A bonus session #trippeludden! Session four-point-five!

Last sesh the dorks had schlepped a mage to a cruel tower but then parted ways and bolted once they learned that he didn’t wanna give them any more share of the loot (“I already gave you two thousand gold coins for disabling that blasted lantern!”). And I wasn’t sure what his fate would be in there so I recruited @smorkin (who isn’t in the campaign normally) to portray him in there! Fun fun fun!♥︎

I also got a chance to use the spell points (“MP” like in video game RPGs—yes, I know that the slot system is also from a video game, Wizardry) from the 2014 DMG p288. It was great! I remember raging at it back in the day because it just adds a layer of complexity on top of what would be a simple system. But what I realized was that it doesn’t really start to be complicated until level 11, until then it’s easier than the slots system (especially for people coming from a video game background). I wish I had realized that a long time ago because we could’ve had lots of spell points fun!

“💇🏻‍♀️” was finally home after being away for summer! I love her so much!♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎

We met up and played Haggis; we played a traditional long game of 350 points, not really utilizing the “bet” rules, and using the new reckoning of one point per captured card instead of some cards 0, some 1, some 2, some 3 and some 5. The game was really fun; I had a huge lead and then she had a clean sweep almost catching up but I ended up winning. I also managed to use both laser bombs and rainbow bombs! This was our first time with the new reckoning so let me review that real quick! That’s right, fam, you get game reviews tangled up in the sesh reps in this 🐝!

Pros

I’m definitively gonna keep using the new reckoning and it makes Haggis shoot up as one of my fave 2p card games. I was kvetching that I don’t like that it doesn’t use the aces (one reason I have such a sweet spot for Color Gin is that it uses the entire French deck fully; suits matter, ranks matter, sets matter, sequences matter and all 52 cards are in use, whereas Haggis hits the first three of those four [and is way more interactive than Color Gin]. It uses a very unusual deck composition 2–10 in four suits, or five suites for 3p. But “💇🏻‍♀️” was into it! She said it was easier, there’s already enough to juggle, you don’t need to worry about card rankings etc, this was great. She made a great case for Haggis’ deck design!

We used one of my fave decks from when I used to collect Bicycle decks. This deck is well worn by now.

But now on to the cons with the new reckoning!

• It makes the idea of “capturing” completely dumb!! First of all, cards in hand are now worth six each in practice no matter which card they are, but you get them as five and then one!
• And the tensions around using the king etc is gone, and the ranking of the joker bombs aren’t as obvious
• And why do I now “capture the haggis” instead of “you get 8 bonus points”?
• It just doesn’t make sense! With the old reckoning there was a purpose to capturing cards. Now “💇🏻‍♀️” wondered why there even was capturing and I explained “it used to be that cards were worth different amounts of points and that’s why capturing was a big deal. You still do it because they’re one point each”.

She agreed that one point per card is better!

This is a strength of Sean’s game dev chops; he ruthlessly realizes when a rule doesn’t really change the outcome of a game. There’s probably less than one game out of forty where the fiddly card point differences changed who won a game, probably less than one out of five where it changed who even won one round. So the new reckoning is way way better but it curiously shows traces of the games’ evolution since if it had been one point per card from the start the “capturing” wouldn’t’ve evolved in this way or been phrased that way!

Then after I had said au revoir to her and returned home, who did I find waiting outside my door? My beloved D&D dorks! And D&D was really really fun today! We could play outside! It was the opposite of last time (where it was stomp-and-stare until we found a “Trilemma” adventure location); this time the random encounters were fun! I was using the rule that stuff on the NE Strielund table that we’ve already seen a couple of times, instead I roll something off of Dungeonesque’s tables (in the blue book).

So we got some flavorful and weird Strielund stuff followed by first a chimera! It was a scared and frozen chimera that didn’t wanna fight but “M”‘s character Tófa hates the world so he started throwing javs! With disastrous results, everyone in the party spent their guardian acorns and barely escaped.

So that later in the afternoon same day they were more vulnerable and they ran into two nobles (high lords from Sisteborg [“Lastfort”]) and their five retainers. The nobles demanded 90% of the party’s possessions. @Halo’s character Visan (he’s playing a Wildfire druid… that has taken every single chef feat in the book! + herbalism!) offered to cook up a meal, the nobles said “Well, that’s a start! You’re right that we’re quite hungry. We can divide the rest of your stuff after dinner.” (they had been treading in the snow) but Visan slipped them a sick dose of psilocybin ‘shrooms! Which was great because I then got to describe how they turned into wolves! (I did a detailed & gory description inspired by The Dreamers by Stephen King which I read the other day.) All seven of them—the whole “nobles and retainers” was just a disguise; rather than lycantrophized nobles they were really bandit werewolves who had stolen those outfits! They had the poisoned condition which made it easier to hide from them (which the party remembered) and defend from them (which they forgot). So everyone got infected by lycantropy which was moot in Tófa’s case because he died! But that was a good thing because “M” seemed way more stoked for his new char! He’s been not entirely positive to the #trippeludden campaign and even less for the campaigns I’ve been thinking of running (#trippeludden is kind of a stopgap or filler campaign as I’m working on the next. Our #boatmode campaign isn’t destroyed, it’s properly bookmarked & stashed in case I wanna return to it, which I don’t anytime soon even though I can understand why the players would want to!) so we’re all hoping that his new character will turn things around!

What I’ve been doing with the Trippeludden setting is that they were pretty restricted in terms of character options at first but as they run into weird creatures, those creatures have been unlocked as character options. So at first they could only be humans but now they can be gnomes, Martoi remnants (using reskinned “Shadar-Kai” stats for them), orcs (of the Aggal blight variety), half-demon (that is to say half-orc, half-demon, using “Tiefling” stats for them), and Seree automations (using reskinned “Warforged” stats for them). Players don’t decrypt: Gurl jrer nyfb ernyyl ernyyl pybfr gb zrrgvat n bar-bss neznqvyyb perngher, juvpu, vs gurl qb, gurl pna cynl xva bs jvgu Gnfun’f havdhr yvarntr ehyrf. Gurl whfg qvqa’g tb vagb gung ebbz!.

Also we were using initiative cards! A little fiddly and slower compared to our normal home made deterministic initiative system but pretty fun and dynamic and easy on the brains for me as DM. I really had looked forward to using those cards ever since I got the Essentials Kit many years ago (they were still on their performated sheet, I separated them for the first time for last sessions but that session didn’t have any fights). I made a couple of mistakes with the cards but “M” help me sort that out. We could also use the cards to partially help keep track of which werewolves had been hidden from and which had not been.

Now, normally on a weeknight we don’t play boardgames after, the way we might on a weekend (maybe as fillers before the game). But since we had a char death, we had time to play Stella! It’s such a dumb game but I love it!!! It just makes me feel really really happy when I play it! And the best part is, “M” loves it too! Things have been a li’l tense since his pet char died in #boatmode so it’s good that he’s been grooving on Stella. He thinks it’s way better than Dixit; although all three of us are in pretty much lockstep sync agreement about the pros and cons of Dixit and Stella. @Halo asked if we could play good old Dixit too sometimes and we said yes. I think the 3P variant does work well for Dixit.

I finally managed to explain how the original scoring system works and they agreed how dumb and bad and fiddly and time-consuming and book-keeping it was. Our houserules are isomorphic but just work faster. “Normally even the ‘in the dark’ player would get two points for every match and one extra for every super spark, but they would then retroactively lose one of those points if they fall, and everyone’s points would be tracked using these stars, and then between each round those scores would be transfered to a score sheet that comes with the game, I don’t have it anymore, and then after the game the scores are summed”. It’s just so dumb!! Instead we use the bunnies and the score track from Odyssey and people get their scores immediately: one if you’re in the dark (which makes sense since the in-the-dark token only shows one star), two if you’re not, and one extra if you spark, and if the in-the-dark player doesn’t fall, which so far hasn’t happen to us, they’d get bonus points equal to as many they marked (a.k.a. their position on the lantern track). So unlike upstream Stella you never have to “backtrack” and there’s no “score transfer” or “score summing” book-keeping steps.

Now, I believe that one reason they went with that cockamamie Rube Goldberg scoring procedure was to make the game feel more different from Dixit! And one other reason is that they just borked it in the dev process (I mean, the two-star/one-star sides on the lantern tokens are an echo of how scoring perhaps worked differently at an earlier stage in the process).

Now I mentioned the other day that I think I need new glasses already but it works OK when I pick up the cards. Stella is “kind” in that way since it uses fewer cards per game. (Although Stella games are shorter than Dixit, we had time to play it twice in 40 minutes tonight.) And getting to look at these cards is such a delight and such a reason why I love these two games!

I’ve been frank in how much I can’t stand some of Dixit’s expansions (“Journey”, “Mirrors”, there are some other ones I also really don’t like. Journey’s images would be cool for a picture book but they’re frustrating for Dixit because unlike Dixit, they’re often just “one thing”, each card is one story or one pun, whereas Dixit’s original three sets (“Dixit”, “Quest”, and “Odyssey”—Journey was called Dixit 3 at one point even though it’s the fourth set) I can come up with a dozen things for each card. But come to think of it, maybe Journey’s cards would work well with the Stella ruleset actually! The Stella word card system affords us to look at every card in a new light! Although nothing can fix that Asterix-style card in “Mirrors”! The Tintin rocket in Odyssey is bad enough!) but please let me then counterweigh that by saying how much I love the card sets of Odyssey, Stella and Revelations! BGG has all card images for all set I really do feel like I’ve picked my three fave ones (in that order: my old fave Odyssey now surpassed by Stella and by my new fave Revelations)!

After a long streak of expansions I don’t like, the Stella cards actually are great! I know that the new rules and components were one big reason why I wanted to get the Stella box but those components can be replaced by scrap paper; as long as you have Dixit cards you can play with the Stella rules, just draw a five by three grid with six lines on a note paper or something. But I really really love this card set! Warm and soft and rich in imagery. Bringing back a lot of what I loved from Dixit which a lot of the other sets have lost. (“Dixit” and “Quest” I’d place as my fourth and fifth favorite; as I said the other day, @Halo has them so I’m not gonna get them since we can play with them with his set when we get nostalgic for them. Instead, I’d be more likely to mix in divination cards from my Morgan-Greer or Laura’s Liminal Spirits Oracle deck.)

Two games of Radlands before D&D today and me and @Halo won one each. He won the first one even though I had a massive card advantage engine and both Magnus Karv and Zeto Kahn active. So for the second game I copied his setup: Scud Launcher, Catapult and Juggernaut! And I won by a huge margin even though he had an active Muse! Catapult is just a really strong camp especially after a Juggernaut has wreaked havoc!

Then session four of #trippeludden for a session that was half awful / half awesome. First half was full of duds—weather too extreme to travel, rumors that didn’t pan out. Second half they actually made it to one of the Trilemma locations and that was fun fun fun! ♥︎ They tried to destroy a lantern by a huge heap of robots!

Me and “M” played a game of Button Men as a filler before D&D. I won, but it was pure luck because we were playing Core characters from the Fight City set and every move I made, my opponent could also predict. I just lucked out in how an early d20 reroll landed untouchably high and then I could coast on it to the end.

Then D&D, session three of #trippeludden! There is some amount of on-the-fly rolling (“tier two” in blorb parlance) as they visit small hamlets and villages on the map that get a random name, random inn… I’m working off of the tables in Dungeonesque which in this case ended up pretty flavorful with a gang of mercenaries who joined the party as they went ghost busting Martoi on the heath. With disastrous results—they made a big payoff rooting out a trio of bog strangles, but then once they found their target, a Martoi wraith escorted by five knights on horseback, they were routed. Four of the eight mercenaries died and they only took one of the knights with them before the party fled.

The flipside to working off of tier two and tier three is having to write everything down in a way I can remember and find again. I’ve been trying BuJo style (and this campaign is also a test run for that method) and I’m already getting pretty overwhelmed. I’ve used index cards in the past, also with mediocre results but maybe they’re still better than this? The BuJo style worked for Starforged but there I was taking my time and being able to write everything down slowly and carefully and update the index. Maybe what’s needed here is to take better notes after each session? “Reverse prep”; go through notes, do tasks for next session, index everything all while this session is fresh in my mind.

During dinner Turncoats which keeps being fresh. “Every game is different”, I keep singing that refrain about this game but it keeps being true. I got my first win in a long time, too. I was lucky and could pretty much stick to negotiating, almost.

Then Stella! So fun! I had to pick up some of the cards and look more closely at them. A completely uneven game where “M” was in the high thirties, @Halo in the mid twenties, and I had less than 15. The game felt like it was over too quickly, I can see how one would wanna play it twice! it’s just four rounds. It’s such a dumb game devoid of any skill or merit. Like, it doesn’t “build character” the way other games do (like Dixit or even something like chess). I’m realizing as I’m writing this that it’s just basically “captcha the game”. “Click on the squares that contain birthdays.” But the flip side is that it’s “looking at art, the game”. It makes art pieces ludemic.

Then we got to play one of James’ card games, Showboat. I loved it even though I was getting absolutely clobbered. It was more that I loved playing with the Heckadeck than the game itself, maybe, because even though the game is very fun (it’s got everything I love: simultaneous selection, planning, tableau building, a solitaire feel while being super interactive, uses multiple aspects of the cards, balancing different factors—it has a bit of a Flipull feel, an old NES/GB game that I adore), it’s maybe not the most balanced? I’m not sure yet. But what kept happening is that the person who retired second-to-last got the most point and who retired first got middle and who retired last (or rather, couldn’t retire since the game ends when the second-to-last player retires) got least. No matter what else was happening in the round. Although I guess that one can think “OK, sure, then that’s the game—try to set up so that you don’t have to retire first. And then the actual score is extra margins that can start mattering once everyone gets good at that first part”. The turn order isn’t set since it’s sim-sel so maybe the game does have legs.

We were using ace through seven and then arrows and talismans instead of using kings and queens, since I thought it’d be easier to mentally divorce the arrows and talismans (which we collectively started calling “supercards” or “supries”) from the number sequence, and I thought that was right. It’s easier to know that you can play a number after a “suprie” than after a king or queen.

Not that the traditional style of the Island deck isn’t awesome, it is! But the Heckadeck’s flavor is to me even more awesome in how there can be a traditional-looking two of diamonds right next to a weird arrow or talisman and a half-way-between-weird-and-traditional three of clouds. The unranked oddball nature of the arrows and talismans is something that just pleases me somehow!?

While I was in card play heaven I got the vibe that the other players were getting bored to tears. I love trad-style card games like Parade, Ninety-Nine, Color Gin, Haggis, and they don’t as much. Yeah, yeah, Sail, but those cards do have powers, sort of.

“M” ended up winning Showboat and then left, and me and Halo played two games of Radlands which he won easily (which, good—we hadn’t played in a few weaks and we ended on me having a winning str). We were both tired and making mistakes, and he could wrangle that chaos better I guess! Then one game of Star Wars where I exiled out my buying power early on leaving me with only heavy hitters, but it wasn’t enough for the home stretch so he won. I was four guns short or I would’ve won—I needed to win that turn because he had a fistfull of lead. I had a Barge but Dengar was in the deck or that woulda done it. My Falcon had whiffed the turn before, too, so that was all she wrote!

D&D first session after a two week break, and it’s session two of our #trippeludden campaign! @Halo found an item that there was only one percent chance of him being able to wield it (a Circlet of Deel) but the dice were with him! We did roll that lucky “01”! After they reached an inn in the New Quarter of Sisteborg (“Lastfort”), and they leveled up their chars, we played Stella! I finally got to play it!♥︎

It was fun and easy. I don’t feel like comparing it to Dixit—it’s great that they have the same card backs. Dixit is a sensitive, creative, expressive game whereas Stella is just easy laidback mindless fun!

Also earlier today I bought too many games—Mind Bug, Fiasco the card game, and Heckadeck. That’s on top of within the last week getting Deathmatch Island, Stella, Dixit Revelations (which hasn’t even arrived yet) and Star Wars!

I kinda wanna throw all games away except for the Heckadeck so it’s dumb (and being a climate-clod) that I added some more to the collection.

We got to try Mindbug as a filler before D&D. I won but then we checked a rule and I retroactively lost instead—apparently you can’t mindbug the “Play from discard” ability the way I did for the win. I’ve wanted this game for years but now I’m not sure about it. The theme, goofy SF, is more fun than Radland’s grim “shooting and burning human beings” theme, but what I really want is to put a Forgetful Fish deck together.

New campaign! I’m running Michael Prescott’s Tristhmus campaign which I’m calling #trippeludden since I’ve changed some of the place names to Swedish. And unlike my modern mysteries campaign or my Strange Stars campaign this one has actually gotten started, with one session behind us.

This world doesn’t really have have tiers or dungeon levels the way I like (I never balance against PCs, but I like areas near the starting area to be comparatively easier than areas further away) but since I started the campaign in Saltgemål (which the original calls “Saltbride”) and it has some suggested adventure sites within that town’s borders, I fleshed those out using easier monsters. But the players didn’t visit them; they are helping a textile guild family move to Sisteborg (“Lastfort”) and are schlepping a wagonful of cloth rolls and furniture across the marshlands and flood plains.

I feel good about this; this was our last session before a li’l summer break and I’m glad it was an OK session.