Sack Attack
Sam’s known Brett since they were kids so it stands to reason he would know which buttons to push now that he (seemingly) has the confidence to really push them. I’m sorry this strip is a little bit talking headish but I wanted to get some of the dialogue across and set us up for Monday.
It should come as no big surprise that Sam’s attitude with Karthun, D&D, and Greyhawk mirror my own. I love Greyhawk with all of my heart but to be honest, a day came where I just had to accept the fact that WotC will never really give it a return to rockstar status like the Forgotten Realms. Of course, I could be wrong there and odds are I probably am but I’m one of the guys who held out hope only to be let down with each and every tease.
At the moment, I am DMing a new Pathfinder campaign and loving it. I am running the Rise of the Runelords adventure path while I work on fleshing out more of Karthun. Very soon a day will come when I send out an email to friends and maybe one or two readers to join me for a few sessions in Karthun, just to take my new world out for a test drive. When that day comes, you will be the first to know.
I’ve recently restocked a few items in the online store if such things appeal to you. If so, I’d be thrilled if you had a look around OVER HERE!Â
The in-game action resumes on Monday!
Omg…this. I’m so enjoying this story. I play a lot like this. Screw the rules…play for fun! Oh…and please pick me. /dream
I love the fact that Brett is the kind of guy you can provoke into stepping outside of his comfort zone like this.
Glad to hear you’re enjoying Pathfinder. It’s my main game at the moment since I run two groups for it and am trying to get my own homebrew game running. The next things on my list are to run Rise of the Runelords, and hopefully find someone to GM Reign of Winter for me so I can actually play in a D&D style game again… currently the only games I get to play are my housemates two World of Darkness games. Don’t get me wrong, I love World of Darkness, but I was raised on D&D, and I miss getting some hack and slash action of my own.
I highly recommend taking a look at some of the other Adventure Paths as well. Shattered Star has a really awesome Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider vibe to it, and Skulls & Shackles is a pretty cool journey from being the lowest ranking crew members on a ship to becoming pirate kings. I haven’t looked at Reign of Winter much yet because I’m desperate to actually get to play this one, but from what I know of it there’s plenty of plane hopping and Russian folklore inspired content. There’s also some fantastic modules and so on if you don’t want a full campaign, I’d suggest taking a look at Realm of the Fellnight Queen, it’s a brilliant adventure that has a really fun twist on the fey.
I’ve been running Curse of the Crimson Throne now for about a year, and it’s on track to be the first time I’ve taken a group of PCs from first to twentieth level.
I really liked this, i can relate to it a lot also, i’m having an almost identical experience in which me (the dm) and my group just played too much with a specific set of rules.
They know everything, they can’t be surprised by anything that’s in the book (so i gave them a lot of custom thing) the only “fun” that’s left is building absurdly powerful charcters.
We really need a change, a fresh start. The problem is that a couple of player feel like brent, they feel confortable knowing all, they feel secure and they just won’t let go. I think is a very common problem with old players.
man i loveing this comic eversince i found it, lol its becuase of THIS comic im so intersted in playing DnD, i have bunch of digital books, and even made a thief like bard xD lol only problem is i have no idea how to play or how to find a group, is there a site that folks use to broadcast when they need new memebers?
lol personally i cant wait to see more of this world of yours, im creating my own but i’ve been lazy so i only have a rough draft done XD lol
It varies by area, really. Around here, the gaming shop (we only have one) is the best bet; just put a notice up on the wall with some contact info, and use a bit of patience. Other people have found groups through the internet, though I’ll admit to never having any luck doing that.
Asking people is pretty much the easiest way to do it. I got in my first regular campaign by asking the clerk at the Den, and his group was looking for a fourth.
I have had good luck with Pen and Paper Games: http://penandpapergames.com/
You register with your location, free days, and which systems interest you, and then you can look through the forums to see if there are games with openings that look interesting, or you can post a topic looking for players to form a new group together, etc. I found two groups that way, and made some new friends. The usual “meeting new people from the internet’ warnings apply, of course.
If you ever write a Karthun campaign setting for Pathfinder, I’ll be your slave. No, really. Make a Pathfinder-friendly Karthun happen and I will literally sell my freedom to you.
Hate to dis this (as I really am enjoying your new game world) but really? A ‘heady’ strip about ‘stretching your roleplaying chops’ by playing YET ANOTHER D&D CLONE?!? It’s one thing to play the same game in a different world but that’s really a cop-out. Take away everything and all is possible. Why not pull away the safety net and play someting unique for once? Your Dread storyarc, now THAT was stretching…
Here’s the thing, though…this is how I feel when I play Call of Cthulhu. Yes, in some ways it’s enough like D&D that I learned to play it quickly. But that first time, after years of D&D playing…it was a whole new world. I felt the same rush when I moved into things like Fiasco or School Daze or Savage Worlds, where the mechanics are different enough to give me a new role-playing experience.
Um, dis all you want Mark. It’s a free internet. I’m still going to write and create the comics I want to make regardless of how much you dis it or feel that certain elements are a cop-out.
A rules set that works and is easy to use is pretty much the only thing that is really needed to actually run a game. D&D clones work because they are easy to reskin for almost any fantasy world.
Is there going to be a bonus comic where Brett rubs his junk on the table and teabags Sam? Maybe in the next compilation?
The more I read this strip the more I wish I had a D&D/RPG group again. I haven’t played D&D in forever, but used to play SW, and the White Wolf stuff on a regular basis.
Loving this! I came to the same point with my own gaming, having started out on D&D back in 1980; everything was too familiar and the patterns were getting set. Luckily I had the chance to try GURPS, CoC, Tunnels & Trolls, Ars Magica et al, and that helped break me out of my gaming rut. It also kept me from falling back into patterns when I did return to D&D.
And I’m with you on Greyhawk. One of the reasons I got excited by D&D 3rd ed was that Greyhawk started as the default setting. I had high hopes WotC was going to push it full bore and give us new content, but of course that isn’t what happened. *sigh*
I’m convinced they will never go back to Greyhawk. With Gary gone, maybe it’s for the best but damn. I’d love to see the money behind the Forgotten Realms get behind Greyhawk for a year.
I really need to get another gaming group together. I miss D&D something fierce. Thanks for at least easing the gaming itch with the comic.
Wow, I feel like you’ve had a video camera in our game room lately. Some of these exchanges feel eerily familiar…
I’m hearing that a lot this week. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry you’re dealing with such table drama.
Damn I love reading this.
Greyhawk deserves a really good treatment. It has been ‘re-launched’ various times, but each effort was surprisingly like the other (compare the various gazetteers… they are practically the same book each time!). I wonder if it would be best to provide something more like the Neverwinter or Halls of Undermountain 4E books. Concentrate on a specific area of Greyhawk and create a real experience, but then also tie it into the larger setting so you want to know more. If successful, that could then lead to a larger treatment for the setting. Something that mimics ToEE could also work – gamers might forget, but ToEE is a pretty pivotal part of what happens historically in Greyhawk. It would be cool to see a similar combination of politics, kingdom interaction, machinations by evil, and a cool location that could become iconic.
I’d be thrilled with one big hardback setting book that cleans up the continuity and consolidates most of the reference.
I am so glad I grabbed a bunch of relative newbies when I started my Pathfinder Campaign as I have a similar mindset to Sam. If it’s cool it can probably happen being the main philosophy of my GMing style.
I appreciate where Brett is coming from admittedly having been that guy myself sometimes I am ashamed to admit. I do hope though that he grows out of that cause it’s way more fun to be surprised after all if we wanted stuff we knew why would we role play?
Sam has an… interesting outlook there. I felt more comfortable playing with older editions of D&D than I did the newer editions where I felt the rules, especially in the encounter and magic item ‘drops’ became more codified while in older editions it was a lot more random and dangerous and hence, easier to explore the game system as it was already ‘broken.’
I’m not a huge fan of the forgotten realms. They’re too fractured and “ooo! Isn’t this bit neat?” for me. I prefer Greyhawk or Darksun or even Krynn because they have a thematic wholeness to them. That said, I pretty much run my own settings because it’s more fun to make up my own fluff than to learn someone else’s… plus I’m going to screw with that fluff anyway.
That said, I do like to throw two settings together and see how they fair… like Aliens invading Forgotten Realms or The Narnia-Middle Earth War. One of my favorite games back in the army was Xeen vs Midgar (FF7).
As game systems evolve over time, gamers should be willing to try new things. Greyhawk and 1st Edition AD&D was fun, but it’s like eating one flavor of ice cream. It gets old after a while.
Sam is doing world building and home brewing, which I applaud. It sounds like he’s come up with something satisfying and fun for his players, so Brett should pull his head out of his ass and play without any more bitching. I hope the first combat changes his mind about things.
For a fun revision of old school D&D, I loved how Hackmaster played.
Wow, I read your comic every day it comes out. And as a fellow GM, I know your pain and the need to change it up a bit because the rules get stale when someone claims to ‘know everything’. I’ve run into so many gamers like that it’s not funny. I even build my own rules sets and custom rules specifically to throw off the ‘I know everything’ gamer, generating monsters and encounters that make them think outside the comfy box. If you ever make a Karthun adventure path, email me about it immediately..I would eat that up in a heartbeat in excitement to try.
Speaking of which, how do I chat with a rad dude like you?
must resist urge to make boxers with “time to get my dirk wet” written on them
I enjoyed Runelords myself, didn’t finish the path before our group broke apart and reformed and started Kingmaker. Hope we get back to Runelords eventually but right now we are doing a Skull and Shackles path, Jade Regent, and Serpents Skull. Have to try and talk my DM into letting me run the Runelords this time, I just love messing with goblins
Personally, I’m all for just about anything that steps outside the standard Tabletop RPG sequence. Warriors and Clerics and Rangers are all well and good, but sometimes the best way to breathe new life into a table is to let them cut loose with something completely different.
Also, calling it now, Brett dives right in the minute he gets a Critical Maneuver.
I absolutely LOVE this arc, I don’t know if you (Brian) have released notes on Karthun but you could totally start a kickstarter to set up some Core books for this, I would love to play it!
Love it. I’m glad I recognized what was going on. Gives me confidence in my DM chops. I may have to give Pathfinder a try now, and I can’t wait to see more of Karthun, both comic and game.
Rise of the Runelords is an excellent AP! one of my favorites have fun with it!
Actually the biggest problem with homebrewed worlds and mechanics are that they are carbon copy of something with a little spice. “Let’s create Gayhawk but with more catman, and vampires, oh oh and spaceships LOOOT of spaceshpis.” About mechanics… well let’s just say that i’ve seen no homebrew (i mean one without 2nd person as an editor) which had proper model for it. Most of them are just another take on d20 or d6 system.
So, to be honest, I’ve played a premade setting only twice. The other times have generally been either created just for the particular adventures (heavily in Doctor Who RPGs and D&D short campaigns) or settings that were made up by the DM for their own original fiction that we get to dick around it (most of the longer campaigns, also lots of fun). I’m mildly embarrased to admit that, since I often skip the overall setting fluff in premade adventures, it took me years to be able to consistently remember which setting was Greyhawk. Homebrew settings are as good as your GM’s creativity, and when you’ve got a group full of wannabe writers who take turns GMing, it can get both fun, and enjoyably confusing.