Good Morning Folks! This week you are getting a bit of a bonus post, because it is extremely rare that I talk about anything on Saturdays. Generally speaking I blog Monday through Friday and then only by happenstance on Sundays because that is when I post the new episode of AggroChat. Today is a bit of a unique situation because last night we had our semi-monthly pen and paper play group. We are playing an Indie RPG system called Public Access, which is effectively an urban horror/found footage type gameplay experience. If you are a junkie for SCPs, Cryptids, or even The Secret World MMORPG then this might be a system for you. What sets it apart from the traditional D&D style “Roll-play” systems is that most of the game is storytelling. We the players paint the scenes by adding in little details, and we the players narrated both our successes and failures… which allows for some interesting situations like having “do-overs”. For example my character has an ability called “Come With Me If You Want to Live” where if I fail a roll and am in Grave harm…. I can narrate my way out of the situation and turn a failure into explaining how I narrowly escaped certain death and also saved my entire party at the same time.
Trigger Warning, I played around with the Adobe Photoshop Generative filters a bit during this post so you will see some of my homegrown AI slop as a result.
This is a session being run by “The Librarian” and I am very new to this group of people, but have seemingly blended with the group pretty quickly. Two of us are entirely new, two are regulars from other RP outings… and collectively we have created this internet age Scooby Doo Gang in the process. I am playing a burned out punk that used to be a little skater kid and now has a band… but the band never quite took off. The thing we have in common is that we all once lived in the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico and all were latchkey kids during the 80s and 90s. There is a cable access channel that no on in the town seems to remember, but we all do… and met up on a message board devoted to it. Over the summer we all agreed to meet up and investigate the town from a rental house, and as a result a Corporate Lawyer type, a Professional Athlete, a Burned Out Punk, and a Cryptid/Conspiracy Theorist all combined powers to try and solve the deep mysteries in this town.
My character shocking to no one, drives a white panel van… which has become the focus of some of the adventures so far. One of the really interesting things about this setting is that splitting the party is not a bad thing. In fact it allows for some really interesting mechanics. Last night for example we had three different scenes taking place at the same time, and while there may only be one set of characters active at a time… it does not mean that the rest of the players out out of the action. There is this phase called “setting the scene” where each player sort of “yes ands” their way through adding details to flesh out the uncanny nature of a lot of the vistas that we come across. For example we were presented with a wood lot, and were asked to explain what makes it look more evil than it might be. The detail I threw in is that the wind had blown through the lot, overturning the root system of the trees and making it both hard to move across it and at the same time giving the appearance of intestinal shapes snaking around the ground. Each player adds a little flavor to the world so we are all effectively building the lore, because in truth there are zero right or wrong answers… and the story is not written, only a set of guidelines for the person running the adventure to follow.
The Athlete and I have sort of developed this weird buddy cop movie thing that we are doing, and we have tag teamed investigating the desert scene. Essentailly there are rumors of these creatures coming at night and carrying people and livestock away, and we are trying to investigate what is happening. I narrated that I remembered this little old lady at the crossroads selling tamales out of an igloo cooler, and wanting to go out there and check out if she was still selling them. When we got out there we instead were introduced to her relative who now has a proper food truck, and introduced us to a series of clues… one of which required us to come back the next day. We also found a key to a hotel room, and in the room was an igloo cooler with a huge bag of blood marked with the Zodiac Taurus symbol on it. That is the Zodiac sign of my character the Burned out Punk. Last night… was our second campaign in this setting so we returned to visit the food truck again and were treated to a surreal wedding photo album, which unlocked additional clues about the scene. However while looking at the photo album, time passed faster than it should have… which required us to make a decision. Shelter someone for the night at the crossroads… either in a sketchy museum, the hotel room we discovered previously… or hop in the van and make a break for town.
The Athelete and I opted to make a break back for town… which created our Night Move for the evening. There are Day Moves which have relatively minor consequences… but Night Moves can end up in the permanent loss of characters. Since I had an escape card in the form of my “Come With Me If You Want To Live” ability… I decided to make the roll which was my Composure of 1 + 2D6. One of the interesting things about this system is that it is the players that determine what MIGHT happen if they fail the roll. So I talked about envisioning scenes in Vampire movies where parties are trying to get away and they swoop down on the roof of the van, trying to rip into it. “The Librarian” said that it was worse than that… they would not only attack the Van, but if I failed they would wreck it forcing us to be stranded out their with them. In my head I was preparing a way to narrate our narrow escape, preferably without losing my beloved panel van, but rolled an 8 which modified by my Composure became a 9, which was enough to get us safely back to town. However the entire time we were driving we were being chased by an ever growing flock of shadows… and just before reaching town some of them painted a Taurus symbol… aka the symbol of my character on the roof of the van in blood.
So what is really interesting about the whole concept of solving these mysteries… is that you collect clues and the clues serve as bonuses to your rolls. However there is no fixed mystery to solve, no correct answer that you have to arrive at. Instead the players decided that 1) they are going to attempt to solve a mystery and then 2) the Guide leaves the room and the players brainstorm a story that could match all of the clues that they have gotten, each clue again giving you a slightly better chance at making the roll. The brainstorming session was great, and the story that we arrived at was that the Food Truck owners family was part of a cult, but we were not sure if they were willing participants or being mind controlled by something darker. The Deep Lake Devils, aka the shadows that were following us are the harbingers of something worse, and the cult collects the blood of each zodiac sign as part of a sacrifice designed to close certain locks or enchantments and keep something far worse from coming into our world. The scene at the hotel room was us interrupting one of those murders and we ended up getting the bag of blood… which they need to replace and my character just happens to be the correct Zodiac Sign. So we solved the first part of the mystery, that states that the Deep Lake Devils are not of terrestrial origin, but now we have to figure out how to either banish them or cut our own bargain with them in future play sessions.
If you are curious, there are a lot of actual plays posted on YouTube for this game setting. I purposefully have not watched any of them, because I really want this to be a fresh expeirence for me. It has been a very long time since I have done anything pen and paper realted, but this reminds me a bit to our high school days playing the storyteller/white wolf system and the way in which we ran it. We were playing with a bunch of folks who were not necessarily seasononed mechanical TTRPG players, so we largely ran it as a story that we were all weaving together. I love the freeform nature of Public Access and how it is a narrative expeirence that we are all partaking in, instead of something that we are having done to us. I also really love this group of folks that I am playing with, and look forward to doing other games and other systems with them in the future. We are all technically local but to make it easier on the constraits of lives and families and such, we are playing over Discord. At some point thought I think we should all get together for dinner or something.
Anyways. It was a really fun night, and I find myself looking forward to these semi-monthly sessions quite a bit. Have you played Public Access? Have you played any systems like this that are way more storytelling driven? Drop me a line below.
The post On Strange Wings appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It is that weird time between holidays, and we are down about half of our folks for various reasons. We push forward and record a pretty focused show around a few topics. We start off discussing Q-Up, a game that effectively has a lot of things to say about League of Legends, and also discuss other games like Rabbit and Steel that are themselves commentaries on other games. From there, Kodra takes Bel to task about Path of Exile II, and mostly how the game seemingly has no interest in making sure you can beat Act 1 with any build and player experimentation. Thalen has been back in Warframe and attempts to recruit us all to the fold, and honestly… it is working. Lastly, we wrap the show with some discussion about the genre that evolved out of MMORPGs… where the games are far less massive, but still sort of feel like they are a multiplayer experience in spite of only focusing on a handful of players.
Topics Discussed:
Q-Up
Path of Exile II Still Uninterested in Experimentation
Good Morning Folks, and I legitimately mean it this time. Yesterday was a pretty awful day seeing as I basically got zero sleep Monday night. I was feeling broadly awful by the time I sat down to blog, and was effectively dead to the world the entire day. I had taken the day off because I had heating and air folks out to do the winter checkup, and spent most of the morning cat napping on the sofa in spurts. I think I must have caught something from the handful of trick or treaters that came to visit, one of which a neighbor that hugged me for way the hell too long… and is probably the Typhoid Mary in this situation. Essentially last night I was in bed by 6 pm, and slept the entire night through minus a few fits and starts and trips to the bathroom due to the diuretic that I am on. I woke up this morning though feeling generally better about the world and everything surrounding it. I am still a bit froggy in the throat and congested, but the worst seems to have passed.
Suffice to say though I remember next to nothing about the day, and spent zero time checking into work and email, so I am sure I will have a deep avalanche of bullshit to dig myself out of. That is the thing that sucks about being management, is that even when you are off for a day… you still need to sort of be engaged or you end up seeing things fall apart around you. So hopefully nothing terribly awful happened yesterday during the day. Essentially I did not make much progress across the board, other than a little bit after one of my cat naps during the morning. I swear if I thought I could have slept the entire night, I would have gone to sleep at 2 pm in the afternoon. I only barely managed to stay awake until 6pm when the evening news was coming on, and at that point I decided it was worth risking it. I woke up around midnight feeling like it was around 3 am or so, but thankfully managed to get back to sleep without much hassle. I might be able to blame some of this on time change, which is always a beast… and is especially so when you are the only person in the house so there is no reality to properly ground you.
I did progress my Atlas a bit further and have now cleared all of the white and yellow tiers of maps, and just started reds. I also ran the Polaric Invitation this morning, and should be getting the Shrek one later today. I am generally way more concerned about unlocking those than dealing with Maven because ultimately there are two easy voidstones behind the bosses associated with red and blue altars. I also need a lot more of the currency associated with them so that I can hopefully get ignite proliferation on my gloves. I currently have fire damage multi on my gloves, which is fine… but I really need that proliferation. I could always go for a Medium cluster jewel, but that requires me to take points away from something else on my tree to make it work. I need to unlock the traits for Brine King so that I can eventually make a shift over to Purity of Fire and Tempest Shield and go block based with 90% fire res, but I am also lacking a Shaper Shield. I need to wait until I get deep enough in delve to start getting good bases before I even mess with that. Shaper Exalts are around 30 chaos so that is always a viable option but I really need more Delve and Harvest juice to funnel into crafting.
For the last few days I have been cursing Beast farmers because none of them seemed to be selling any beasts on the instant trade market. Apparently this was a bug, that kept them from listing beasts and it was fixed this morning. Over night the price of a Black Morrigan fell from around 400c down to under 100c. This meant that I was able to buy one and six link my Cloak of Flames that I had gotten to six sockets and gave appropriate colors earlier in the league. This league seems to be amazing for the general player, who just plays the game and spend the chaos that they get dropped on buying stuff. This league seems to be awful for anyone who used to juice maps and funnel resources into a storefront. Everything is cheap because there is absolutely no friction to sell your stuff. This means I can casually list all of the rejects from Tree Crafting for example, and log in the next morning to a handful of chaos sitting there waiting on me. This is freaking great, and feels so good… but it does have some weird trickle down effects.
Price checkers are deeply confused. I have used Awakened POE Trade for years now, to help me determine if anything that I picked up is actually worth selling. It does a few different things where firstly it attempts to estimate what it thinks it is worth, and it also brings up comps from the trade system in order to show you real world pricing. For example these gloves it thinks are worth as much as 2 divines in a previous league… but in truth because they are easy to craft with the tree are now worth maybe 10 chaos. So I am back to doing the thing that I usually do and just pricing things at fixed points. Has a good fracture? 20 Chaos. Has good stats but no good fracture… 10 Chaos. I mean you can technically craft your gear upgrade with the tree, but I also realize there are going to be a lot of players who are too lazy or too confused by the crafting options to actually do that thing. Granted at some point I am going to just have to get rid of everything that has not sold, but that is fine. I will funnel them into the disenchanter, as I am starting to finally do some shipments.
One of the things that I was seeking from Ritual was a good ArchDemon Crown to craft on. I have pulled a couple of them so far, but sadly they are only item level 77, and I need at least 82 to get level 20 gems on them. I was able to sadly pick up a perfect one from the trade market for 5 chaos… making the entire process of farming Ritual feel meaningless. I am likely going to shift my focus over to Delve and Harvest so I can get some crafting juice to start working on trying to get a 20/20 helm out of it. Once I get a six link helm, I will see a massive improvement in my damage. It was wild how big of a difference swapping over to a six link Cloak of Flames was this morning. It is not like I was struggling health wise, but the noticeable difference in damage intake was wild. I kind of dig how easy it seems to be focused on acquiring this specific thing now… since we have so damned many farming and crafting options. I feel like I might be to the point where I actually could go SSF in this game, because I have enough knowledge to figure out how to get what I need to get… which feels like a massive accomplishment.
As far as Tree Crafting goes… I need to shift to focusing on trying to get upgraded grafts. Other than that I will probably still focus on gloves because those are situationally something that I can still improve greatly. However I guess once I am done crafting I will just start trying to print some interesting uniques. The “Tree Tree” feels like it is one of those things that is amazing early in the game, but the utility of it peters out over time. I guess you can keep focusing on trying to get good crafting bases with the perfect fracture on them, but still… the utility of it diminishes over time. I love it however, and I really hope some version of it goes live, because it feels so good for getting a character up and running for the first time. You can create some very good items that propel you into maps, without needing to either know how to craft them or buy them from trade.
The weird side effect of lots of good rares, and freedom of selling things… means however that loot filters which base things on prices… make it feel like there is no loot in the game. I feel like juicers are going to have to relax their filters a bit because the loot is dropping… the filter is just hiding it because it no longer has the value that it once did.
The post Of Sleep and Beasts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I had a fairly miserable night, and I am hoping at some point today I can take a nap. I was struggling to breathe all day, and coughing quite a bit… then as I prepped for bed the wheezing got pretty awful. So I opted to take a breathing treatment thinking that it might help. This cranked up my system so hard that I pretty much spent most of the evening feeling my heart racing through my ears. I cat napped throughout the evening, and because I am now on diuretics… my bladder kept waking me up. Hopefully tonight I can get some proper rest because today is going to be miserable. Thankfully I had already taken it off, because I have the heating and air folks coming out to do their bi-annual maintenance. Earlier in the evening though, things were pretty great because I ran some Destiny Rising raids with Ace, and pulled the last of the exotic exclusives to the three raid levels.
At this point I believe I am sitting at 65 of 115, and I have switched over to a second tree that is focused on Einhar and Ritual in an attempt to either get a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to six link my cloak of flames. Whenever I get a surplus of fusings, I keep making attempts but so far have been unlucky, Since I am not running a Niko tree at the moment, it means that I am not progressing Delve. I got down to around 100 depth, and it was pretty comfortable, but I just need to grind out the rest of the azerite to make the resists and radius manageable. Resonators are selling, but not so much that they are overwhelmingly good money. Right now single slot ones are selling 2 chaos to 1 resonator, which is fine, and good enough to get some early currency.
What I am honestly making more currency doing is selling near misses that I have been crafting with the tree. I’ve focused on boots and got a good pair, and now am trying to pick up a better pair of gloves. I am looking for either gloves that are ready to go, or gloves that have a max life regeneration fracture on them. I tried my hand at printing amulets and there is just too much going on with those to make anything good. Boots and Gloves have been pretty reasonable, and I might go for a better helmet if I do not upgrade to an elder helm soon. That is really what I need to do, but I have not fought any Elder Guardians yet, and am simply not progressed in my atlas enough to get them.
These are the gloves and boots that I am using that I printed with the tree. Right now I am trying to get ignite proliferation on the gloves, which will help massively for eventually clearing the Breach Fortress encounters much more successfully. The chest that I am using currently is well within the “good enough” realm, especially since my ultimate goal is to replace it with a Cloak of Flames and then pick up the life mastery for not having life on your chest. The weird thing is, I feel like I am in a much more stable state than I normally do at this point in the league. I might start pushing to craft some better rings, if I can figure out the magic formula to spit out amethyst rings with high chaos resistance on them. I did spent my single solitary divine on a reasonable +1 fire gems and damage over time multi necklace, which was worth putting the anoint on it for endurance charges on kill.
I’ve set up my currency branches in a way to where it pretty reliably drops stacks of chaos. Now I wish these were stacks of Divines, but I will take what I can get. Everyone is scared to death of the gold node, that converts all currency to gold… because that would be the one time a Mirror drops and it instead gets converted into a stack of much less useful gold. All in all I am pretty happy with this league, and will continue to grind out progress through the rest of this week. However I think a nap is going to happen soon, or at least one will be attempted.
The post Rough Night appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
