I guess since I'm here again, I'll make my own Now Playing topic!

[Maniac]

also i'm playing witcher 3 now despite my entire experience with the franchise being playing the first 2 hours of witcher 2 and watching a friend stream separate chunks of witcher 1. i'm playing on a higher difficulty and I am pretty bad at this game

i did some sidequests and murdered a griffon, which thanks to having invincible mentor-senpai stealing his attention 24/7 was an easier fight than any pack of wolves have ever been. then i tried to swim across a lake and got two shot by some fishmen and stopped playing whoops

[Random]

I enjoyed the game more after upping the difficulty, so at least you're starting out strong.

Drowners are mean.

[Maniac]

i mean, everything is mean when they're eight levels above you and you're playing with the garbage underwater controls

made story progress and I guess we're leaving this place right now since i autofailed some sidequests I had open. went backwards instead so that I can investigate all the question marks on this map and do all the sidequests because I'm guessing I'm never coming back. so are the maps in this game just small little cutout overworlds or is this just a trial map and the main overworld becomes accessible after this little tutorial area?

[Random]

White Orchard is a tutorial area. The main game consists of two much larger maps (and then there's a third for the second DLC).

[Maniac]

alright now i'm out of white orchard

did a few story things, just met the bloody baron whom the game seems to be trying really hard to make me think is a chill guy for someone everyone is mortally terrified of and who has hanging bodies decorating even the most shit-squalor villages. I liked the story of how he got his name because it's a complete 360 bait and switch, and I imagine we're gonna get something like that in our relationship with him too.

now that I'm actually using quen and have realized that side-stepping is way more potent in combat than rolling, I'm starting to hold my own. killed the cockatrice, who was virtually harmless against quen. good thing too, because I went adventuring and stumbled into a palette swap of him who was 10 levels above me and spent about 10 minutes hacking away at him with the default silver sword until he eventually croaked. i like how wyverns are cockatrice palette swaps by the way

[Random]

side-stepping is way more potent in combat than rolling

this is maybe the single most important thing you can learn, especially if you played Witcher 2 for any length of time, so good job

[Maniac]

sassy

[Scourge the Hedgehog]

Update. NOW.

[Maniac]

update what

i imagine this isn't it, but this is what I've been doing i guess

The Pathfinder campaign I was DM-ing ended wight as we finished the first book because the guy who was hosting us at his house couldn't do it this semester, and one of the other players is his best friend and I'm pretty confident he was gonna bail shortly after too despite promising otherwise. So, for the last month, I've been going to my local dork shop's Adventurer's League, which is organized 5e play for the uninitiated. They offer Forgotten Realms adventures on Wednesdays and Eberron content on Fridays. The very first session I played involved my character (and my character alone) being turned into a vegetable forever to an Intellect Devourer in a module where we couldn't actually die from combat damage, so that was a pretty amazing start. However, I've managed to get one of the characters I've made since out of first level tier in the Adventurers League's Eberron content: A maddened, bog-dwelling ranger named Sark who is part sovereign citizen, part insane paranoic over "flying jellyfish" - flumphs, good-aligned psionic aberrations who were only re-added to modern monster manuals because they're so infamously lame that they became a running joke in Order of the Stick - because they contacted him in an alcoholic haze to warn him of the foul Illithids and their extraplanar master thinking that he'd be their hero because he's managed to manipulate planar energies through copious amounts of alcohol and drug abuse. One of the other players once said that the voice I give him sounds like Randy Savage, which means little to an anime nerd like me but maybe floyd would get a kick out of that.

Eberron is a setting added for 3.5e by way of a contest back in the early 2000s, and I think it's one of the only non-Forgotten Realms settings officially supported by 5e as of barely more than half a year ago. Higher tech (kinda like the technological progress of a steampunk setting if it was magic powering that tech instead of 19th century science), lower magic, less of a dungeoneering setting and more of an intrigue-y and pulp-y, settings are in more densely-sprawled, 19th-early 20th century-style cities with much of the content for lower-level characters so far involving us pinballed around by the mercy of corrupt merchant families and noble houses. This store only offers four tier 1 adventures in Eberron written by the same publisher and intended to be done in order and as such are scaled the difficulty of each adventure in order, and I somehow managed to do them in the order of 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 1. Since Adventurer's League is perfectly opt-in/opt-out and it's fucking winter in Michigan so all of us are at the mercy of the weather, there's often a number of situations where we end up in the level 4 adventure or something and everyone is running fresh level 1s with zero arcane magic to help punch up which sucks in the Forgotten Realms adventures. However it's been a bit easier in these tier 1 Eberron adventures since combat has often been unnecessary and discouraged by threat of TPK if it's initiated -- do you really want to pick a fight in an armed compounded with 30 dudes, about a third of those being enemies with a CR that matches or exceeds our average party level by themselves, let alone ten of them?

But it often means that it takes clever play and foresight and a fair hand of luck with skill checks to survive. For example, Sark's first adventure was a comical mess where we were supposed to break into a party and steal some documents from their basement and we were caught immediately, so it turned into a Benny Hill chase sequence where two of the party members who weren't me were chased up and down the first floor and the basement by way of pivoting between each floor via a single elevator while me and three other players stood behind helplessly before things resolved themselves through an implausible strategy that I don't quite think anyone who wrote this planned on happening. The second adventure saw some good luck with the dice and we smoothly made our way through it while I heard horror stories of near-TPKs from players from other parties that tackled it. The third adventure had a hack-n-eyed plan that wasn't helped by a series of low rolls -- the party split in halves almost cleanly among the fresh 1s and the 2s-3s and the 1s bumbled into a level 4 encounter that would have cleared them out if the DM didn't say "whoops, I got the enemies wrong for this encounter, let's pretend that didn't happen" which I dunno if that really happened or not -- prolly would have cleared all of us combined if we were together too, and it was one of the easier ones. His last adventure was more or less in a kiddie pool where the highest AC on any enemy was 14 and the expectation from my strongest attack would one-shot every single enemy in the book, and good thing too because one of the players deliberately tried to troll the rest of the table by picking every fight he could despite being a squishy level 1.

The other players are all an eclectic mix -- I know half of the players on Wednesdays from college, but more or less nobody on Fridays. Since it's a college town, it's a pretty even split between old-heads who've been here long enough that their children play here too and college kids. Almost everyone plays joke characters, everyone is chaotic neutral (or "chaotic neutral" i guess), everyone likes killing their way through every fight and negotiating their way through any diplomacy check by threatening the opposing party's children's children. To be fair, the format really doesn't let you do it any other way, though. I have a Forgotten Realms character that I haven't been able to make work because he's half serious (and also because he hasn't gotten any adventures that have been anything but kick-down-the-door-and-kill-everyone encounters -- he'd prolly be way more effective in Eberron), but Sark fits like a glove. It's been pretty fun playing here though, since there's usually at least two players who have some wild fucking ideas (one of my old college friends had a ridiculous build he was using to roleplay Naruto) or there'd a group of players with solid rapport amongst each other that they can keep the whole thing going themselves. So far I can't say I've been one of those players since I have a charisma score lower than the number of fingers on one hand, but at least I'm having fun I guess.

tl;dr pathfinder is still better than 5e but yeah this is better than nothing

[ganonfloyd]

A maddened, bog-dwelling ranger named Sark who is part sovereign citizen, part insane paranoic over "flying jellyfish" - flumphs, good-aligned psionic aberrations who were only re-added to modern monster manuals because they're so infamously lame that they became a running joke in Order of the Stick - because they contacted him in an alcoholic haze to warn him of the foul Illithids and their extraplanar master thinking that he'd be their hero because he's managed to manipulate planar energies through copious amounts of alcohol and drug abuse. One of the other players once said that the voice I give him sounds like Randy Savage, which means little to an anime nerd like me but maybe floyd would get a kick out of that.

this is good content

I've considered doing Adventure's League during down periods (like right now my fuckin clown ass friends are flaking hard the past few weeks) but none of the stores are all that close to me. I'm always afraid I'd be like the only near 30 person there as well and it would be a bunch of younger players who all listened to Critical Role and I'd be lost and confused.

[Maniac]

...

I would play a battle royale version of Dark Souls 1 and I don't know what it says about me that I would...

[Maniac]

playing my boring faerun character now. we got framed for murder, one of my teammates took a hostage as we escaped by carriage. the dm asked him to roll a d100 and that player rolled a 1. turns out he kidnapped the real murderer and the final boss of the module and as he tried to escape in the middle of things, we took him out before he could get away. gotta love it when a terrible idea works out thanks to a 1/100 chance happening.

(of course, we kept going because he had nothing incriminating on him and we needed to prove our innocence, burnt all of our resources and a good amount of HP taking out some guards and committed some actual crimes along the way just to run into a dead end and got arrested anyway. we were only exonerated because a bunch of assassins attacked us on the way back and nearly killed the party because we had fucking nothing left. also we still got arrested for property damage and assault anyway, so awesome)

faerun character and eberron character are now both tier 2. faerun character is nowhere near as fun as eberron character and I perennially end up being the most boring party member playing as him and I feel bad doing so

[Maniac]

[ganonfloyd]

lmao

should have made it the weird lizardmen guys instead of fucking hoggarth or whatever that is, cowards

[Maniac]

yeah, you will never get me to play a bara furry, but I would be willing to play as this guy: