Posts

Showing posts with the label Role-playing Rants

Role-playing Rants: Why I dislike the "sandbox approach"

Image
A few days ago I've posted a rather controversial tweet about sandbox games, and why I think they're infinitely less appealing than those "on the rails". I also made a terrible mistake of forgetting about how much people get offended these days. My meme-based tweet twisted a lot of panties, fortunately most of the people interacting with it were reasonable and understood its tongue-in-cheek nature. To those people I say: thank you. Now back to topic. I dislike sandbox games a lot. They're boring, sluggish and only offer the guise of freedom. Shit, I almost forgot - this is of course only mine opinion, even if I present it as a revealed truth. Introducing the meme that started it all! Anyway, sandbox games - they're boring. Every single sandbox that I was playing or running was suffering from that problem. Even the ones that I watched on YouTube were horribly boring. The main problem here is that sandbox only works if the players have a clear goal for both thei...

Role-playing Rants: My honest thoughts about the current state of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition

Image
Last week Cubicle 7 dropped a bunch of info about their future WFRP releases. It's quite impressive, and it actually made me rethink a lot of things about the current edition of the game. Yeah, no scenario review this week, sorry. You see, on the 30th of April we've been given a long and impressive list of upcoming 4th edition titles from the developers at C7. You can find it here . Among these we have a bestiary of sorts, a book about magic, both human, elvish and dwarf (in the form of runes, naturally), more parts of the "Enemy Within" remaster and a bunch of other sourcebooks. All in all, that's pretty impressive. Is it finally time for the 4th edition to pick up the pace a bit? Yeah, I'm not even kidding. That is genuienly impressive stuff. Mind you, I don't believe that we'll see any of these titles this year, but kudos to the C7 team for giving us a long and easy to read list of books which we might see... someday. Perhaps. You see...

Role-playing Rants: My favorite player characters: Part Six

Image
This is it, the final chapter of my favorite character series. I'm not gonna lie, these posts were a joy to write, and this particular one is especially dear to me. Of all the Classic World of Darkness games, Hunter: The Reckoning is my personal favorite. Yeah, I know it's an underdog and the red-headed stepchild of the whole setting, but to me it's one of my favorite RPGs of all time. One day I will write a full review of this title, but for now let me just tell you that some of my best role-playing memories came from playing Hunter with my close friends years ago. The chronicle, the atmosphere, the props that we were using during our games, and finally... the characters. The characters were simply epic, and since HTR was the game in which we've played a single, longest campaign of all, they took a lot of time to develop, mature and evolve. Seeing their progress, their journey - it was pure joy. As much as I love WFRP, it is Hunter: The Reckoning with which I have, ...

Role-playing Rants: My favorite player characters: Part Five

Image
Allow me to take you on a journey into the grim and dark future of endless war, blind zealotry and cynicism - the dystopian world of Warhammer 40,000 awaits. Even though WFRP is my default go-to game, I do play other titles as well... occasionally. One of them, and one that I enjoy a lot, is the Fantasy Flight Games' 1st edition of Dark Heresy. Now it wasn't always that way, as those who read my blog for some time, know already. I used to dislike DH a lot, but that was a long, long time ago. Currently I only have fond memories of this game, and would very much like to run it in the near future. Anyway, my players created quite a few and interesting characters during our times together, when we were discovering the many and varied dangers of the 41st Millenium. I want to tell you about a few of them. 1. Solomon Victus, a ruthless and ambitious arbitrator (played by Martin) Sometimes you just find the perfect artwork for a character. This picture just screams ...

Role-playing Rants: My favorite player character: Part Four

Image
Those of you with eyes of a hawk no doubt noticed that I used the singular term "character", in the title of this post. That's because it's going to be about a single hero - one that I've RP'ed almost 12 years ago. If you're reading my blog for some time now, you know that I'm not particulary fond of participating in roleplaying games as a player. I'm the forever GM-kind of guy. I like the creative control, the world building possibilites and, of course, the power of life and death over my players... Errrr... I mean, the chance to see them evolve and become the heroes that they were always destined to be! What I want to say is that I'm not too fond of playing RPGs. The last time that I was a regular player, was in 2017, back when I've participated in a Vampire: The Masquerade game as a Brujah DJ with a thing for baseball bats. Since then it was only a couple of one-shots, but nothing too serious. That said, back in 2008 when I've...

Role-playing Rants: My favorite player characters: Part Three

Image
Gotta say, I really enjoy these trips down the memory lane. There is something incredibl pleasant about remembering the coolest, most interesting player characters that one had a chance to encounter, during his years as a game master. Today we continue our journey through time and space, visiting yet another batch of my favorite Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay heroes. This time we take a look at the original characters created by my Roll20 group, and how they've managed to leave a lasting impression in my mind. 1. Lukas Kohler, a hardcore survivalist from Talabecland (played by Andy) Lukas Kohler (artwork by Jason Brisken) If there ever was a "hero" who defied death time and time again, laughing in its ghastly face, it was Lukas Kohler. A syphilitic charcoal burner from the rural province of Talabecland, Lukas decided to leave his small hovel to pursue adventure and gather riches. What he found was death and danger at every corner. From rescuing a little girl fr...

Role-playing Rants: My favorite player characters: Part Two

Image
My trip down the memory lane continues with even more, memorable WFRP characters! Let's take a look at a few of them, and enjoy the tales of their deeds. This time we're covering the heroes of my first playthroughs of "Terror in Talabheim" and "The Thousand Thrones", as well as the Polish-written campaign - "Lord of Winter". There are quite a lot of them, so I will describe the most interesting ones, the ones that I still think about to this very day. Let's take a trip down the memory lane, shall we? 1. Lukyan Aleksandrovitch Yakov, Kislevite spy master (played by Martin) To this day one of my favorite PC's of all time. A ruthless Kislevite Checkist (posing as a Imperial merchant) with low moral compass, and a low tolerance for fools, Lukyan survived 6 chapters of "The Thousand Thrones", one of the hardest WFRP campaign ever written. His task was to find the miraculous child and asses the threat that it posed to Kislev ...

Role-playing Rants: My favorite player characters: Part One

Image
Enough with the reviews, enough with the fillers. Let's talk buisness - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay buisness! The analitics don't lie. Aside from various Asian porn sites which seem to really like my blog, and re-visit it all the time, the biggest ammount of hits that I generate, come from people who are all about WFRP. This little slice of internet was initially created as a way for me to rekindle my love for this system (which it managed to do), but over the years I also wanted to write about other stuff. World of Darkness, Warhammer 40,000, Delta Green and many other topics have been tackled by me with mixed results, but they never gained the ammount of enthusiasm and popularity, that my WFRP posts managed to achieve. I'm cool with that, to be honest. There was a time when I was quietly wishing for a more diverse group of followers, but that's in the past now. I am grateful for what I have, for what I was able to build over the years, and I wouldn't change ...