]

i may be out of mana
but i am not out of options

blam blam blam

[ 1d6 = 5 ]

blam blam blam
[ 1d6 = 6 ]

>>70076
ok, we're done

>>70051
charging my best attack EXPLOSION
[ 1d1000 = 683 ]

>>70051
They of purple aura? Or is aura more so pink? And black, or transparent?

My life is Dungeons And Dragons; I decided years ago to start playing DAD 24/7, only never stopping.

Red plus pink plus blue is root chakra for brains. They consumed by sexuality for consciousness.
Or red plus blue, alone.
And black and transparent both mean they -1.

As a newcomer to this medium of entertainment, I am enjoying playing Four Against Darkness with dry-erase markers and a white board. I might have to start collecting RPGs.

>>68419
Hello again anon! It's been a year, how are things going in your game? Still playing with that GM and that other guy?

>I spend most of the week despising it
>Then it's gaming night and all is forgiven. I have a great time, I get to talk with other human beings I don't actively despise
>Then it's the next day and nausea returns
I have started my campaign again and as the GM, I've been having the opposite reaction. I enjoy preparing the game during the week, stocking the dungeons and moving the gears of the world, but on game night I can feel my tank emptying in real-time, and by the end, I tend to be slightly dissatisfied. The players are engaged and definitely seem to enjoy the whole thing, and I think I've found a pretty good risk/reward balance that makes the game meaningful. So I don't know what else I'd want really, yet I usually get more fun preparing the game than actually running it. After the game, I spend the rest of the evening being negative and mulling over minor things that could have gone more smoothly, not feeling the raw satisfaction you'd expect, or being excited about what the players did in the game.
But then, on the following days, I get motivated again and enjoy devising new things for the players.

>>70266
Hey there. It's been a while since I checked this thread. Apologies. About the game, I quit about 5 months ago and it was a mistake. I miss it more than I hated it. Now I'm reading the books wishing I was playing. I'm beyond fucking pathetic, what else can I say. I don't feel like going back to my old group, I fear they think less of me for quitting. Now I'm thinking about finding another group, I don't know.

Happy to know you started your own game. How is it going? I'm sure your players are enjoying it. Players that are at all worth their salt always appreciate their DM. You're basically doing hard work for their enjoyment. Even if things don't go smoothly here or there, who gives a fuck, right? At least that's how I see it as a player.

this looks fun

>>70678
Hello anon!

>About the game, I quit about 5 months ago and it was a mistake. I miss it more than I hated it.
Ah, sorry to hear that. I'm sure you had good reasons to quit after so long.
Have you ever ran your own game, or thought of doing so?

>Happy to know you started your own game. How is it going?
I have stopped running it, mostly due to the reasons I mentioned. My motivation dried up, and at some point it started to feel like a chore.
It lasted long enough, and the players were certainly enjoying it, if I'm going by their near perfect attendance, engagement during play, and long sessions often ending later than reasonable on week nights. It was also the best campaign I ever ran, having perfected my methods from previous ones, and that was good. But I lost the spark eventually, and sooner than I expected too.

>Even if things don't go smoothly here or there, who gives a fuck, right? At least that's how I see it as a player.
That's my issue as a GM, I'm too autistic about running the system rules-as-written. It makes for a rewarding and meaningful experience for the players, and while I'm good at running it this way, it's a lot of work. I could certainly gain from being more flexible, but even as a player, when things are too loose or when I sense the GM is cutting corners, I tend to lose interest because it stops feeling like a game with strict rules I can win or lose at.

Anyway, like yourself, I have been reading stuff again, old gaming magazines from the 80s. The spark is never completely dead.

>>70680
There wasn't a good reason, it's just that I tend to focus on the negative side of anything I'm doing. I quit because I thought I was going to dedicate myself to reading more books, but of course, in the end, I barely read shit anyways and now I'm outta game. I'll probably find a new group on Roll20.

How long did it take you to call it quits with your campaign? I hope you had fun with it. Maybe it's best to have shortish games that end after some months so people can recharge, instead of turning it into a fucking religion the way me and the guys were doing. The first couple of weeks after I left I truly felt like I had escaped from a cult. And now I want back into the fold. I'm almost inclined to give a hollow laugh.

I prefer strict rules myself, but I'm not dead set on them. I do very strongly prefer no fudging to save the characters, no matter what. You can only have true consequences from your decisions if the world is not conspiring in favor of the PCs.

>>70679
It is fun. It's way better than any video game out there, that's for sure.

>>70682
>How long did it take you to call it quits with your campaign?
It ran for about 6 months, and when I really got tired of it I gave myself another session to see if my motivation would return (as it often did), but it didn't. And the funny thing is that the campaign was at a point where it could expand to the overworld and such, with lots of opportunities for development, but after each session, I was getting less and less enjoyment from the whole thing.

Now I'm thinking of doing some solo adventure, playing as one of those yeti monsters (>>70680) and dwelling in a dungeon, looking for human encounters to devour their brains and gain their powers.

>>70685
That's a respectable run. You can get a lot done in six months. Most online games don't last four sessions, let alone several months.

Man I tried solo games but I just can't do it. The wealth of bizarre shit that happens when five nerds get together to play these games just can't be matched by solo play. At least not for me. In many ways solo is the best way to play it because you don't depend on others. I really like that part. It's basically a video game. Pick up and put it down whenever you want. If only I could get into it.

Anyway, I already caved and found another group. We'll be playing through a module this time, about 20 sessions, so about the size of your campaign. Not enough time for me to start hating on rpgs which is good. I can't wait to delve into musty corridors and throw some dice. We start next week. I'll report back.

>>70686
I'm eager to hear your report.
If you don't like it, at least the module will end at some point.

Well I said I would report back so here I am. I had my first game with the new group. It was rather strange, as I'm not used to playing with newbies. My usual experience with gaming is with grognards, and the game very quickly gets into a rather smooth operation: go to the dungeon, kill the monsters, fetch the gold, bring it back for XP, rinse, and repeat. Roleplay is present but secondary, it's a game, not a narrative. The characters are tools for combat and exploration first, not people. It's just a different way of playing, is all.

Now, with the newbies coming into roleplaying after the Critical Role phenomenon, it's different. They all want to elevate their characters to some literary figure. I sat through a 10-minute argument between two players because they have PCs whose "personalities" clash. These players have pet characters that they intensely protect from all danger, to the point of being a detriment to the game itself. They don't want to go into the cave "because there might be something too dangerous inside." Well wtf man, that's the whole fucking point, is it not?

The DM is aware of the problem and was privately messaging me days before the session, telling me he was hoping that I would stir the other players to action. I have never had that happen to me before. Usually, DMs are control freaks who want to have complete control of the world and the players somewhat. This guy is apparently too afraid to be candid about the pet characters that are paralyzing his game and is trying to recruit me as his hatchet man.

Welp, I'm happy to inform you that I embraced the task. We saw some action and a character got killed, although it was an excruciating process that took several minutes of arguments. But before that, let me tell you about what we did in town before going out into the caves.

One of the players actually had his character looking for work AS A FUCKING BARISTA AT THE LOCAL INN! Holy fucking Christ Jesus, man. Here we have a game where you can be a hill giant, a devil, a paladin, a rogue, a demon prince from hell, or a fucking dragon if you want to. And this guy takes a 15-minute side quest to try and get his character work waiting tables! There was nothing particularly important about this inn, either. It's just an inn.

And it's not like we were short on money either. This is a Monty Haul DM and each of us had enough money to afford food and board for like a whole year. Besides, we can just hear some rumors and get immediately hired to do cool jobs like hunting orcs, solving a murder, or whatever the fuck. But no, this guy has his character serving club sandwiches to the town drunk. I might point out now that all these players are only on their second dnd game. They played a module for a couple of months, and now the DM is running another module for the same group. But honestly, when I was a newbie, I would have never done something as dull as serving club sandwiches at the local inn. Then again, when I first started playing these games, if you pulled some shit like that at the table, taking 15 minutes of everybody's time to go find a barista job that has nothing to do with anything important going on, you would probably get your character murdered. But I digress.

Anyway, back to the part where I was trying to convince this party to get their hands dirty inside a cave. I was very adamant about it, and they decided to take a vote. I was going to lose, but the DM, having two votes because he's controlling two characters in the party (we're still a couple of players short) voted my way. This is the level of bullshit we were pulling here just to get this game going.

We go in, find some treasure, and win a couple of encounters, but we get attacked on our way back by goblins. Because old-school dnd is quite deadly, we lose one of the characters. And just like that, we're now actually playing the game. The player who lost his character got into an argument with another player because that player didn't come to his aid when he was the only one who could've done something. The DM tries to defuse the situation, basically saying the game is very deadly, yadda yadda yadda, but yeah, if you ask me, that other player fucked up because he thinks his character is his fucking girlfriend that he needs to keep out of harm's way. Fucking pathetic, but hey, at least we got some treasure.

All that said, I actually had fun. The DM is quite good, he can do voices, describe scenes, and he knows the game well enough. The players are laughable, but I think there's hope there.